John Marvel, Assistant

by Thomas Nelson Page

Before many days were out the strike had progressed so far that, instead of its being a small body of men engaged in cessation of work, with pacific methods of attempting to dissuade others who wished to continue their work from doing so, or, by some more positive form of argument known as picketing, of preventing newcomers from taking the places of those who had struck, it had developed into an active force whose frank object was to render it impossible for any man to take or hold a position as an employee of the railway company. It was not so much that meetings were frequently held and the measures advocated constantly grew more and more violent, nor that occasional outbreaks occurred, as that the whole temper of the people was becoming inflamed, and the conditions of life affected thereby were becoming almost intolerable. The call of the company on the mayor, as the representative of the public, to grant them protection, was promptly, if somewhat evasively, replied to. No man knew better than Coll McSheen how to express himself so that he might be understood differently by different men. It had been one of his strong cards in climbing to the altitude which he had reached. But the idea that the police would render efficient aid to the company was openly and generally scoffed at in the quarters where the strike prevailed. It was boldly declared that the police were in sympathy with the strikers. This report appeared to have some foundation, when one cold night, with the thermometer at zero, a fire broke out in the mills owned by Mr. Leigh's company, and they were gutted from foundation to roof. It was charged on the strikers; but an investigation showed that this charge, like many others, was unfounded; at least, as it alleged a direct and intentional act. The evidence proved conclusively to my mind that the fire, while of incendiary origin, was started by a gang of reckless and dissolute youths who had no relation whatever to the strikers, but whose purpose was to exhibit their enmity against a company which was held in such disfavor generally. This was the contention of Wolffert in his papers on the incident, and the view which Mr. Leigh afterward adopted.

It was only an expression of the general feeling that had grown up in the city under the influence of the strike—one of the baleful offspring of the condition which McSheen and Wringman and their like had been able to produce from the conflict which they had projected and fostered. The wretched youths who were arrested, told under the sweating process a series of wholly conflicting and incredible lies, and in time two of them were convicted on their own confessions and sent to the State prison, and the strikers who had not yet resorted to extreme measures of violence got the credit of the crime.

The continued spread of the strike and of sympathy with it had already reached large proportions. The losses to business and to business men and the inconvenience to even the well-to-do classes were immense and when calculated in figures were quite staggering. The winter had set in with sudden severity. The suffering among the poor was incalculable. There was not a house or shop in the poorer districts where the pinch of poverty was not beginning to be felt. The wolf, which ever stands beside the door of the poor, had long since entered and cleaned out many of the small dwellings which the summer before had been the abode of hope and of reasonable content. Only the human wolves who prey on misfortune battened and fattened; the stock-brokers who organized raids on "the market," the usurers who robbed the poor more directly, but not more effectively, the thieves of one kind or another alone prospered. The cry of hunger increased while bitterness without and within had long since begun to be universal, so long as to be scarcely heeded throughout the poor quarters. The efforts of philanthropy, individual and organized, were exercised to the utmost, but the trouble was too vast to be more than touched on the outer fringe. The evil which Mr. Leigh had predicted had come to pass and his prophecy had been far more than verified. Many of the young women, turned from their factories, had disappeared from the places which knew them before and found their way to haunts like Mel Gallagin's "Gallery" and others less splendid, but not more wicked. Only in the sphere in which persons of extraordinary accumulation moved, like the Canters and the Argands, was there apparently no diminution in their expenditure and display. Young Canter and his comrades still flaunted their vast wealth in undisguised and irresponsible display—still gambled on the stock boards in commodities that touched the lives of pining thousands—still multiplied their horses and automobiles, and drove them recklessly through crowded streets, heedless of the pinched and scowling faces of unemployed multitudes. But older and saner heads were beginning to shake when the future was mentioned. The reefing of sails for a storm whose forerunners were on the horizon was already taking place, and every reef meant that some part of the crew which had sailed the ship so far was dropped overboard.

The devil is credited with the power to raise a tempest. Certainly tempests are raised, but sometimes even the devil cannot quiet them. Such was the case with the strike. McSheen, Wringman and Co. had been completely successful in getting the strike of the Leigh employees under way: when it started, they privately took much pride in their work. Wringman received his wage and gratified his feeling of revenge for Mr. Leigh's cool contempt of him on the occasion when he called to demand terms of him. McSheen had a score of longer standing to settle. It dated back to the time when Mr. Leigh, looking with clear and scornful eyes at his work, gave him to feel that at least one man knew him to the bottom of his scoundrelly soul. For a while it appeared as though Mr. Leigh would be irretrievably ruined and McSheen and his friends and secret backers like Canter would secure easy possession of the properties his power of organization had built up; but suddenly an unlooked-for ally with abundant resources had come to Mr. Leigh's assistance in the person of an old friend, and the ripened fruit of their labors had been plucked from their hands outstretched to grasp it. And now having raised the tempest, these gamblers could not calm it. In other words, having started a strike among Mr. Leigh's operatives for a specific purpose, it had spread like a conflagration and now threatened to destroy everything. The whole laboring population were getting into a state of ferment. Demands were made by their leaders such as had never been dreamed of before. The leaders were working them for their own purposes, and were after a temporary raise of wages. But there was a graver danger. The people were becoming trained. A new leader was coming forward, and his writings were having a profound influence. He could not be bullied, and he could not be bought, this Jew, Wolffert. He was opening the eyes of the People. Unless the thing were stopped, there would be a catastrophe which would ruin them all. This was the judgment that McSheen and Canter and Co. arrived at. And this was the conclusion that Mr. Canter, Sr., announced to his son and heir, Mr. Canter, Jr., at the close of an interview in which he had discussed his affairs with more openness than he usually employed with that audacious young operator. "The fact is," he said, "that we have failed in the object of our move. We have not got hold of Leigh's lines—and his men are returning to work while ours are just beginning to fight—and instead of getting his properties, we stand a blessed good show of losing our own. McSheen couldn't deliver the goods and there is the devil to pay. Why don't you stop your —— nonsense and settle down and marry that girl? She's the prettiest girl in town and—Well, you might go a good deal further and fare worse. There is a good property there if we don't destroy it fighting for it. If you are ever going to do it, now is the time, and we are bound to have it, if possible, to save our own."

Mr. Canter, Jr., shrugged his shoulders. "How do you know she would have me?" he asked with a sort of grin which was not altogether mirthful. He did not feel it necessary to impart to his parent the fact that he was beginning to have strong doubts himself on the subject. But Canter, Jr., was no fool.

"Well, of course, she won't, if you go spreeing around with a lot of blanked hussies. No decent woman would. But why the deuce don't you drop that business? You are getting old enough now to know better. And you can't keep hitting it up as you have been doing. There's a new system coming in in this town, and you'll get in trouble if you don't look out. You came precious near it the other night. Those young men mean business. Get rid of that woman."

Young Canter for once came near disclosing to his father the whole situation and telling him the truth. He however contented himself with his usual half-light assurance that he was all right—and that he was going to settle down. He could not bring himself to tell him that he found himself bound with a chain which he could not break, and that "that woman" would not be gotten rid of. She, in fact, threatened not only to make a terrible scandal if he attempted to leave her, but actually menaced his life.

However, he determined to act on his father's advice. He would break off from her and if he could carry through his plans he would marry and go abroad and remain until the storm had blown over and "that woman" had consoled herself with some other soft young millionaire.

Among all the people affected by the strike none suffered more, I believe, than John Marvel and Wolffert. I never saw any one more distressed by the suffering about them than these two men. Others suffered physically, they mentally, and in the reflexive way which comes from over-wrought sympathies. Where gloom and dull hate scowled from the brows of the working class, sadness and sorrow shadowed John's brow, though at need he always had a smile and a cheery word for every one. He was soon reduced to his last suit of clothes, and as the cold increased, he went about overcoatless and gloveless, walking like fury and beating his arms to keep himself from freezing, his worn overcoat and gloves having long since gone with everything else he had to help some one needier than himself. "Take a long, deep breath," he used to say, "and it will warm you up like a fire. What does a young man need with an overcoat?" What, indeed, with the thermometer at zero, and rapidly slipping still lower! "Those I grieve for are the old and the sick and the young children."

However this was, he was busier than ever—going in and out among his poor; writing letters, making calls, appealing to those able to give, and distributing what he could collect, which, indeed, was no little, for the people at large were sympathetic with suffering and generous to poverty. And his ablest assistant in the work was Wolffert, if, indeed, he was not the leader. I never knew before what one man's intellect and zeal consecrated to a work could accomplish. The great morass of poverty, wide and profound at all times, extending through the city, sapping the foundations and emitting its exhalations, became now bottomless and boundless. Into this morass Wolffert flung himself with the earnestness of a zealot. He worked day and night, organizing relief associations; looking after individual cases; writing letters to the press and picturing conditions with a vividness which began to make an impression on all sides. He counselled patience and moderation on the part of the poor, but made no secret of his sympathy with them, and where he dealt with the injustice shown them it was with a pen of flame. The conservative papers charged that his letters added fuel to the flames already blazing. It was possibly true. Certainly, the flames were spreading.