The Driver (3 page)

iv

Though the Army of the Commonweal of Christ was dead, and Coxey himself was now a pusillanimous figure, Coxeyism survived in a formidable manner. The term was current in newspaper language; and the country seemed to be full of those forms of social insubordination which it was meant to signify. In the west rudely organized bands, some of them armed, and strong enough to overwhelm the police of the cities through which they passed, were running amuck. They bore no petition in boots; they were impatient and headlong. One of their pastimes was train stealing. They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and oblige themselves to outlaw transportation; and the railroad people, fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through. It was very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying to the forces of law and order.

Public opinion was distracted and outraged.

Some said, “Put down Coxeyism. Put it down with a strong hand. To treat it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.”

Others said, “You may be able to put down Coxeyism by force, but you will sometime have to answer the questions it has raised. Better now than later.”

There was a great swell of radical thought in the country. The Populist party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to the Senate and eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers and magazines were aligned with the agitators, all asking the same questions:

Why hunger in a land of plenty?

Why unemployment?

Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?

The Federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively against Coxeyism because too many people sympathized with it, secretly or openly. It was partly a state of nerves. Writers in the popular periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red. In Coxey’s march they saw an historic parallel. In almost the same way five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from Marseilles to Paris with questions that could not be answered, and gave the French Revolution a hymn that shook the world. Human distress was first page news. The New York World gave away a million loaves of bread and whooped up its circulation. The New York Herald solicited donations of clothing which it distributed in large quantities to the ragged.

On the train from Washington to New York I found men continually wrangling in fierce heat about money, tariff and Coxeyism. I was surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well dressed, apparently prosperous men, in the very phrases with which the Coxeyites had filled my ears. Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall Street, but there were those who denounced the Coxeyites and Populists intemperately. Everybody denounced something; nobody was
for
anything. National morale was in a very low state.

In the smoking compartment two men, behaving as old acquaintances, quarreled interminably and with so much dialectical skill that an audience gathered to listen in respectful silence. One was a neat, clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse of humor or fancy. The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes over his clothes unawares, and had a way of putting out his tongue and laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place. He was the elder of the two. He was saying:

“Because men are out of work they do not lose their rights as citizens to petition Congress in
any
peaceable manner. Your low tariff is the cause of unemployment. There is the evidence,—those cold smoke stacks.”

He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington.

“The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up. You retort by calling the unemployed tramps.”

“It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and helpless,” said the other. “For years you taught them that good times resulted not from industry and self-reliance but from laws,—that prosperity was created by law. Now you reap the fruit. You put money into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know this. Now they say, ‘Fill our pockets, too.’ It’s quite consistent. But it’s Socialism. That’s what all this Coxeyism is,—a filthy eruption of Socialism, and the Republican party is responsible.”

“You forget to tell what has become of the jobs,” the other said. “All they want is work to do. Where is the work?”

“These Coxeyites,” the other retorted, “are a lot of strolling beggars. They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs, living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would not dare to do for fear of police and dogs. And the Republican party encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high tariff argument.”

At this point an impulse injected me into the discussion.

“You are wrong about the Coxeyites,” I said. “At least as to those from Massillon. I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There were no criminals. A great majority of them were men willing to work and honestly unemployed.”

Both of them stared at me, and I went on for a long time, not knowing how to stop and wishing I hadn’t begun. The younger man heard me through with a bored air and turned away. But the other asked me some questions and thanked me for my information.

The episode closed suddenly. We were running into the Jersey City railroad terminal, on the west bank of the Hudson River, and all fellow-traveler contacts began to break up without ceremony in the commotion of arrival. I saw no more of the disputants and forgot them entirely in the thrill of approaching New York for the first time.

It was early evening. Slowly I made headway up the platform against the tide of New Jersey commuters returning from work. With a scuffling roar of feet, and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed along the platforms and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease with extraordinary burdens, such as reels of hose, boxes of tomato plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs, carpentering tools and bits of lumber.

Beating my way up the current, wondering how so many people came, by what means they could be delivered in such numbers continuously, I came presently into view of the cataract. Great double-decked ferryboats, packed to the rails with self-loading and unloading cargoes, were arriving two or three at a time and berthing in slips which lay side by side in a long row, like horse stalls.

We, the eastbound passengers from the Washington train, gathered at one of the empty slips. Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly a stealthy mass up-heaved, hesitated, then made up its mind and came head on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment the engines were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters, and the boat came fast with a soft bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted themselves with a headlong rush. We stood tight against the wall to let them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we were sent aboard, the gates banged to behind us, and the boat was off toward the other shore for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson River tunnels.

I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York.

One’s inner sense does not perceive the thing in the moment of experience, but films it, to be afterward developed in fluid recollection. I see it now in memory as I only felt it then.

A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a languorous ancient way. And so indifferent! Indifference was its immemorial character. I watched the things that walked upon it—four-eyed, double-ended ferryboats with no fore or aft, like those monsters of the myth that never turned around; tugs like mighty Percherons, dragging sledges in a string; a loitering hyena, marked dynamite, much to be avoided; behemoths of the deep, helpless in this thoroughfare, led by hawsers from the nose; sorefooted scows with one pole rigs, and dressy, high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was as unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as of the natural fish, the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless patterns woven of the light which seem to play upon its surface and are not really there.

Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained. The city!... Sudden epic!... Man’s forethought of escape... his refuge... his selfoverwhelming integration. Anything may happen in a city. Career is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell, and heaven. One has the sense of moral fibres loosening. Lust of conquest stirs. The spirit of adventure flames. A city is a tilting field. Unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where he will, and take the consequences. The penalties are worse than fatal. The rewards are what you will.

“New York!” I said.

It stood against the eastern sky, a pure illusion, a rhythmic mass without weight or substance, in the haze of a May-day evening. The shadows of twilight were rising like a mist. Everything of average height already was submerged. Some of the very tall buildings still had the light above, and their upper windows were a-gleam with reflections of the sunset.

Seething city!... So full of life transacting potently, and yet so still! A thin gray shell, a fragile show, a profile raised in time and space, a challenge to the elements. They take their time about it.... Lovely city!... Ugly city!... Never was there one so big and young and hopeful all at once.

“New York!” I said again, out loud.

A man who must have been standing close beside me for some time spoke suddenly, without salutation or word of prelude.

“You were with Coxey’s Army?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to look at him. I recognized him as a man who sat in one corner of the smoking compartment, listening in an attentive though supercilious manner, and never spoke.

“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, in a truculent tone.

“People were very generous along the way.”

“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, repeating the question aggressively.

“There was generally enough and sometimes plenty,” I replied. Then I added rather sharply: “I have no case to prove for the Coxeyites, if that’s what you think.”

“I know you haven’t,” he said. “I have no case to make against them either. They are out of work. That’s bad. But people who will ask need not be hungry. You can cut that out. The unemployed eat. You’ve seen it. Do the ravens feed them?”

“What are you driving at?” I asked.

“They all eat,” he repeated. “Ain’t that extraordinary?”

“It doesn’t seem so to me,” I said. “They have to eat.”

“Oh, do they?” he said. “You can eat merely because you have to, can you? Suppose there wasn’t anything to eat?”

He was turning away, with his feathers up, as if he had carried the argument. But I detained him.

“All right,” I said. “There is not enough work but plenty to eat. We’ll suppose it. What does that prove?”

Eyeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to what he would say but as to whether he should bother to say it.

“It proves,” he said, “that the country is rich. Nobody knows it. Nobody will believe it. The country is so rich that people may actually live without work.”

“That’s an interesting point of view,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Nobody,” he replied, with an oblique sneer. “A member of the Stock Exchange.”

“Oh!” I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the conversation in that lurch I asked: “Do you know who those two men were who wrangled in the smoking compartment?”

“Editors,” he replied, cynically. “The younger one was Godkin of the Post. I’ve forgotten the other one’s name. Silly magpies! Pol-i-t-i-c-s,
hell!
”

At that instant the ferryboat bumped into her slip. The petulant man screwed his head half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had been standing just behind us, and stalked off in a mild brain fit.

I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her father,—I supposed it was her father,—and in passing she gave me a look which made me both hot and cold at once. It left me astonished, humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too impervious to be returned as it deserved and much too impersonal to be rude. It was worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It occurred to me that either or both of us might have been stark nude and it would not have made the slightest difference.

For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,—that she was not a girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe and flexible. She walked without touching her father,—if he were that. He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and his left arm swung in an arc.

Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience, apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why did she look at me at all?

Her eyes were dark carnelian.

i

“W
HERE is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter the next morning.

“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said. “Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street”

That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.

Wall street proper,—street with a small
s,
—is a thoroughfare. Wall Street in another way of speaking,—street with a big
S,
—is a district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to it gradually, and the first two things you see are the tombstones of Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in Broadway. Rector Street ends there.