Life has an upspringing quality that defies pain. Something buoyant throbs in the heart of the world—something untamed and wild—exultant in the flying beauty of romping children, glinting in the dawn-whitened sea, risen, indeed, through man into triumphant cities and works, and running like a pulse through his spirit. San Francisco is shattered, and there is death and sorrow and destruction: a whole population is homeless—whereupon the little human creatures come down from the hills like laughing gods and create but a more splendid city. Earth itself forges through its winters with an April power that flushes a continent with delicate blossoms and tints.

Joe had come home from Sally Heffer a man renewed. From some clear well in his nature sprang a limpid stream of soft, new joy; a new exhilarating sense of life; a new creative power that made him eager for action. His heart was cleansed, and with the exquisite happiness of a forgiven child he "took up the task eternal." Hereafter he was a man dedicated, a man consecrated to a great work.

His mother noticed the change in him, a new wisdom, a sweet jocularity, and, withal, the return of much of his old nature—its rough camaraderie, its boyish liveliness and homely simplicity. For her this was a marvelous relief, and she could only watch him and wonder at the change. He seemed very busy again, and she did not disturb him in these sensitive days of growth; she waited the inevitable time when he would come to her and tell her what he was going to do, whether he would re-establish his business or whether he had some new plan. And then one day, tidying up his room, she stumbled on a heap of books. Her heart thrilled and she began to surreptitiously borrow these books herself.

Already the great city had forgotten its fire horror—save the tiny, growing stir of an agitating committee—and even to those most nearly concerned it began to fade, a nightmare scattered by the radiance of new morning. One could only trust that from those fair and unpolluted bodies had sprung a new wave of human brotherliness never to be quite lost. And Joe's mother had had too much training in the terrible to be long overborne. She believed in her son and stood by him.

Luckily for Joe, he had much work to do. He and Marty Briggs had to settle up the business, close with customers, dig from the burned rubbish proofs and contracts, attend the jury, and help provide for his men. One sunny morning he and Marty were working industriously in the loft, when Marty, with a cry of exultation, lifted up a little slot box.

"Holy Moses, Joe!" he exclaimed, "if here ain't the old kick-box!"

They looked in it together, very tenderly, for it was the very symbol of Joe's ten years of business. On its side there was still pasted a slip of paper, covered with typewriting:

KICK-BOX

This business is human—not perfect. It needs good thinking, new ideas (no matter how unusual), and honest criticism.

There are many things you think wrong about the printery and the printery's head—things you would not talk of face to face, as business time is precious and spoken words are sometimes hard to bear.

Now this is what I want: Sit down and write what you think in plain English. It will do me good.

JOE BLAINE.

Suddenly Marty looked at his boss.

"Say, Joe."

"What is it, Marty?" The big fellow hesitated.

"Say—when that jury finishes—you're going to set things up again, and go on. Ain't you?"

Joe smiled sadly.

"I don't know, Marty."

Tears came to Marty's eyes.

"Say—what will the fellers say? Ah, now, you'll go ahead, Joe."

"Just give me a week or two, Marty—then I'll tell you."

But the big fellow's simple grief worked on him and made him waver, and there were other meetings with old employees that sharply drew him back to the printery. One evening, after a big day of activity, he found it too late to reach the boarding-house for supper and he remembered that John Rann's baby was sick. So he turned and hurried across the golden glamor of Third Avenue, on Eightieth Street, and just beyond climbed up three flights of stairs in a stuffy tenement and knocked on the rear door. Smells of supper—smells chiefly of cabbage, cauliflower, fried onions, and fried sausages—pervaded the hall like an invisible personality, but Joe was smell-proof.

A husky voice bade him come in and he pushed open the door into a neat kitchen. At a table in the center under a nicely globed light sat John Rann in his woolen undershirt. John was smoking a pipe and reading the evening paper, and opposite John two young girls, one about ten, the other seven, were studying their lessons.

"Hello, John!" said Joe.

John nodded amiably, and muttered:

"Hello yourself!"

He was a strong, athletic, stocky fellow, with sunken little blue eyes, heavy jaws, and almost bald head. Before he had time to rise the two young girls leaped up with shrieks of joy and rushed to Joe. Joe at once tucked one under each arm and hugged them forward to a big chair, into which they all sank together.

"Well! Well!" cried Joe.

"Who do you love most?" asked the seven-year-old.

"The one who loves me most!" said Joe.

"I do!" they both shrieked.

"Now leave Mr. Joe be," warned the father. "Such tomboys they're getting to be, there's no holdin' 'em in!"

At once in the half-curtained doorway to the next room appeared a stocky little woman, whose pale face was made emphatic by large steel-rimmed glasses that shrank each eye-pupil to the size of a tack-head. Her worried forehead smoothed; she smiled.

"I knew it was Mr. Joe," she said, "by the way those gals yelled."

Joe spoke eagerly:

"I just had to run in, Mrs. Rann, to ask how the baby was."

"He's a sight better. Mrs. Smith, who lives third floor front, had one just like him sick a year ago come Thanksgiving, and he died like that. But the doctor you sent over is that kind and cute he's got the little fellow a-fightin' for his life. He's a big sight better. Want to see him?"

Joe gave a kiss each way, set down two reluctant women-to-be, and followed Mrs. Rann to the inner room. In a little crib a youngster, just recovered from colic, was kicking up his heels. Joe leaned over and tickled the sole of one foot.

"Well, Johnny boy!"

"Unc! Unc!" cried the infant.

The mother purred with delight.

"He's trying to say Uncle Joe. Did you ever hear the likes?"

Joe beamed with pride.

"Well, your uncle hasn't forgotten you, old man!"

And he produced from his pocket a little rubber doll that whistled whenever its belly was squeezed.

John Rann appeared behind them.

"Say, Mr. Joe, you haven't had your supper yet."

"Not hungry!" muttered Joe.

"G'wan! Molly, put him up a couple of fried eggs, browned on both, and a cup of coffee. I won't take no, either."

Joe laughed.

"Well, perhaps I'd better. I'm ashamed to ask for anything home this hour—in fact, I'm scared to."

So he got his fried eggs and coffee, and the family hung around him, and Joe, circled with such warm friendliness, was glad to be alive. He was especially pleased with Mrs. Rann's regard. But Joe was always a favorite with mothers. Possibly because he was so fond of their babies. Possibly because mothers love a good son, wherever they find one. Possibly because his heart was large enough to contain as something precious their obscure lives. Just before he left John asked him:

"Will the printery soon be running, Mr. Joe?"

"Tell you later," murmured Joe, and went out. But he was sorely troubled.

However, to Joe there had been revealed—almost in a day and after thirty-eight years of insulated life—two of the supreme human facts. There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state, organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man, that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new generations to inhabit that new state of the future. Intertwined, these wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb his existence.

He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the little ones must stay back at home with the mother.

In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra:

"I may never see you again…. I belong to those dead girls."

And this phrase came and went like a refrain. He must choose between her and those "dead girls." There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance. She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own children … who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a strange domestic tenderness. The depths of the man were stirred by these appeals—that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride of health and the fresh open air.

And Myra herself, that charming presence to infold his life—He would go walking through the golden October park, by little leaf-strewn paths under the wild and sun-soaked foliage, with many vistas every way of luring mystery, and over all the earth the rich opulent mother-bliss of harvest, and his heart would ache, ache within him, ache for his own harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.

A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours of the morning. Exhaustion alone brought him peace.

But something had to be done. He sat down and wrote to her with a trembling hand:

DEAR MYRA,—Though I am impatient to see you, I
must yet wait a little while. Bear with me. You will
understand later.

Yours,
JOE.

And then she replied:

DEAR JOE,—Can't I help you?
MYRA.

He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied:

Not yet—later.
JOE.

And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolishing, almost erasing and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the vision of a new world.

He had taken so much for granted. He had taken for granted that he lived in a democracy—that the Civil War had once for all made America a free nation—a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all. Not so. Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life—their work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt, lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health, from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.

He proved the case for himself. He began making tours of the city, discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime and crime and poverty of a great industrial center. He poked into the Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and hung about saloons. Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down into the city's underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves, women walking the streets as prostitutes.

And over this broad foundation of the "people" rose the structure of business and politics, equally corrupted—or so it seemed to Joe, as it does to every one who is fresh to the facts. Men at the top gathering into their hands the necessities of life: oil, meat, coal, water-power, wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social exchange; snatching strings of banks wherein the people's money was being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation, to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush opposition. So had arisen a "Money Power" that was annuling democracy.

And Joe's books argued that all this change had been wrought by the invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose the industrial city, the modern mill. The very things that should have set man free, the enormous powers he snatched from nature and harnessed to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men—these very things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved the majority. Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed, housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of toil and more variety of work.

But Joe's books argued further and most dogmatically that this organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all. Indeed, this was what Sally's labor movement meant: the enlightenment of the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for the supreme revolution.

And out of all this arose the world-vision. At such moments Joe walked in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains. It was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human touch. And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work. It lay in exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls and palaces of the human spirit. He was one with the toilers of earth, one with the crowded underworld. It was that these lives might grow richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life. And so arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision—a picture as it were of the far future—a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory, which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther and farther into the sunlit distances—but it is the day which leads the race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the consummation of that Victory.

He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:

"By God, I'm going to help change things."

The vision shook him—tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto such things had the "dead girls" brought him.

So, crammed with theories—theories as yet untested by experience—Joe became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news, he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,… there were reactions when his human humorous self—backed by ten years of the printery—told him that the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man expected to achieve such marvels.

But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an accumulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered world to him. What he wanted passionately was to go and live among the toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training them.

But then there was the problem of his mother—a woman of sixty-three. Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast? She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums of the advance?

Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement, and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to confess a wrong.

He looked up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days. He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked at her door.

"Come in!" she cried.

He swung the door wide and entered. She was, as usual, sitting in the little rocker under the light and beside the bureau, between the bed and the window. The neat, fragrant room seemed to be sleeping, but the clear-eyed, upright woman was very much awake. She glanced up from her sewing and realized intuitively that at last the crisis had come. His big, homely face was a bald advertisement of his boyish excitement.

She nodded, and murmured, "Well!"

He drew up a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at a loss.

"Well," he muttered, trying to be careless, "how are you?"

"All right," she said drily.

She could not help him, though her heart was beginning to pain in her side.

"I've been walking about the Park," he began again, with an indifference that was full of leaks, "and thinking…." He leaned forward and spoke suddenly: "Say, mother, don't you get tired of living in this place?"

She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.

"It isn't so bad, Joe…. There are a few decent people … there's Miss
Gardiner, the librarian … and I have books and sewing."

"Oh, I know," he went on, clumsily, "but you're alone a lot."

"Yes, I am," she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no further with him. She began sewing diligently.

"Say, mother!"

No answer.

"Mother!"

"Yes," dimly.

His voice sounded unnatural.

"Since the … fire … I've been doing some thinking, some reading…."

"Yes."

"I've been going about … studying the city…."

"Yes."

"Now I want you to understand, mother…. I want to tell you of … It's—well, I want to do something with my money, my life…." And his voice broke, in spite of himself.

His mother felt as if she were smothering. But she waited, and he went on:

"For those dead girls, mother…." and sharply came a dry sob. "And for all the toilers. Oh, but can you understand?"

There was a silence. Then she looked at him from her youthful, brilliant eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy. This gave her strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking:

"Understand? Do you mean the books you are reading?"

"Yes," he murmured.

"Well," she smiled weakly, "I've been reading them, too."

"You!" He was shocked. He looked at her as if she had revealed a new woman to him.

"Yes," she said, quickly. "I found them in your room."

He was amazedly silent. He felt then that he had never really known his mother.

"Joe," she said, tremulously, "I want to tell you a little about the war…. There are things I haven't told you."

And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him—not all, but many things. She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one, even the business man, was a poet. She had seen or met some of the great men. Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on slavery were burning in her brain. She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was one of those

"Who dare to be
In the right with two or three."

Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now forgotten, had taken her out to see "the white Mr. Longfellow." It was one of the dream-days of her life—the large, spacious, square Colonial house where once Washington had lived; the poet's square room with its round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple, white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke so winningly and simply. He even gave her a scrap of paper on which were written some of his anti-slavery lines.

Those were great days—days when America, the world's experiment in democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify. The great test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice. The young, beautiful, clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give up all and go to the front. It was like tearing her own heart in two, and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself. On that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they passionately embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then at last when the young man said: "I'll go! It's little enough to do in this crisis!" she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.

And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible years set in—years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had seen:

"I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.
I saw the dÉbris and dÉbris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."

Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing,

"Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing."

Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated and sick man. Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long widowhood….

Had she not a right to speak to him?

"Understand?" she ended. "I think, Joe, I ought to understand…. I sent your father into the war…."

Depth beneath depth he was discovering her. He was amazed and awed. He asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so blind. He felt very young then. It was she who actually knew what the word social and the word patriotism meant.

He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper:

"And … would you send me off, too? The new war?"

She could scarcely speak.

"Whereto?"

"I … oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere—the slums…."

"Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you."

"But you—" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"—"it's impossible, mother."

She answered him with the same quietness.

"You forget the shanty."

And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She would go with him; more than that, she should. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in its miraculousness.

But he only said, in a strained voice,

"All right, mother!"

And she laughed, and mused, and murmured:

"How does the world manage to keep so new and young?"