The Nine Tenths by James Oppenheim

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THE NINE-TENTHS

BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
1911

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

CONTENTS

PART I--THE DREAM

I. THE PRINTERY

II. THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

III. THE GOOD PEOPLE

IV. GOLDEN OCTOBER

V. MYRA AND JOE

VI. MARTY BRIGGS

VII. LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN

VIII. THE WIND IN THE OAKS

PART II--THE TEST

I. BEGINNINGS

II. THE NINE-TENTHS

III. OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER

IV. OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN

V. FORTY-FIVE TREACHEROUS MEN

VI. A FIGHT IN GOOD EARNEST

VII. OF THE THIRTY THOUSAND

VIII. THE ARREST

IX. RHONA

X. THE TRIAL

XI. THE WORKHOUSE

XII. CONFIDENT MORNING

XIII. THE CITY

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
surreptitiously, 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 passed 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 snatch 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 passion. It absorbed him by its masterful
stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking,
flashing, 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
washing. 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,
lusting 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 relationship 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 masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened
briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of
a skyscraper 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 wishing 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.

He felt sure Myra would come. She had not been around for a week, and,
anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very
young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night,
its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar. It all
seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set
them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all
these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his
twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed
from him defeated of its splendor.

If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a
lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands
and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And
then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the
bell sharply sounded.

She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her
neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck,
struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face
strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow
woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and
sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating. Under
the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a
personality. One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth
and breeding. But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than
the total, which was thirty-two.

There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness. He turned
pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart.
She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off
through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a
hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.

"Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh.

"Oh--not much!" she gasped. She held her leather bag under her arm and
took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.

He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then
murmured, suddenly:

"More school stuff?"

She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost
failed her.

"Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,'
and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!"

With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose
sheets. He bent over them at once.

"Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or
I'll give the job to some one else."

Joe laughed strangely.

"How many copies?"

"One thousand."

He spoke as if in fear.

"Fifty cents too much?"

Myra laughed.

"I don't want the school to ruin you!"

He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully
to button her coat. There was no reason for staying.

Then suddenly he spoke, huskily:

"Don't go, Miss Craig...."

"You want ..." she began.

He leaned very close.

"I want to take a walk with you. May I?"

She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose
with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation
that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.

"I may?" he was whispering.

Her "Yes" was almost inaudible.

So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch
hat, and called over Marty.

"I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said.

Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly
presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be
there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine,
with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name
"Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high.

The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down
past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his
cigarette, remarked, amiably:

"Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right....
Good-night, Mr. Blaine!"

"Good-night, Tom," said Joe.

II

THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked
east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of
Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through
a hurrying throng of people.

"Take my arm," cried Joe.

She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between
the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some
little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went
south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of
bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.

Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather
floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and
carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when
they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with
brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the
motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed
melodiously.

The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast
spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides
and there was nothing some distance north and south.

"Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!"

It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet
to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing
floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island
loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore
sparkled a friendly light.

"But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra.

She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly
arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side,
and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish
smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.

And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful
as smoking chimneys. They meant so much--labor, human beings, fire,
warmth.

And over all--river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the
throbbing city behind them--rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A
keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear
and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between
enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the
tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was
moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole
huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.

And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them,
the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted
away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them
closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the
heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the
wind together--they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like
gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to
the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

"I want ..." he began.

"Yes," she breathed.

He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

"Myra!"

And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried
out:

"Joe!"

And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome
with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

"Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..."

"Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!"

All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted
into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one,
stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a
mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the
twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

"Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"

They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and
wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow
and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

"Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."

It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love.
He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand
lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes,
families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere
love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.

"Look at that," he said in a changed voice.

Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were
visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red
lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.

"What is it?" said Myra.

He gazed at it, transfixed.

"That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale
light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely
speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street."

She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.

"Not ... the loft?"

"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."

They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast;
and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust,
and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and
spoke harshly:

"You must run!"

Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be
exploding in their breasts. They felt as if that fire were consuming
them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the
corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.

Joe spoke hoarsely.

"It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...."

Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose
like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled
from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of
smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down
cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street.
Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water
played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating,
pounding fire-engines.

And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end
had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain.
That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in
flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he
and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment;
and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the
hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat.

They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd
of people, a density that could not be cloven. They went around about it
frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses;
they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when,
in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight. Crouched on that
stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face
white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls. It was Fannie
Lemick. Joe knew her. And no one seemed to notice her. The crowd was
absorbed in other things.

And even at that moment Joe heard the dire clanging of ambulances, and
an awful horror dizzied his brain. No, no, not that! He clutched the
stoop-post, leaned, cried weirdly:

"Fannie! Fannie!"

She gazed up at him. Then she recognized him and gave a terrible sob.

"Mr. Joe! Oh, how did you get out?"

"I wasn't there," he breathed. "Fannie! what's happened?... None of the
girls ..."

"You didn't know?" she gasped.

He felt the life leaving his body; it seemed impossible.

"No ..." he heard himself saying. "Tell me...."

She looked at him with dreadful eyes and spoke in a low, deadly,
monotonous voice:

"The fire-escape was no good; it broke under some of the girls;... they
fell;... we jammed the hall;... some of the girls jumped down the
elevator shaft;... they couldn't get out ... and Miss Marks, the
forelady, was trying to keep us in order.... She stayed there ... and I
ran down the stairs, and dropped in the smoke, and crawled ... but when
I got to the street ... I looked back ... Mr. Joe ... the girls were
jumping from the windows...."

Joe seized the stoop-post. His body seemed torn in two; he began to
reel.

"From the ninth floor," he muttered, "and couldn't get out.... And I
wasn't there! Oh, God, why wasn't I killed there!"

III

THE GOOD PEOPLE

Joe broke through the fire line. He stepped like a calcium-lit figure
over the wet, gleaming pavement, over the snaky hose, and among the
rubber-sheathed, glistening firemen, gave one look at the ghastly heap
on the sidewalk, and then became, like the host of raving relatives and
friends and lovers, a man insane. It was as if the common surfaces of
life--the busy days, the labor, the tools, the houses--had been drawn
aside like a curtain and revealed the terrific powers that engulf
humanity.

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