Part 23 (1/2)

”I know it,” said Joe, ”and I like it!”

They shook hands.

”Come over to-morrow and meet my mother!” He gave her the address.

”Good-by,” she said. ”And let me tell you, I'm simply primed for woman stuff. It is the women”--she repeated the phrase slowly--”it is the women, as you'll find, who bear the burden of the world! Good-by!”

”Good-by!”

He went down into the open air exulting.

He could not overcome his astonishment. She was so different than he had antic.i.p.ated, so much more human and simple; so much more easy to fit into the every-day shake-up of life, and full of that divine allowance for other people's shortcomings. It was impossible to act the tragedian before her. And, most wondrous of all, she was a ”live wire.” He had gone to her abasing himself; he came away as her employer, subtly cheered, encouraged, and lifted to new heights of vivid enterprise.

”Sally Heffer!” he kept repeating. ”Isn't she a marvel! And, miracle of miracles, she is going to swing the great work with me!”

And so the Stove Circle was founded with Sally Heffer, Michael Dunan, Oscar Heming, Nathan Latsky, Salvatore Giotto, and Jacob Izon. Its members met together a fortnight later on a cold wintry night. The stove was red-hot, the circle drew about it on their kitchen chairs, and Joe spent the first meeting in going over his plans for the paper. There were many invaluable practical comments--especially on how to get news and what news to get--and each member was delegated to see to one department. Latsky and Giotto took immigration, Dunan took politics and the Irish, Heming took the East Side, Izon, foreign news, and Sally Heffer took workwomen. Thereafter each one in his way visited labor unions, clubs, and societies and got each group to pledge itself to send in news. They helped, too, to get subscriptions--both among their friends and in the unions. In this way Joe founded his paper. He never repeated the personal struggle of that first week, for he now had an enthusiastic following to spread the work for him--men and a woman, every one of whom had access to large bodies of people and was an authority in his own world.

But that wonderful week was never forgotten by Joe. Each day he had risen early and gone forth and worked till late at night, making a canva.s.s in good earnest. House after house he penetrated, knocking at doors, inquiring for a mythical Mrs. (or Mr.) Parsons (this to hush the almost universal fear that he had come to collect the rent or the instalment on the furniture or clothes of the family). In this way he started conversation. He found first that the immediate neighborhood knew him already. And he found many other things. He found rooms tidy, exquisite in their cleanliness and good taste of arrangement; and then other rooms slovenly and filthy. He found young wives just risen from bed, chewing gum and reading the department-store advertis.e.m.e.nts in the paper, their hair in curl-papers. He found fat women hanging out of windows, their dishes unwashed, their beds unmade, their floors unswept.

He found men sick in bed, and managed to sit down at their side and give them an interesting twenty minutes. He found other men, out of work, smoking and reading. He found one Italian family making ”willow plumes”

in two narrow rooms--one a bedroom, the other a kitchen--every one at work, twisting the strands of feathers to make a swaying plume--every one, including the grandmother and little dirty tots of four and six--and every one of them cross-eyed as a result of the terrific work.

He found one dark cellar full of girls twisting flowers; and one attic where, in foul, steaming air, a Jewish family were ”finis.h.i.+ng”

garments--the whole place stacked with huge bundles which had been given out to them by the manufacturer. He found one home where an Italian ”count” was the husband of an Irish girl, and the girl told him how she had been led into the marriage by the man's promise of t.i.tle and castle in Venice, only to bring her from Chicago to New York and confess that he was a poor laborer.

”But I made the best of it,” she cried. ”I put down my foot, hustled him out to work, and we've done well ever since. I've been knocking the dago out of him as hard as I can hit!”

”You're ambitious,” said Joe.

”My! I'd give my hands for education!”

Joe prescribed _The Nine-Tenths_.

Everywhere he invited people to call--”drop over”--and see his plant and meet his mother. Even the strange specimen of white woman who had married a negro and was proud of it.

”Daniel's black outside, but there's many stuck-up women I know whose white man is black _inside_.”

Absorbingly interesting was the quest--opening up one vista of life after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life--saw flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after destiny--squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift, respectability. He never forgot the shabby dark back room where under gas-light a frail, fine woman was sewing ceaselessly, one child sick in a tumble-down bed, and two others playing on the floor.

”I'm all alone in the world,” she said. ”And all I make is two hundred and fifty dollars a year--less than five dollars a week--to keep four people.”

Joe put her on the free list.

He learned many facts, vital elements in his history.

For instance, that on less than eight hundred dollars a year no family of five (the average family) could live decently, and that nearly half the people he met had less, and the rest not much more. That, as a rule, there were three rooms for five people; and many of the families gathered their fuel on the street; that many had no gas--used oil and wood; that many families spent about twenty-five cents a day for food; that few clothes were bought, and these mainly from the instalment man and second hand at that; that many were recipients of help; and that recreation and education were everywhere reduced to the lowest terms.

That is, boys and girls were hustled to work at twelve by giving their age as fourteen, and recreation meant an outing a year to Coney Island, and beer, and, once in a while, the nickel theater; that there were practically no savings. And there was one conclusion he could not evade--namely, that while overcrowding, improvidence, extravagance, and vice explained the misery of some families, yet there were limits. For instance:

On Manhattan Island no adequate housing can be obtained at less than twelve or fourteen dollars a month.