That was it, I told myself, these people were all friends of revolutions. Vaguely as I watched them now I felt I was seeing the parlor side, the light and fluffy outer fringe, of something rather dangerous. I thought again of that parade and my impression of mass force. No danger in that, it was dressy and safe. But some of these youngsters did not stop there, they went in for stirring up people in rags, mass force of a very different kind. Here was a sculptor socialist who openly bragged that he'd had a hand in filling Union Square one day with a seething mass of unemployed, and then when some poor crazed fanatic threw a bomb, our socialist friend, as he himself smilingly put it, never once stopped running until he reached his studio.
It was this kind of thing that got on my nerves. For I pitied the unwieldy poor, the numberless muddle-headed crowds down there in the tenements, and it seemed to me perfectly criminal that a lot of these young high-brows should be allowed to stir them up. Their own thinking was so muddled, their views of life so out of gear.
I a radical? No chance!
While they chattered on excitedly, I thought of my trip uptown on the "El" that afternoon, a trip that I had made hundreds of times. Coming as I usually was from some big man or other, whose busy office and whose mind was a clean, brilliant illustration of what efficiency can be, I would sit in the car and idly watch the upper story windows we passed, with yellow gas jets flaring in the cave-like rooms behind them. There I had glimpses of men and girls at long crowded tables making coats, pants, vests, paper flowers, chewing-gum, five-cent cigars. I saw countless tenement kitchens, dirty cooking, unmade beds. These glimpses followed one on the other in such a dizzying torrent they merged into one moving picture for me. And that picture was of crowds, crowds, crowds—of people living frowzily.
This was poverty. And it was like some prodigious swamp. What could you do about it? You could pull out individuals here and there, as Eleanore did. I considered that a mighty fine job—for a woman or a clergyman. But to go at it and drain the swamp was a very different matter. You couldn't do it by easy preaching of patent cure-alls, nor by stirring up class hatred through rabid attacks upon big men. No, this was a job for the big men themselves, men who would go at this human swamp as Eleanore's father had gone at the harbor—quietly and slowly, with an engineer's precision. He had been at it six solid years, but he still remarked humbly, "We've only begun."
Then from thinking of big men I thought of the one I had seen that day, and of my story about him. It was just in the stage I liked, where I could feel it all coming together. Incidents, bits of character and neat little turns of speech rose temptingly before my mind.
Presently, through the clamor around me, I heard "the Indian" crying. All this chatter had waked him up. I saw Eleanore go in to him and soon I heard the crying stop, and I knew she was telling him a story, a nice sleepy one to quiet him down.
What an infernal racket these people were making about the world. I went on thinking about my work.