Part 58 (2/2)
”Youth,” I replied, ”is the time when you can think anything, feel anything and go anywhere.”
”I'm still going anywhere,” he remarked.
”But you can't think anything,” I rejoined. ”You say I'm tied to a wife and home. All right, I'm glad I am. But you're tied, too. You're tied to a creed, Mister Syndicalist--a creed so stiff that you can't think of anything else.”
”All right, I'm glad I am,” he echoed. ”I'm sorry youth lasted as long as it did.”
He closed his grip and strapped it. Then he took up his hat and coat and threw a last look about the room where he had lived for a year or more.
”Breaking up home ties,” he said with a grin. ”Don't come to the boat,”
he added downstairs. ”She don't sail for an hour or two and I'll be asleep in my bunk long before.”
”All right. Good-by, J. K.--remember we may meet over there----”
Again that gruffness came into his voice:
”If you do, you'll be taking a mighty big chance,” he said. ”Good-by, Bill--it's just possible we may never meet again. Glad to have made your acquaintance, Kid. Here's wis.h.i.+ng you luck.”
He turned and went off down the Farm with that long swinging walk of his, his big heavy shoulders bent rather more than before. And as I stood looking after him I thought of the lonely winding road that he was to travel day and night, into slums of cities and in and out among the camps.
I walked slowly back through the tenements toward the new home among them that Eleanore had made.
In the summer's night the city streets were still alive with people. I pa.s.sed brightly lighted thoroughfares where I saw them in crowds, and I knew that this tide of people flowed endlessly through the hundreds of miles of streets that made up the port of New York. Hurrying, idling, talking and laughing, quarreling, fighting, here stopping to look at displays in shop windows, there pouring into ”Movies”--and walking, walking, walking on. Going up into their tenement homes to eat and drink, love, breed and sleep, to wake up and come down to another day.
So the crowd moved on and on, while the great harbor surrounding their lives and shaping their lives, went on with its changes unheeded.
I tried to think of this harbor as being run by this common crowd--of the railroads, mines and factories, of the colleges, hospitals and all inst.i.tutions of research, and the theaters and concert halls, the picture galleries, all the books--all in the power of the crowd.
”It will be a long time,” I thought. ”Before it comes the crowd must change. But they will change--and fast or slow, I belong with them while they're changing.”
Something Joe had once said came into my mind:
”They're the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time of peace.”
And I thought of the crowds across the sea--of men being rushed over Europe on trains, or marching along starlit roads, or tramping across meadows. And I thought of long lines of fire at dawn spurting from the mouths of guns--from mountainsides, from out of woods, from trenches in fast blackening fields--and of men in endless mult.i.tudes pitching on their faces as the fire mowed them down.
And with those men, it seemed to me, went all the great G.o.ds I had known--G.o.ds of civilization and peace--the kind G.o.d in my mother's church and the smiling G.o.ddess in Paris, the clear-eyed G.o.d of efficiency and the awakening G.o.d of the crowd--all plunging into this furnace of war with the men in whose spirits all G.o.ds dwell--to shrivel and melt in seething flame and emerge at last in strange new forms. What would come out of the furnace?
I thought of Joe and his comrades going about in towns and camps, speaking low and watching, waiting, hoping to bring a new dawn, a new order, out of this chaotic night.
And I heard them say to these governments:
”Your civilization is cras.h.i.+ng down. For a hundred years, in all our strikes and risings, you preached against our violence--you talked of your law and order, your clear deliberate thinking. In you lay the hope of the world, you said. You were Civilization. You were Mind and Science, in you was all Efficiency, in you was Art, Religion, and you kept the Public Peace. But now you have broken all your vows. The world's treasures of Art are as safe with you as they were in the Dark Ages. Your Prince of Peace you have trampled down. And all your Science you have turned to the efficient slaughter of men. In a week of your boasted calmness you have plunged the world into a violence beside which all the bloodshed in our strikes and revolutions seems like a pool beside the sea. And so you have failed, you powers above, blindly and stupidly you have failed. For you have let loose a violence where you are weak and we are strong. We are these armies that you have called out. And before we go back to our homes we shall make sure that these homes of ours shall no more become ashes at your will. For we shall stop this war of yours and in our minds we shall put away all hatred of our brother men. For us they will be workers all. With them we shall rise and rise again--until at last the world is free!”
The voice had ceased--and again I was walking by myself along a crowded tenement street. Immigrants from Europe, brothers, sons and fathers of the men now in the camps, kept pa.s.sing me along the way. As I looked into their faces I saw no hope for Europe there. Such men could take and hold no world. But then I remembered how in the strike, out of just such men as these, I had seen a giant slowly born. Would that crowd spirit rise again? Could it be that the time was near when this last and mightiest of the G.o.ds would rise and take the world in his hands?
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