"Hardly!" Ruth admitted with a smile.
"Well, what I'm telling you is just as certain as the passage of time. I'm anything but a dreamer. I believe in a present for the working class as well as a future. I believe that we, if we work hard, have the right, now, to-day, to a comfortable living, and with enough over to give our children as good an education as the children of the bosses; and with enough to buy a few books, see a little of the world, and to save a little so we'll not have ahead of us the terrible fear that we and our families may starve when we get too old to work. That's the least we ought to have. But we lack an almighty lot of having it, Miss Arnold.
"Take my own trade—and we're a lot better off than most workingmen—we get three seventy-five a day. That wouldn't be so bad if we made it three hundred days a year, but you know we don't average more than six months' work. Less than seven hundred dollars a year. What can a man with a family do in New York on seven hundred dollars a year? Two hundred for rent, three hundred for food, one hundred for clothes. There's six hundred gone in three lumps. Twenty-five cents a day left for heat, light, education, books, amusement, travel, street-car fare,—and to save for your old age!
"And then our trade's dangerous. I think half of our men are killed. If you saw the obituary list that's published monthly of all the branches of our union in the country, you'd think so, too! Every other name—crushed, or something broke and he fell. Only the other day on a steel bridge near Pittsburg a piece of rigging snapped and ten men dropped two hundred feet. They landed on steel beams in a barge anchored below—and were pulp. And after the other names, it's pneumonia or consumption. D'you know what that means? It means exposure at work. Killed by their work!... Well, that's our work,—and we get seven hundred a year!
"And then our work takes the best part of our lives, and throws us away. So long as we're strong and active, we can be used. But the day we begin to get a little stiff—if we last that long!—we're out of it. It may be at forty. We've got to learn how to do something else, or just wait for the end. There's our families. And you know how much we've got in the bank!
"Well, that's how it is in our union. Is seven hundred a year enough?—when we risk our lives every day we work?—when we're fit for work only so long as we're young men? We're human beings, Miss Arnold. We're men. We want comfortable homes, we want to keep our children in school, we'd like to save something up for the time when we can't work. Seven hundred a year! How're we going to do it, Miss Arnold? How're we going to do it?"
Ruth looked up at his glowing set face, and for the moment forgot she was allied to the other side. "Demand higher wages!" her instinct answered promptly.
"That's the only thing! And that's what we're going to do! More money for the time we do work!"
He said no more. Now that the stimulant of his excited words was gone, Ruth felt her fatigue. Engrossed by his emotions he had swung along at a pace that had taxed her lesser stride.
"Shall we not sit down," she suggested; and they found a bench on a pinnacle of rock from whence they looked down through a criss-cross of bare branches upon a sun-polished lagoon, and upon the files of people curving along the paths. Tom removed his hat, and Ruth turning to face him took in anew the details of his head—the strong, square, smooth-shaven face, the broad forehead, moist and banded with pink where his hat had pressed, the hair that clung to his head in tight brown curls. Looked,—and felt herself growing small, and the men of her acquaintance growing small. And thought.... Yes, that was it; it was his purpose that made him big.