CHAPTER VI
Terry
Terry is a perfect type of the idealist. We shall see how, in the midst of what the world calls immorality and sordidness, this quality in him was ever present; even when it led to harshness to persons or facts. Not fitting into the world, his attitude toward it, his actions in it, and his judgment of it, are keen and impassioned, but, not fitting the actual facts, sometimes unjust and cruel. Tender and sensitive as a child, his indignation is so uncompromising that it often involves injustice and wrong. But the beauty in him is often startlingly pure, and reveals itself in unexpected conditions and environment. I cannot do better in an attempt to present him and his history than to quote voluminously from his letters to me, adding only what is necessary for the sake of clearness. He wrote for me the following poetic outline of his life:[1]
"The fate of the immigrant, sprung from peasant stock, is to grow up in the slums and tenements of the great city. Such a fate was mine. To exchange the rack-rented but limitless fields of Irish landlordism for the rickety and equally rack-rented tenements, with the checkerboard streets, where all must keep moving, is only adding sordidness to spare sadness. Surely, the birthday's injury is felt in a deep sense by the poor. But the patient fatalism of the peasant (so fatal to himself) is equal to every calamity.
"I came from an exceptionally well-to-do family of tenement-farmers, but a few generations of prolific birth rate, with the help of successive famines and successful landlordism, reduced us to the point of eviction. Enough was saved from the wreck to pay for our passage in a sailing vessel to America. After being successfully landed, or stranded, on New York, my father, with the true instinct of the peasant, became a squatter on the prairies of Goose Island. Here we put up, in the year 1864, a frame shanty of one room, in which the nine of us tried to live. My father, the only bread-winner, made from seven to eight dollars a week. Absolute communism in the deepest and most harmonious faithfulness prevailed. Truly, as Burns says:
'We had nae wish, save to be glad,
Nor want but when we thirsted;
We hated naught but to be sad.'
"I rejoice to say that I never got over this first blessed lesson in communism; even though it was on a small scale, the family contained the unity of a Greek tragedy. The heart that throbs with little things may finally throb for the world. And I learned nothing in these days except the lessons of the heart. The only necessary thing of which we had almost enough was bread. The struggle for existence, began on one continent, has continued on the other, with the surviving members of the family standing shoulder to shoulder for lack of room.
"Armed with a throbbing faith in everything but myself, I boldly and voluntarily entered the arena of commercial activity at the pliable age of eight. My first job away from home was in a mattress factory. Ah, that first job! I was a triumphant Archimedes who had found his fulcrum. I helped move the world, for twelve hours a day and for two dollars a week.