manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of
the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and
guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them
out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did
not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange
printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the
freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the
fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the "No Smoking" rule,
but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile:
"Marty, the boys are only human--they see me smoking in the private
office!"
Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate
presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here
and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the
greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in
sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a
complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning,
and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the
presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver.
The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of
the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the
young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others
Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch
as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap--a touch of color and of melody.
Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a
glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter.
Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street--their
hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow.
But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful
stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking,
flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths,
and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even
that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a
golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt
his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of
the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this
was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the
crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it
would last forever.
Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean
of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live
and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His
father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his
right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had
overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and
they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with
his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.
Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in
the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any
money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is
now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the
site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a
shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a
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