The Nine-Tenths | Page 7

evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra! Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!"
The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called after him.
"Your mother's out, Mr. Joe."
He turned.
"Out? How long?"
"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."
He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.
And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity. Who was the guilty one, if not he, the boss?
And then the inquisition began, the repeated sting of lashing thoughts and cruel questions. He asked himself what right he had to be an employer, to take the responsibility of thirty lives in his hands. He was careless, easy-going, he was in business for profits. Had such a man any right to be placed over others, to be given the power over other lives? The guilt was his; the blame fell on him. He should have kept clean house; he should have stamped out the smoking; he should not have smoked himself. There fell upon his shoulders a burden not to be borne, the burden of his blame, and he felt as if nothing now in the world could assuage that sense of guilt.
Life, he found, was a fury, a cyclone, not the simple, easy affair he had thought it. It was his living for himself, his living alone, his ignorance of the fact that his life was tangled in with the lives of all human beings, so that he was socially responsible, responsible for the misery and poverty and pain all about him.
That he should be the one! Had he not lived just the average life--blameless, cheerful, hard-working, fun-loving--the life of the average American? Just by every-day standards his was the useful and good life. But no, that was not enough. In his rush for success he had made property his treasure instead of human beings. That was the crime. And so these dead lay all about him as if he had murdered them with his hands. It was his being an average man that had killed sixty-three girls and men. And what had he been after? Money? He did not use his money, did not need so much. Just a little shared with his employees would have saved them. No, the average man must cease to exist, and the social man take his place, the brother careful of his fellow-men, not careless of all but his own gain.
A boy passed, hoarsely shouting that terrible extra. Would nothing in the world silence that sound? The cold sweat came out on his face. He was the guilty one. That was the one fact that he knew.
And then he paused; the door opened creakingly and his mother entered. She was a magnificent young-old woman, her body sixty-three years old, her mind singularly fresh and young. She was tall, straight, spirited, and under the neat glossy-white hair was a noble face, somewhat long, somewhat slim, a little pallid, but with firm chin and large forehead and living large black eyes set among sharp lines of lids. The whole woman was focussed in the eyes, sparkled there, lived there, deep, limpid, quick, piercing. Her pallor changed to pure whiteness.
"Joe ..." her voice broke. "I've been looking for you...."
He paused, walled away from her by years of isolation. She advanced slowly; her face became terrible in its hungry love, its mother passion. She met his eyes, and then he fled to her, and his body shook with rough, tearless sobs. Her relief came in great tears.
"And all those girls," she was murmuring, "and those men. How did it happen?"
He drew back; his eyes became strange.
"Mother," he said, harshly, "I'm the guilty one. There was a heap of cotton waste in the corner, shouldn't have been there. And I let the men smoke cigarettes."
She was horrified.
"But why did you do that?" she whispered, moving a little away