The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Nine-Tenths, by James Oppenheim

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Title: The Nine-Tenths

Author: James Oppenheim

Release Date: February 29, 2004 [EBook #11372]

Language: English

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THE NINE-TENTHS

BY JAMES OPPENHEIM 1911

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

CONTENTS

PART I—THE DREAM

I. THE PRINTERY

II. THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

III. THE GOOD PEOPLE

IV. GOLDEN OCTOBER

V. MYRA AND JOE

VI. MARTY BRIGGS

VII. LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN

VIII. THE WIND IN THE OAKS

PART II—THE TEST

I. BEGINNINGS

II. THE NINE-TENTHS

III. OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER

IV. OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN

V. FORTY-FIVE TREACHEROUS MEN

VI. A FIGHT IN GOOD EARNEST

VII. OF THE THIRTY THOUSAND

VIII. THE ARREST

IX. RHONA

X. THE TRIAL

XI. THE WORKHOUSE

XII. CONFIDENT MORNING

XIII. THE CITY

PART I—THE DREAM

I

THE PRINTERY

That windy autumn noon the young girls of the hat factory darted out of the loft building and came running back with cans of coffee, and bags of candy, and packages of sandwiches and cakes. They frisked hilariously before the wind, with flying hair and sparkling eyes, and crowded into the narrow entrance with the grimy pressmen of the eighth floor. Over and over again the one frail elevator was jammed with the laughing crowd and shot up to the hat factory on the ninth floor and back.

The men smoked cigarettes as the girls chattered and flirted with them, and the talk was fast and free.

At the eighth floor the pressmen got off, still smoking, for "Mr. Joe" was still out. Even after the presses started up they went on surreptitiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with machine-oil. This heap had been passed by the factory inspector unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the "No Smoking" rule, but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile:

"Marty, the boys are only human—they see me smoking in the private office!"

Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning, and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver.

The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap—a touch of color and of melody. Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter. Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street—their hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow.

But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking, flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths, and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American—clean of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do. Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave "her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could. This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood, though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets and they went through English literature together.

Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable and went for twenty thousand dollars,