CHAPTER XXXVI
“Come on, – I’ll show you the real dirt,” Brissenden said to him,
one evening in January.
They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry
Building, returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show
Martin the “real dirt.” He turned and fled across the water-front,
a meagre shadow in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to
keep up with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two
gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand boarded a
Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened with several
quart-bottles of whiskey.
If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to
what constituted the real dirt.
“Maybe nobody will be there,” Brissenden said, when they dismounted
and plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class
ghetto, south of Market Street. “In which case you’ll miss what
you’ve been looking for so long.”
“And what the deuce is that?” Martin asked.
“Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found
you consorting with in that trader’s den. You read the books and
you found yourself all alone. Well, I’m going to show you to-night
some other men who’ve read the books, so that you won’t be lonely
any more.”
“Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions,” he
said at the end of a block. “I’m not interested in book
philosophy. But you’ll find these fellows intelligences and not
bourgeois swine. But watch out, they’ll talk an arm off of you on
any subject under the sun.”
“Hope Norton’s there,” he panted a little later, resisting Martin’s
effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. “Norton’s an idealist
– a Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to
philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father’s a
railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son’s
starving in ‘Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a
month.”
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Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south
of Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.
“Go ahead,” he said; “tell me about them beforehand. What do they
do for a living? How do they happen to be here?”
“Hope Hamilton’s there.” Brissenden paused and rested his hands.
“Strawn-Hamilton’s his name – hyphenated, you know – comes of old
Southern stock. He’s a tramp – laziest man I ever knew, though
he’s clerking, or trying to, in a socialist cooperative store for
six dollars a week. But he’s a confirmed hobo. Tramped into town.
I’ve seen him sit all day on a bench and never a bite pass his
lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to dinner – restaurant
two blocks away – have him say, ‘Too much trouble, old man. Buy me
a package of cigarettes instead.’ He was a Spencerian like you
till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism. I’ll start him on
monism if I can. Norton’s another monist – only he affirms naught
but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want, too.”
“Who is Kreis?” Martin asked.
“His rooms we’re going to. One time professor – fired from
university – usual story. A mind like a steel trap. Makes his
living any old way. I know he’s been a street fakir when he was
down. Unscrupulous. Rob a corpse of a shroud – anything.
Difference between him – and the bourgeoisie is that he robs
without illusion. He’ll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant,
or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary,
that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little tin
god. The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel.”
“Here’s the hang-out.” Brissenden rested his demijohn at the
upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb. It was the usual two-
story corner building, with a saloon and grocery underneath. “The
gang lives here – got the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis
is the only one who has two rooms. Come on.”
No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the
utter blackness like a familiar ghost. He stopped to speak to
Martin.
“There’s one fellow – Stevens – a theosophist. Makes a pretty
tangle when he gets going. Just now he’s dish-washer in a
restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I’ve seen him eat in a ten-cent
hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward.
I’ve got a couple in my pocket for him, if he shows up.”
“And there’s another fellow – Parry – an Australian, a statistician
and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay
for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for
1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who
was welter-weight champion of the United States in ’68, and you’ll
get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-
machine. And there’s Andy, a stone-mason, has ideas on everything,
a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot
socialist and strong union man. By the way, you remember Cooks’
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and Waiters’ strike – Hamilton was the chap who organized that
union and precipitated the strike – planned it all out in advance,
right here in Kreis’s rooms. Did it just for the fun of it, but
was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have risen high if
he wanted to. There’s no end to the possibilities in that man – if
he weren’t so insuperably lazy.”
Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light
marked the threshold of a door. A knock and an answer opened it,
and Martin found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome
brunette man, with dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache,
and large, flashing black eyes. Mary, a matronly young blonde, was
washing dishes in the little back room that served for kitchen and
dining room. The front room served as bedchamber and living room.
Overhead was the week’s washing, hanging in festoons so low that
Martin did not see at first the two men talking in a corner. They
hailed Brissenden and his demijohns with acclamation, and, on being
introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and Parry. He joined
them and listened attentively to the description of a prize-fight
Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his glory,
plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine and
whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, “Bring in the clan,” Andy
departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.
“We’re lucky that most of them are here,” Brissenden whispered to
Martin. “There’s Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them.
Stevens isn’t around, I hear. I’m going to get them started on
monism if I can. Wait till they get a few jolts in them and
they’ll warm up.”
At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless Martin could
not fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds. They were men
with opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they
were witty and clever, they were not superficial. He swiftly saw,
no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the
correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified
conception of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their
opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another,
and their lips were strangers to platitudes. Never had Martin, at
the Morses’, heard so amazing a range of topics discussed. There
seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to. The
talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward’s new book to Shaw’s latest
play, through the future of the drama to reminiscences of
Mansfield. They appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials,
jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and
Brander Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East
and the economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the
German elections and Bebel’s last speech, and settled down to local
politics, the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party
administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about the
Coast Seamen’s strike. Martin was struck by the inside knowledge
they possessed. They knew what was never printed in the newspapers
– the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the puppets
dance. To Martin’s surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered
in the few women he had met. They talked together on Swinburne and
Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-
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paths of French literature. His revenge came when she defended
Maeterlinck and he brought into action the carefully-thought-out
thesis of “The Shame of the Sun.”
Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with
tobacco smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.