Part 7 (1/2)
It requires time and patience to drive into the thick heads of the workers that they are downtrodden, and that their oppressors are worthless parasites. When they finally do awaken to this idea and rebel, how terribly shocked the world is because these brutes have not the cleverness or delicacy to be more subtle in their brutalities.
”In your last letter you wrote of the crudeness of most propagandists of anarchism, naming Anatole France as one of the rare anarchists who express themselves otherwise than crudely. He rarely or never, you say, ever mentions the word 'anarchism,' although much of his writing is calculated to destroy belief in the value of organised society as it now exists. Don't you think you are perhaps prejudiced too much against certain words because of their a.s.sociations? I know that many words are objectionable to refined, cultured people because they have been so long a.s.sociated with the coa.r.s.e and brutal mob, the working cla.s.s, as the socialists would say. But you must remember that anarchism is intended to appeal to this 'mob' especially; that its doctrines might not be needed by refined people who ought to have enough sensibility not to enjoy 'freedom' unless it is shared by the coa.r.s.e and brutal workers.
Believe me, there is nothing so degrading as poverty. It makes the slave more slavish and the brute more brutal. It acts like a goad, spurring people on to do things which make them seem to themselves and others lower and lower, until they are truly no longer human beings but animals.
”Therefore it is that the propaganda of anarchism is generally crude. It is true that much good literature is permeated with the ideals of anarchism, for instance, Sh.e.l.ley, Whitman, Th.o.r.eau, and Emerson. Such reading is excellent as a means of humanising and making anarchists of refined people, but how could you appeal to the rebellious workers with such books as these? For instance, my father, do you think he could read Ibsen or any of the others? Indeed not; but let him go to a meeting where he can hear Emma Goldman speak, or let him read Jean Grave, or Bakunin, or some other writer of 'crude' pamphlets, and he might become interested, he might be able to understand. But since it seems that truly refined people cannot enjoy the pleasures of freedom without being, at any rate at times, worried because of the condition of the 'ma.s.s,' what is to be done? This objectionable crudity must remain until there is a demand for something more subtle on the part of the workers for whom is intended all propaganda. The rich and cultured presumably have brains which they can use to solve the problems for themselves or to digest the things written by Anatole France and others. But how do you suppose that I, for instance, could a few years ago have relished Anatole France? Wouldn't you think it idiotic for anyone to have given me such books, at that time, with any expectation of my appreciating their refined and evanescent anarchism?”
It must have been a strange sight that of Terry sitting on his dilapidated bed in the Rogues' Gallery, with his eternal cigarette in his mouth, talking to Marie and perhaps to some prost.i.tute or pickpocket! We begin already to see the result on Marie's education: that will appear complex and manifold, but it is likely that on many a half-formed creature who afterward pa.s.sed out of Terry's life, his words yet made an impression which perhaps in some later darkness revived an idea which explained and justified his miserable existence.
CHAPTER IX
_The Salon_
The Rogues' Gallery went the way of all good things: it ceased to exist when the creative spirit was gone. Terry went to Pittsburg, as we have seen, to find the flaw in the tanning process, and while he was away Marie attempted to conduct the academy of anarchism. But she was too much interested in what is called ”life” to make a sustained mental or moral effort without the inspiring presence of a man whose central pa.s.sionate ideas never changed. The personal jealousies which Terry's philosophic att.i.tude and idealism tended to dissipate became, during his absence, too strong for the bond uniting the ”rogues,” and when Terry returned he found that his little colony had dispersed and that Marie, unable any longer to pay the rent, was living with her old friend Katie.
This was, to our idealist, a deep disappointment. On the heels of his final break in Pittsburg with society came this sign of woman's weakness. Terry might easily have expected it, but one of the limitations of an idealist is an insufficient knowledge of realities. To men of his temperament there is always a distinct shock envolved in coming face to face with an actuality. Truth is the element of the idealist, but an abstract truth into which concrete realities seldom fit. Terry did not, or tried not to, mind, at this time, this continued s.e.xual freedom, or rather vagaries, of Marie's life; for that fitted into his scheme of personal freedom: he zealously strove to respect the private inclinations of every human being. But the least sign, in any of his acquaintances, of a compromise with the integrity of the soul, of any essential weakness, met with no tolerance from him. ”He pa.s.sed him up,” on the spot, with a scornful wafture of his hand. That Marie had yielded to the stress of circ.u.mstances, had been unable to hold out in the Rogues' Gallery, galled the relatively uncompromising, exigent idealist. If she had resorted to temporary prost.i.tution to hold the society together he would have admired her. But, instead, she weakly sought, like any merely conservative woman, the shelter of Katie's roof.
The first seed of the essential discord which finally resulted, at a much later time, in their relations was planted thus in this deep irritation of Terry's soul; it did not, however, affect seriously his love for Marie as a person or his interest in her as a social experiment. But it tended to make him feel more lonely and to render him more hopeless of any realisation of the ideal, as he saw it.
When Terry returned, without a job, and with no intention of trying for one, and found Marie living with Katie, he had a long talk with the two women. Katie was still with her husband, Nick, but she was willing to quit him in order to live with and take care of, her darling Marie. She proposed to Marie and Terry to hire some rooms and all live together.
She would work as cook in a restaurant and thus support the three of them.
To this eager desire of Katie's Terry refused to consent; but he also refused to work. What was to be done? He was too proud willingly to live on Katie, and he was principled against labour. Katie wanted the luxury of her proposed arrangement. She quarrelled with Terry, but he interested her. Already she began to look on these two as her superior cultivated ones, aristocrats, with whom it was a joy to live and for whom it was a pleasure to work. To work for them, especially for Marie, she would drop her old Nick, good dull man, in a moment.
An event which happened just at the right moment to decide things, finally brought about the union of the three. One night Terry was drinking in a saloon, talking philosophy, and quoting literature. Some rapid lines from Swinburne had just left his lips when an elderly man, who had been listening to Terry's talk approached him and said: ”You are the man I'm looking for, won't you have a drink?”
As he spoke, he flashed a fifty dollar bill over the bar and repeatedly treated the crowd, all in Terry's honour.
”Before we separated that night,” said Terry, telling me the story, ”I learned that the old guy had fifty thousand dollars and that he would soon go down and out, for he had all sorts of bad diseases. He knew it himself, but he was an old sport and he wanted his fling before he died.
He liked me and wanted me to be bar-tender in a saloon he owned. He lived above the saloon and wanted a housekeeper to take care of the rooms. So I told Kate here was her chance. The next day Marie, Katie, and I moved into the rooms, where the old man lived, too, and I began my work as a bar-tender.
”I did not regard this job as work: it was really graft, for I had decided that my old friend, not long for this world, did not need all of his money and that I might as well turn part of it toward Katie, to help maintain a common house for us all. So, every night, after the day's work, I turned the roll that I received behind the bar over to Katie, who tucked it away in the bank. I don't know whether the old guy knew about it or not, if he did, he did not care. He died after two or three months, but Katie had increased her bank account by three or four hundred dollars.”
Terry is strenuous about this story. He is evidently anxious lest it be thought that he later became a mere parasite on Katie. He prides himself on having taught her to steal from an unkind world, but he does not like the idea that she has slaved for him without any help in return. Katie did not prove to be a good pupil. She was not naturally ”wise,” in the slang sense, but gained what she gained by hard labour. Even while she was housekeeper for the old guy she felt she earned all the money she tucked away.
”I worked hard for the old man,” she said, ”and I only got about one hundred and thirty dollars for all my work. I thought I made that much.”
There is a slight difference in the amount received, in Terry's account and in Katie's, but it is clear that it was not very much. It is interesting and characteristic that Terry wants it to appear to have been ”graft,” while Katie looks upon the money as honest wages, received in an unconventional way.
Nick was definitely deserted, and the new ”salon” formed, with Terry and Marie as the bright particular stars and Katie as the happy means of living, if not in luxury at least in independence. They lived on her eight or nine dollars a week with the comfortable feeling that there were several hundred dollars tucked away in the bank, the result of Katie's savings and Terry's ideas.
The salon was of a more select and higher order intellectually than had been the Rogues' Gallery. The people who frequented the three little slummy rooms on the West Side where Terry, Marie, and Katie lived were mainly anarchists in theory, and occasionally one or another of them was so in practice. They mainly consisted of rebellious labourers who had educated themselves in the philosophy of anarchism.[2] They had ideas about politics and government and the relation between the s.e.xes. They were indeed all ”free lovers,” and quite naturally so; the rebellious temperament instinctively takes as its object of attack the strongest convention in society. Anarchism in Europe is mainly political; in America it is mainly s.e.xual; for the reason that there is less freedom of expression about s.e.x in America than in Europe: so there is a stronger protest here against the conventions in this field--as the yoke is more severely felt. While I was in Italy and France I met a number of anarchists who on the s.e.x side were not ostentatiously rebellious. They were like the free sort of conservative people everywhere. But in political ideas they were more logical, sophisticated, and deeply revolutionary than is the case with the American anarchists, who, on the other hand both in their lives and their opinions, are extreme rebels against s.e.x conventions. It is only another instance of how unreason in one extreme tends to bring about unreason in the other. Our prudishness, hypocrisy and stupid conventionality in all s.e.x matters is responsible for the unbalanced license of many a protesting spirit.
So there was many an ”orgie” in the salon--s.e.xual and alcoholic: and many wild words were spoken and many wild things done. But these same extreme people were gentle and sensitive, too, and emotionally interested in ideas. They went to lectures on all sorts of social subjects, they read good books of literature and crude books on politics, they grouped together and enjoyed to a certain extent their communistic ideas. They published their anarchistic newspapers and they welcomed into their ranks people who otherwise could have attained to no consolatory philosophy--who would have had no society and no hope. And they did not do it for the sake of charity--hollow word!--but from a feeling of fellows.h.i.+p and love. You, reader, who may think ill of thieves and prost.i.tutes--too ill of them, perhaps: if you can come to see that social differences are of slight value in comparison with the great primal things and the universal qualities of human nature, you will perhaps be better if not more ”virtuous” than before, and may be kinder, less self-righteous, and do far more good, no matter how ”charitable” you are now inclined to be. You have never been able to arouse the real interest of the proletariat, for the simple reason that you have never been really interested in them. But you do arouse their hatred and their contempt. They ought not, of course, to hate and despise anything, especially anything that means as well as you do. But they, though they are anarchists, are human, all too human, sometimes, like the rest of us. Here are some of the ideas of the salon about you, about us, let me say, as voiced by Terry and Marie. To begin with, Terry: about our ”culture” he writes:
”There is not much doubt about the sapping influence of culture. It seems that narrowness of range means intensity of emotion. This is seen in the savage, the child, and uncultivated men as well as other animals.
I might even go farther and say we see it in such t.i.tans as Balzac and Wagner, who seek to compress all the arts into their own particular art.
The mind that finds many outlets generally overflows in dissipation of energy instead of digging a deep single channel of its own. And yet to focus our feelings to one point may be a dangerous accomplishment. For instance, the fulminating fire of Swinburne's radium rhymes, while harmless to himself, may become dangerous through me or some other 'conductor.' Unfortunately, the inability to foretell the ultimate effect of any given idea produces that form of inhibition called conservatism, and to this vice people of so-called culture are especially p.r.o.ne. It takes recklessness to be a social experimentalist or really to get in touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we do fas.h.i.+on our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from G.o.ds to governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!--with a great black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin and hands[3]; those who try to beat their breast-bone through layers of fat! Oh, this rotund reverence of morality! 'Meagre minds,' mutters George Moore, and my gorge rises in stuttering rage to get action on them. Verily such morality as your ordinary conservative person professes has an organic basis: it has its seat in those vestiges of muscles that would still wag our abortive tails, and often do wag our abortive tongues.
”To arouse such fat ones to any onward flight it may take the tremendous impact of a revolution. It may take many upheavals of the seismic soul of man before the hobgoblins of authority are finally laid in the valley.