Yes, I laughed, and yet there was so brave a simplicity about this odd, absurd little man that what I laughed at was only his outward appearance (and that he himself had no care for), and all the time I felt a growing respect and admiration for him. He was not only sincere, but he was genuinely simple--a much higher virtue, as Fenelon says. For while sincere people do not aim at appearing anything but what they are, they are always in fear of passing for something they are not. They are forever thinking about themselves, weighing all their words and thoughts and dwelling upon what they have done, in the fear of having done too much or too little, whereas simplicity, as Fenelon says, is an uprightness of soul which has ceased wholly to dwell upon itself or its actions. Thus there are plenty of sincere folk in the world but few who are simple.
Well, the longer he talked, the less interested I was in what he said and the more fascinated I became in what he was. I felt a wistful interest in him: and I wanted to know what way he took to purge himself of himself. I think if I had been in that group nineteen hundred years ago, which surrounded the beggar who was born blind, but whose anointed eyes now looked out upon glories of the world, I should have been among the questioners:
"What did he to thee? How opened he thine eyes?"
I tried ineffectually several times to break the swift current of his oratory and finally succeeded (when he paused a moment to finish off a bit of pie crust).
"You must have seen some hard experiences in your life," I said.
"That I have," responded Bill Hahn, "the capitalistic system--"
"Did you ever work in the mills yourself?" I interrupted hastily.
"Boy and man," said Bill Hahn, "I worked in that hell for thirty-two years--The class-conscious proletariat have only to exert themselves--"
"And your wife, did she work too--and your sons and daughters?"
A spasm of pain crossed his face.
"My daughter?" he said. "They killed her in the mills."
It was appalling--the dead level of the tone in which he uttered those words--the monotone of an emotion long ago burned out, and yet leaving frightful scars.
"My friend!" I exclaimed, and I could not help laying my hand on his arm.
I had the feeling I often have with troubled children--an indescribable pity that they have had to pass through the valley of the shadow, and I not there to take them by the hand.
"And was this--your daughter--what brought you to your present belief?"
"No," said he, "oh, no. I was a Socialist, as you might say, from youth up. That is, I called myself a Socialist, but, comrade, I've learned this here truth: that it ain't of so much importance that you possess a belief, as that the belief possess you. Do you understand?"
"I think," said I, "that I understand."
Well, he told me his story, mostly in a curious, dull, detached way--as though he were speaking of some third person in whom he felt only a brotherly interest, but from time to time some incident or observation would flame up out of the narrative, like the opening of the door of a molten pit--so that the glare hurt one!--and then the story would die back again into quiet narrative.
Like most working people he had never lived in the twentieth century at all. He was still in the feudal age, and his whole life had been a blind and ceaseless struggle for the bare necessaries of life, broken from time to time by fierce irregular wars called strikes. He had never known anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship, of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions.
It was against the "black people" he said, that he was first on strike back in the early nineties. He told me all about it, how he had been working in the mills pretty comfortably--he was young and strong then; with a fine growing family and a small home of his own.
"It was as pretty a place as you would want to see," he said; "we grew cabbages and onions and turnips--everything grew fine!--in the garden behind the house."
And then the "black people" began to come in, little by little at first, and then by the carload. By the "black people" he meant the people from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes"--"hordes and hordes of 'em"--Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the same time the machines were speeded up. It seems that many of these "black people" were single men or vigorous young married people with only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers and mothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.
"There wasn't a living for a decent family left," he said.
So they struck--and he told me in his dull monotone of the long bitterness of that strike, the empty cupboards, the approach of winter with no coal for the stoves and no warm clothing for the children. He told me that many of the old workers began to leave the town (some bound for the larger cities, some for the Far West).
"But," said he with a sudden outburst of emotion, "I couldn't leave. I had the woman and the children!"
And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs. "Begging like whipped dogs," he said bitterly.
Many of them found their places taken by the eager "black people," and many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places--punished for the fight they had made.
