Part 1 (1/2)

The Nine-Tenths.

by James Oppenheim.

PART I--THE DREAM

I

THE PRINTERY

That windy autumn noon the young girls of the hat factory darted out of the loft building and came running back with cans of coffee, and bags of candy, and packages of sandwiches and cakes. They frisked hilariously before the wind, with flying hair and sparkling eyes, and crowded into the narrow entrance with the grimy pressmen of the eighth floor. Over and over again the one frail elevator was jammed with the laughing crowd and shot up to the hat factory on the ninth floor and back.

The men smoked cigarettes as the girls chattered and flirted with them, and the talk was fast and free.

At the eighth floor the pressmen got off, still smoking, for ”Mr. Joe”

was still out. Even after the presses started up they went on surrept.i.tiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with machine-oil. This heap had been pa.s.sed by the factory inspector unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the ”No Smoking” rule, but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile:

”Marty, the boys are only human--they see me smoking in the private office!”

Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning, and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver.

The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap--a touch of color and of melody.

Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a glimpse of their bright faces and a s.n.a.t.c.h of their careless laughter.

Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street--their hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow.

But his printery was his chief pa.s.sion. It absorbed him by its masterful stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking, flas.h.i.+ng, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths, and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.

Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave ”her two men” home together and go out and do such work as she could.

This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood, though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in was.h.i.+ng. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets and they went through English literature together.

Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and, l.u.s.ting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.

In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well, and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.

Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be ”done”; and so he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious, fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living and economy. And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up the street. They spent very little on themselves. In fact, Joe was too busy. He was all absorbed in the printery--he worked early and late--and of recent years in the stress of business his fine relations.h.i.+p with his mother had rather thinned out. They began leading separated lives; they began shutting themselves away from each other.

And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it all been? Merely the narrow, steady, city man's life--work, rest, a little recreation, sleep. Outside his mother, his employees, his customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life of the city about him. He used but one set of streets daily; he did not penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone in every direction. There stood the city, a great fact, and even that afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged cloud ma.s.ses pa.s.sed huge shadows over the s.h.i.+p-swept Hudson, darkened briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of a skysc.r.a.per and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power, gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic. And in that mesh of nature and man the human comedy went on--there was love and disaster, frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the woman on the operating-table in the hospital. Who could measure that swirl of life and whither it was leading? But who could live in the heart of it all and be unaware of it?

Yet Joe's eyes were unseeing. Children played on the street, people walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was all he knew or saw. And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of life. Like many men, Joe had missed women. There was his mother, but no one else. He was rather shy, and he was too busy. But during the last few months a teacher--Myra Craig--had been coming to the printery to have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected Joe--sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had underrated poetry and music. Romance, led by Myra's hand, had entered the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been blind to life.

Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight, blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps, and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn. The afternoon was quietly waning, up--stairs the hat-makers, and here the printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair glistening in the light overhead. His face was the homeliest that ever happened. The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark, melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles.

His hands were large, mobile, and homely. But about him was an air of character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human nature. He stood there wis.h.i.+ng that Myra would come. The day seemed to demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and forgetful glory of love.

He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there would be little children in that house. He thought she loved him; yes, he was quite sure. Then what hindrance? There, at quarter to five that strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success, and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance. He had before his eyes the evidence of his wealth--the great, flapping presses, the bending, moving men. If anything was sure and solid in this world, these things were.