Part 7

Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the surgery improvised in the companionway. On a table flamed a number of small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,” motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group. “Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.

The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.

It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis Island.

It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk would not submit for two successive days.

On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say, move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar of American citizenship. We “moved up” until the last square foot of floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means wait till the steed is stolen.

Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful, after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and wraps and boxes and babies.

Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat, “Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit and wait for half an hour.

When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.

“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R, F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip. Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant, commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”

Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room. It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eat anything all day. In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I emphatically sat down.

At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.

At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from the _Lusitania_ whipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside. The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners, attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the benefits of civilization.

On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before. Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were absorbed, obliterated. The little world of the _Lusitania_ was already annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star. I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering. I was sorry to say good-bye.

THE C. T. U.

GEORGE CRAM COOK

The battle began Monday morning when Assistant Professor Clark seated himself facing the President in the President’s office.

“I want permission,” said the lanky, trim-bearded young man, “for Vida Martin, who is here raising money for the striking button-cutters of Manistee, to speak in Assembly Hall.”

The President’s grey eyes opened a little wider, then narrowed shrewdly. He swung a little in his swivel chair, and pulled his graceful iron-grey moustache. Then he said gently: “Would you regard it as proper for the University to take sides to that extent in an industrial dispute?”

“We listened to Judge Graham’s Menace of Syndicalism.”

“An address which was general. This is a specific conflict.”

“Judge Graham talked about it.”

“In illustration of his general point. Miss Martin, I understand, talks of nothing else. She is an extreme radical—a professional firebrand. I am surprised to find a man of your standing in sympathy with her ideas.”

“I’m not—altogether,” replied Clark. “That is scarcely a sufficient reason for not listening to them. I want our students to hear her side of the case—undistorted.”

“We cannot lend unsound cases the weight of university authority,” said the President.

“Judge Graham’s case was thoroughly unsound,” said Clark. “Vida Martin is, as you say, an extreme radical. But we have listened to an extreme reactionary. If it is the policy of the University not to take sides, it cannot invite him to speak and refuse to let her. Her subject, I ought to say, is general—the Ideals of Syndicalism. As to her soundness: she knows industrial unionism from the inside—her own experience as organizer. She knows its leaders personally. All Judge Graham knows is his own prejudice against labor and some newspaper stories.”

The President swung back to his desk and arranged some papers.

Clark sat there looking irritatingly thorough.

“What made you take the responsibility of discussing this with Vida Martin?” the President demanded.

“I met her on the train from Manistee last night. I used to know her at Hull House. She spoke of the dismissal of Brooks and Gleason here last year for insisting on their right to express their real ideas, and made the sweeping claim that there is no free speech in any American university. I said I’d disprove that by getting Assembly Hall for her. If she can’t have it, it seems to bear out her charge against us.”

“Haven’t you yourself enjoyed freedom of speech here?”

“Yes, I have. But frankly, I’m afraid I’ve never had anything to say that was dangerous.”

“Afraid! Your talk with Miss Martin seems to have had a singular effect on your point of view.”

“It has,” admitted Clark. “I never put such new life into the thinking of any student as she put into mine last night. Six years ago in Chicago she was not unlike me. If the labor movement makes her what she is and the University makes me what I am—there’s something wrong with the University. I think we should try to understand her.”

“By all means—those of us who have not already done so.”

Clark smiled.

“Understanding her is one thing,” said the President, nettled, “and giving her violent doctrines such sanction by the University as you propose is quite another. You’ve been carried off your feet. When you regain your balance you’ll thank me for not granting this wild request of yours. Is there anything further you wish to say?”

Clark rose to go. “Only that I regret this failure—of the University.”

“It’s not the University that’s in danger of failing, Mr. Clark,” said the President significantly.

Having sufficiently endangered his career to no purpose, Mr. Clark strode out of the Liberal Arts’ Building, past the black bulletin boards on which the announcement of Vida Martin’s lecture would not appear. He marched down the old flagstone walk beneath the oaks and budding maples and across to the hotel—a three-story brick building painted slate-grey.

There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the height of her vivid powers.

She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall.

“That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of Assembly Hall.”

Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.”

Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!”

She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and ‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to use a rubber stamp?”

As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove.

“It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle of fighting tactics.”

He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce your meeting in my classes.”

“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”

“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I _will_ lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.

That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.

After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.

“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box in Assembly Hall.”

“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.

Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”

“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with her now.”

Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.

“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.

With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.

Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation” of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and things.

Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand that she had laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination “confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it, but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of light.

“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach. I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”

He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must first go home and lead up to that.

“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.

“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”

“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.

“Or a cause.”

Afterwards they remembered her saying that, and looking back it seemed a premonition.

II

When he reached home that afternoon, Guthrie expended half an hour’s skilled energy in overcoming Mrs. Guthrie’s instinctive objections to the unusual, and the dinner invitation went over the telephone to Clark and Vida Martin.

Guthrie’s mind was full of glow and movement. His impulse was to draw in from Vida Martin as with a deep inhalation all the modernity he had missed—not merely her thoughts but her way of thinking, her inner feeling and her technique of conveying it. Her manner he felt to be not her own unaided invention but a social growth—a collaboration of many men and women moving in the same direction. He felt a need of moving with them.

The most tangible thing for him was an accent of sincerity in Vida which compelled her listener into an answering sincerity. He coveted the secret of that social power—the power of being and doing that. It rested down on a greater democracy than he had known—upon her sense of oneness with others, her feeling of non-superiority, her assumption: “You and I are fundamentally alike.”

He wanted to be with her long enough to catch that feeling, to have and to use it, giving it forth in turn to others. What a power to fill his students with! The teacher in him craved that secret of living. He wanted it to transmit; he wanted it as seed to sow in a more human seminar than he had yet conducted.

It meant scrutinizing, accepting and conveying the actual human truth about one’s own feelings and motives—without thought of whether they were or were not admirable. It meant the acceptance of one’s self as the most authentic human document—a desire and firm resolution not to embellish or in any way falsify that text in the mind of another.

One couldn’t do that and continue to set one’s self up professor-like as an example to youth. The power could be exerted only by taking youth completely into his confidence. Only one’s real, uncensored thoughts and impulses as they sprang out of one’s own nature had that quality he sought. He felt that he needed the help of Vida, with her long habit of truthful self-revelation, in learning to read that intricate, much disregarded text—himself.

In his new spirit he spoke to Mrs. Guthrie about the secret he wanted to acquire from Vida Martin, hoping to rouse in Anna a desire to acquire it for herself.

But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third. She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly brutal in the bald way he came out with it. Things like that which would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such things.

“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected. “It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”

To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.

Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.

Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,” he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”

When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of my having such a woman to dinner?”

The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from Guthrie’s deploring, _à propos_ of the danger of Clark’s dismissal, the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents and regents.

“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.

“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.

“Why not?” she challenged.

“It’s as natural as sunrise,” he said. “We’re all controlled through bread and butter channels.”

“Other classes of workers are testing out ways of controlling their own bread and butter. Bread and butter freedom is precisely what the world now needs and seeks. Are university professors less capable of thought than button-cutters?”

“No,” said Clark. “But less capable of concerted action. We’re too confoundedly jealous and individualistic to work together.”

“How do you know that?” Vida demanded. “Have you ever tried it? With things as they are you certainly can’t fulfil your social function. You’ll either have to get together and secure your freedom or remain in a position where you cannot really influence your students.”

“But they do influence them!” protested Mrs. Guthrie.

“About all the students look to us for,” said Clark, “is credits. A credit costs on the average so much time and attention. A little more and they resent your overcharge, a little less and they gloat because they’ve been able to underpay.”

“Imagine their having such an attitude toward a live man dealing with live ideas!” exclaimed Vida. “Toward Bernard Shaw, for instance, lecturing on the necessity of extending to unmarried women the right to have children!”

Mrs. Guthrie looked apprehensively at Lucy and then at the young Bohemian girl who was bringing in the dessert. “Fortunately,” she said, “our professors do not care to deal with things like that.”

“No,” said Vida, “they prefer to let society continue unwarned its present insane treatment of illegitimacy.”

“There’s no question about our lack of freedom,” said Guthrie hastily, “nor about our need of it. But what means do you suggest to us, Miss Martin, for gaining it?”

“Well,” said Vida, “here’s Kenton Clark, one of the best economists in the country, in danger of being kicked out for recommending my lecture. Brooks and Gleason went the same way last year. Who kicks you out?”

“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from omnipotent Regents who can kick _him_ out—and frequently do.” That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it.

“Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be self-governing.”

“Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing system. What force is capable of transforming it?”

“Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many college teachers are there?”

“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.”

“But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious chuckle.

“They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both sterile.”

“There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,” Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with flame.”

“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”

Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were so absorbed they did not hear.

“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.

“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”

“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,” said Clark.