Starbuck had a pass, and he rode in the parlor-car; but his sleep was troubled, and his dreams seemed full of strange noise and glare. He woke up once and found a reason for the latter; the train was running by a long row of flaming coke-furnaces, which lit the whole valley with a sullen red. The dawn broke as they rolled through a long tunnel, choking with coal-gas, and came to Pittsburg. The forest of chimneys stood smokeless, now that a subtiler agent than the coal was found, and the ringing of bells was in the Sunday morning air, which now lay clear above the city; and the steep river hills were visible, and the red brick town, heaping up its apex in the bold mediæval castle that is its modern city hall.
James had little cause to dally here; but noticed, in the hour or two he had to wait, an unusual, unquiet expression on the faces of the people, who were swarming from the tenement doors into the street, like ants from some huge ant-hill. By mid-day he found a freight train that would take him to his destination. His journey lay up a river valley, its sloping mountains clothed in reds and yellows of autumn woodland. For many miles everything was silent with a Sunday stillness; then the crests of the hills were lost, and the blue sky shaded into yellowish brown, at the touch of a few tall iron towers. These were pouring forth black cinders, as they had for seven years past; for the iron smelter may never say, “it is good,” and rest, upon the seventh day. James watched the carload of ore climbing up along the outside of the furnace, until the great tower’s top was opened, as the tons of ore fell in; then the prisoned flame burst forth and the lower surface of the sulphurous brown cloud that filled the valley was dyed a vivid crimson with the pouring flame.
This river basin had been lovely once; but now its soil was coal-dust, and the soft swelling of the hillsides, all up and down the stream, was spotted with huge red tanks, of rusting brick-red iron, large as ancient forts, the storage fountains of the pipe-lines. And the whole country bristled with the abandoned scaffoldings of old oil-wells, like a scanty fur.
James talked with the brakeman and found that his accustomed engineer was disabled. Bill, he said, was a non-union man, and had been given many a hint; but he stuck it out and wouldn’t join, and so the Union had deputed Ned O’Neal, the engineer of the local freight that ran just ahead, to choose the steepest down grade and “drop upon” Bill’s time. O’Neal had “dropped” accordingly, lagging behind under pretext that his engine would not fire, and finally getting his long train of fifty coal-cars just at the bottom of a curving trestle. Bill had gone into him and scattered the last dozen coal-cars, doing some injury to his locomotive; but his head was badly cut open, and his brakeman had broken his neck. Starbuck was too well used to the tyranny of laboring-men to pay much attention to this murder; and he asked about the riots. Yes, said the brakeman, he believed they had had quite a time at Steam City for several days past. A few men had been hurt, some of them Hungarians at the mines or suchlike. But they had smashed up a terrible deal of rolling-stock.
It was night when Starbuck reached Steam City. The streets were jammed with people, but the town was very still. Only, just in front of the station, was a piece of vacant land that might have contained two or three acres; this was closely strewn with the wreck of cars, machinery, and engines; nothing but the trucks, wheels, and other iron work remaining, all twisted in a wild confusion of iron arms and limbs.
He found that most of the people were going in but one direction, so he followed them. It was a strange country; the soil was coal-dust, the very streams were still with oil, and through every crevice in the earth poured the gas, flaring with wild fire that flamed there night and day. The night was very dark; and at every street corner waved these torches, never quenched, belching fire from the iron tubes stuck anywhere, carelessly, into the ground. A strange country, fitter place for northern runes than modern men; where Loki still lurks in the mountains and the smitten rock gives forth petroleum; and, where the spear or pickaxe strikes the earth, gush still the mythic rills of fire.
The crowd went on, to a wild and open hillside above the town. Here perhaps a dozen lengths of pipe were flaring with the natural gas, glowing ruddily and fitfully upon the upturned faces of some dozen thousand men; and at the highest point, below a flaming well of the gas that had been but lately and rudely piped (for the volume of the fire still shot up straight some hundred feet or so, pillaring, like a groined roof, its canopy of smoke), was a sort of rostrum. From this a man was speaking; but his words were hard to hear above the roaring of the burning well. Starbuck knew the man; he was a certain Moses Jablonawski, a Polish Jew.
The man was pale and narrow-chested, with a reddish beard; his strongest notes varied from a low hiss to a sort of thin shriek; this last he employed in climaxes, and managed barely to carry his words across the great multitude. But Starbuck knew well what he was saying; he preached simple anarchy, nihilism, resistance to any government or force, destruction of all industrial system, annihilation of all wealth and works. Starbuck had never, even in his secret meetings, gone wholly with the man—(openly, of course, he was a “boss” and on the side of the employers)—for secretly James had rather a greed for the wealth of others than a desire to do without the material things of civilization. But to-night there was something in the cold, logical, merciless reasoning of the Pole that went with his mood. Why dally with the pitch at all? Undoubtedly, if they too got their part of this corruption, they would be just as bad. His sister Jenny spoke to him. Destroy, destroy, was the burden of the orator’s speech; then ask what new thing there shall be, when all is gone. And if it be but suicide, society’s suicide, better that than humanity in misery. The slave must break his chains before he ploughs and sows. But the most part of the speech was a clever rousing of the passions, among his audience, of hate and envy. He brought their own woe home to them; and painted brilliantly the pleasures of the idle remnant. And always came the refrain, Kill, kill, destroy, resist all office and authority—till mankind be as the beasts of the forest once more, lawless, unrestrained; then may they build anew and better, freed from superstition of another world, from tainted lessons of the past of this, from silly lessons of a priest’s self-sacrifice, from fashions of a feudal aristocracy. He showed them that their government was but a tyranny more formidable, more insidious, than the Czar’s; that their rich masters were worse than kings; that commercial bourgeois (he used the word) were more blood-sucking than military dukes; and common schools and priests, policemen, laws, and soldiers, their implements of selfish wrong. All these must go; and labor, the primal curse, go with them too.
He stopped; and the crowd murmured; and another man got up. This speaker was tall and muscular, and his clear voice rang deeply to the farthest corners of the crowd. “Some of you know me,” he said, “some of you have heard me speak before; and some Englishmen among you have heard of me in England. My name is Lionel Derwent.” There was a shout or two at this; but most of the crowd remained expectant.
“You know why I have come; I heard that there was trouble here and I came down to see what little thing I could do to help you. You must know me as the son of a working-man who has leisure, and who tries to see the truth for working-men. You know, too, that I have no interest against you; every penny of property my father left I gave to the working-men’s schools in England; and I support myself by writing for the papers.