A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give me over the 'phone.

"You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me about Sue."

I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his side.

"I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.

I felt a little electric shock. So here was the great mob agitator, the notorious leader of strikes. Eleanore's words came into my mind: "We're to meet all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike—into what Joe calls revolution." Well, here was the arch-revolutionist, the prime mover of them all. Of middle size, about forty years old, angular and wiry, there was a lithe easy force in his limbs, but he barely moved as he spoke to me now. He just turned his narrow bony face and gave me a glance with his keen gray eyes.

"I've known your work for quite a while," he said in a low drawling voice, "Joe says you're thinking of writing me up."

So this was why Joe had sent for me. I had quite forgotten this idea, but I took to it eagerly now. My work was going badly. Here was something I could do, the life story of a man whose picture would soon be on the front page of every paper in New York. It would interest my magazine, it would give me a chance to get myself clear on this whole ugly business of labor, poverty and strikes. I had evaded it long enough, I would turn and face it squarely now.

"Why yes, I'd like to try," I said.

"He wants to do your picture with the America you know," said Joe. "He says he's ready to be shown."

Marsh glanced out at the harbor.

"If he'll trail around with us for a while we may show him some of it here," he drawled. And then quietly ignoring my presence he continued his talk with Joe, as though taking it for granted that I was an interested friend. I listened there all afternoon.

The thing that struck me most at first was the cool effrontery of the man in undertaking such a struggle. The old type of labor leader had at least stuck to one industry, and had known by close experience what he had to face. But here was a mere outsider, a visitor strolling into a place and saying, "I guess I'll stop all this." Vaguely I knew what he had to contend with. Sitting here in this cheap bare room, the thought of other rooms rose in my mind, spacious, handsomely furnished rooms where at one time or another I had interviewed heads of foreign ship companies, railroad presidents, bankers and lawyers, newspaper editors, men representing enormous wealth. All these rooms had been parts of my harbor—a massed array of money and brains. He would have all this against him. And to such a struggle I could see no end for him but jail.

For against all this, on his side, was a chaotic army of ignorant men, stokers, dockers, teamsters, scattered all over this immense region, practically unorganized. What possible chance to bring them together? How could he feel that he had a chance? How much did he already know?

I asked him what he had seen of the harbor. For days, I learned, he had told no one but Joe of his coming, he had wandered about the port by himself. And as a veteran tramp will in some mysterious fashion get the feel of a new town within a few short hours there, so Marsh had got the feel of this place—of a harbor different from mine, for he felt it from the point of view of its hundred thousand laborers. He felt it with its human fringe, he saw its various tenement borders like so many camps and bivouacs on the eve of a battle.

He told a little incident of how the harbor learned he was here. About nine o'clock one morning, as he was waiting his chance to get into one of the North River docks, a teamster recognized him there from a picture of him he had once seen. The news traveled swiftly along the docks, out onto piers and into ships. And at noon, way over in Hoboken, Marsh had overheard a German docker say to the man eating lunch beside him,

"I hear dot tamn fool anarchist Marsh is raising hell ofer dere in New York."

"But I wasn't raising hell," he drawled. "I was over here studying literature." And he drew out from his pocket a tattered copy of a report, the result of a careful investigation of work on the docks, made recently by a most conservative philanthropic organization.

"'In all the fierce rush of American industry,'" he read, with a quiet smile of derision, "'no work is so long, so irregular or more full of danger. Seven a. m. until midnight is a common work day here, and in the rush season of winter when ships are often delayed by storms and so must make up time in port, the same men often work all day and night and even on into the following day, with only hour and half-hour stops for coffee, food or liquor. This strain makes for accidents. From police reports and other sources we find that six thousand killed and injured every year on the docks is a conservative estimate.'"

Marsh glanced dryly up at me:

"Here's the America I know."

I said nothing. I was appalled. Six thousand killed and injured! I could feel his sharp gray eyes boring down into my soul:

"You wrote up this harbor once."

"Yes," I said.

"Did you write this?"

"No. I would have said it was a lie."

"Do you say so now? These people are a careful crowd." I took the pamphlet from his hands.

"Queer," I muttered vaguely. "I never saw this report before."

"Not so queer," he answered. "I'm told that it wasn't meant to be seen—by you and the general public. That's the way this society works. They spend half a dead old lady's cash investigating poverty and the other half in keeping the public from learning what they've discovered. But we're going to furnish publicity to this secluded work of art.

"On Saturday afternoon," he continued, "I went along the North River docks. I found long lines of dockers there—they were waiting for their pay. At every pay window one of 'em stood with an empty cigar box in his hands—and into that box every man as he passed dropped a part of his pay—for the man who had been hurt that week—for him or for his widow.

"And over across the way," he went on, "I saw something on the waterfront that fitted right into the scenery. It was a poster on a high fence, and it had a black border around it. On one side of it was a picture of a tall gent in a swell frock suit. He was looking squarely at the docks and pointing to the sign beside him, which said, 'Certainly I'm talking to you! Money saved is money earned. Read what I will furnish you for seventy-five dollars—cash. Black cloth or any color you like—plush or imitation oak—casket with a good white or cream lining—pillow—burial suit or brown habit—draping and embalming room—chairs—hearse—three coaches—complete care and attendance—also handsome candelabra and candles if requested.'"

As Marsh read this grisly list from his notebook, it suddenly came into my mind that in my explorations years ago I had seen this poster at many points, all along the waterfront. It had made no impression on me then, for it had not fitted into my harbor. But Marsh had caught its meaning at once and had promptly jotted it down for use. For it fitted his harbor exactly.

Vaguely, in this and a dozen ways, I could feel him taking my harbor to pieces, transforming each piece into something grim and so building a harbor all his own. Disturbedly and angrily I struggled to find the flaws in his building, eagerly I caught at distortions here and there, twisted facts and wrong conclusions. But in all the terrible stuff which he had so hastily gathered here, there was so much that I could not deny. And he gave no chance for argument. Quickly jumping from point to point he pictured a harbor of slaves overburdened, driven into fierce revolt. It was hard to keep my footing.

For his talk was not only of this harbor. It ranged out over an ocean world which was all in a state of ferment and change. Men of every race and creed, from English, Germans, Russians to Coolies, Japs and Lascars, had crowded into the stokeholes, mixing bowls for all the world. And the mixing process had begun. At Copenhagen, two years before, in a great marine convention that followed the socialist congress there, Marsh had seen the delegates from seventeen different countries representing millions of seamen. And this crude world parliament, this international brotherhood, had placed itself on record as against wars of every kind, except the one deepening bitter war of labor against capital. To further this they had proposed to paralyze by strikes the whole international transport world. The first had followed promptly, breaking out in England. The second was to take place here.

"You don't see how it can happen," said Marsh, with one of those keen sudden looks that showed he was aware of my presence. "You admit this place is a watery hell, but you don't believe we can change it. You don't see how ignorant mobs of men can rise up and take the whole game in their hands. Do I get you right?"

"You do," I said.

"Look over there."

I followed his glance to the doorway. It was filled with a group of big ragged men. Some of the faces were black with soot, some were smiling stolidly, some scowling in the effort to hear. All eyes were intent on the face of the man who had never been known to lose a strike.

"That's the beginning," Marsh told me. "You keep your eyes on their faces—from now on right into the strike—and you may see something grow there that'll give you a new religion."

As the day wore into evening the crowd from outside pressed into the room until they were packed all around us.

"Let's get out of this," said Joe at last. We went to a neighboring lunchroom and ate a hasty supper. But as here, too, the crowd pressed in to get a look at Marsh, Joe asked us to come up to his room.

"They know your room," Marsh answered. His tone was grim, as though he had been accustomed for years to this ceaselessly curious pressing mass, pressing, pressing around him tight. "Suppose we go up to mine," he said. "I want you fellows to meet my wife. She has never met any writers before," he added to me, "and she's interested in that kind of thing. She was a music teacher once."

I was about to decline and start for home, but suddenly I recalled Eleanore's saying that she would like to meet Mrs. Marsh. So I accepted his invitation. And what I saw a few minutes later brought me down abruptly from these world-wide schemes for labor.

We entered a small, cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs and came into the narrow bedroom which was for the moment this notorious wanderer's home. A little girl about six years old lay asleep on a cot in one corner, and under the one electric light a woman sat reading a magazine. She had a strong rather clever face which would have been appealing if it were not for the bitter impatient glance she gave us as we entered.

"Talk low, boys, our little girl's asleep," Marsh said. "Say, Sally," he continued, with his faint, derisive smile, "here's a writer come to see you."

"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," she said, then relapsed into a stiff silence. I tried to break through her awkwardness but entirely without avail. I grew more and more sure of my first impression, that this woman hated her husband's friends, his strikes, his "proletariate." She was smart, pushing, ambitious, I thought, just the kind that would have got on in any middle western town. Eleanore must meet her.

Then presently I noticed that only Marsh was talking. I glanced at Joe and was startled by the intensity in his eyes.

For Joe was watching his leader's wife. And watching, he appeared to me to be seeing her in a dreary succession of rooms like these, in cities, towns and mining camps, wherever her husband was leading a strike—and then trying to see his own home in such rooms, and Sue in his home, a wife like this. The picture struck me suddenly cold. Sue pulled into this for life! Again I remembered Eleanore's words—"Drawn into revolution."

"Say, Joe," drawled Marsh, with a sharp look at him. "Got any of that typhoid left?"

Joe laughed quickly, confusedly.

Soon after that I left them.