The Nine-Tenths. James Oppenheim

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 pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western wilderness.

      Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave "her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could. This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood, though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made Henry Blaine wince with shame.

      Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets and they went through English literature together.

      Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and, lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting fact—namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.m. and ended at 8.30 A.m. In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well, and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.

      Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be "done"; and so he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious, fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living and economy. And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up the street. They spent very little on themselves. In fact, Joe was too busy. He was all absorbed in the printery—he worked early and late—and of recent years in the stress of business his fine relationship with his mother had rather thinned out. They began leading separated lives; they began shutting themselves away from each other.

      And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it all been? Merely the narrow, steady, city man's life—work, rest, a little recreation, sleep. Outside his mother, his employees, his customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life of the city about him. He used but one set of streets daily; he did not penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone in every direction. There stood the city, a great fact, and even that afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged cloud masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of a skyscraper and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power, gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic. And in that mesh of nature and man the human comedy went on—there was love and disaster, frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the woman on the operating-table in the hospital. Who could measure that swirl of life and whither it was leading? But who could live in the heart of it all and be unaware of it?

      Yet Joe's eyes were unseeing. Children played on the street, people walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was all he knew or saw. And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of life. Like many men, Joe had missed women. There was his mother, but no one else. He was rather shy, and he was too busy. But during the last few months a teacher—Myra Craig—had been coming to the printery to have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected Joe—sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had underrated poetry and music. Romance, led by Myra's hand, had entered the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been blind to life.

      Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight, blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps, and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn. The afternoon was quietly waning, up—stairs the hat-makers, and here the printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair glistening in the light overhead. His face was the homeliest that ever happened. The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark, melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles. His hands were large, mobile, and homely. But about him was an air of character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human nature. He stood there wishing that Myra would come. The day seemed to demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and forgetful glory of love.

      He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there would be little children in that house. He thought she loved him; yes, he was quite sure. Then what hindrance? There, at quarter to five that strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success, and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance. He had before his eyes the evidence of his wealth—the great, flapping presses, the bending, moving men. If anything was sure and solid in this world, these things were.

      He felt sure Myra would come. She had not been around for a week, and, anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night, its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar. It all seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed from him defeated of its splendor.

      If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the bell sharply sounded.

      She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck, struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating. Under the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a personality. One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth and breeding. But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than the total, which was thirty-two.

      There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness. He turned pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart. She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.

      "Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh.

      "Oh—not