The Nine-Tenths. James Oppenheim

leather bag under her arm and took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.

      He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then murmured, suddenly:

      "More school stuff?"

      She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost failed her.

      "Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,' and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!"

      With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose sheets. He bent over them at once.

      "Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or

       I'll give the job to some one else."

      Joe laughed strangely.

      "How many copies?"

      "One thousand."

      He spoke as if in fear.

      "Fifty cents too much?"

      Myra laughed.

      "I don't want the school to ruin you!"

      He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully to button her coat. There was no reason for staying.

      Then suddenly he spoke, huskily:

      "Don't go, Miss Craig. … "

      "You want … " she began.

      He leaned very close.

      "I want to take a walk with you. May I?"

      She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.

      "I may?" he was whispering.

      Her "Yes" was almost inaudible.

      So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch hat, and called over Marty.

      "I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said.

      Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine, with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name "Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high.

      The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his cigarette, remarked, amiably:

      "Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right. …

       Good-night, Mr. Blaine!"

      "Good-night, Tom," said Joe.

II

       Table of Contents

      THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

      They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through a hurrying throng of people.

      "Take my arm," cried Joe.

      She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.

      Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed melodiously.

      The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides and there was nothing some distance north and south.

      "Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!"

      It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore sparkled a friendly light.

      "But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra.

      She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side, and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.

      And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful as smoking chimneys. They meant so much—labor, human beings, fire, warmth.

      And over all—river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the throbbing city behind them—rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.

      And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together—they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

      He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

      "I want … " he began.

      "Yes," she breathed.

      He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

      "Myra!"

      And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried out:

      "Joe!"

      And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

      "Oh," he cried, "how I love you! … Myra … "

      "Joe, Joe—I couldn't have stood it longer!"

      All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one, stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature—a mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

      "Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"

      They turned … and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

      "Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."

      It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all—his work, his love.

       He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

      Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets—everywhere homes, families; men,