"No," she said quickly. "I don't want that. I've told you that I'm not afraid——"
"Then we'll have to wait and see, won't we, dear? We can't help ourselves now. I've got to keep on writing, you know—we depend on that for our living. And I can't write what I did before—I don't seem to have it in me. So I'm going into this strike as hard as I can—I'm going to watch it as hard as I can and think it out as clearly. I know I'll never be like Joe—but I do feel now I'm going to change. I've got to—after what I've been shown. The harbor is so different now. Don't you understand?"
I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine.
"Yes, dear," she said, "I understand——"
CHAPTER XII
The events of that day dropped out of my mind in the turbulent weeks that followed. For day by day I felt myself sink deeper and deeper into the crowd, into surging multitudes of men—till something that I found down there lifted me up and swept me on—into a strange new harbor.
Of the strike I can give only one man's view, what I could see with my one pair of eyes in that swiftly spreading confusion that soon embraced the whole port of New York and other ports both here and abroad. War correspondents, I suppose, must feel the same chaos around them, but in my case it rose from within me as well. I was like a war correspondent who is trying to make up his mind about war. What was good in this labor rebellion? What was bad? Where was it taking me?
From the beginning I could feel that it meant for me a breaking of ties with the safe strong world that had been my life. I felt this first before the strike, when I went to my magazine editor. He had taken my story about Jim Marsh, but when I came to him now and told him that I wanted to cover the strike,
"Go ahead if you like," he answered, a weary indulgence in his tone, "I don't want to interfere in your work. But I can't promise you now that we'll buy it. If you feel you must write up this strike you'll have to do it at your own risk."