Chapter 16 The Gates of the Clarion

The men of the Clarion were to vote on the trust on a Monday in the first week of February, and the scabs came at seven in the morning, and they came in a wagon with Gormley's detectives riding beside it. Cormac saw them from the assembly hall window. He had been awake most of the night with the men, going over the terms of the trust one last time, and he had come to the window because the street had gone quiet in a way that streets do not go quiet on a working morning, and when he looked down he saw the wagon and counted eleven men on it and three detectives and, at the corner, two more. He knew immediately what it was. It was the last thing Thorndike had arranged before he resigned, the thing the machine sellers had arranged with him, the thing that was supposed to happen if the strike ever reached the point where a settlement seemed possible: a wagon of hired men brought in to work the presses, and in front of them a line of workers who would not be able to watch scabs cross their line and do nothing. He went down the stairs three at a time. By the time he reached the street, the men of the Clarion were pouring out of their boarding houses and their saloons and the doors of the press-room, and the Row was filling with workers from the other shops, who had come because a strike in one shop is a strike in all of them and they knew it. There were three hundred of them by the time Cormac reached the gate. There were eleven scabs on the wagon. And the detectives had their hands on their coats, and one of them had a revolver, and the whole thing was balanced like a glass on the edge of a table. Cormac walked into the space between the gate and the wagon, where the two sides could see him, and he raised his hands. "Nobody moves," he said. "Not one man of ours steps past this line, and no man of theirs gets down from that wagon. Gormley, you hear me? Your men keep their hands where I can see them." The lead detective looked at him and did not answer, but he did not draw. Scanlon was at Cormac's shoulder, and Scanlon was not alone; there were thirty young men behind him who had been waiting two months for exactly this morning, and their faces were the faces of men who had been given, at last, something simple to do. "We can take them," Scanlon said. "Thirty of us and three of them. The wagon turns over, the scabs walk home, and the company learns what a line means." "You take them and the police come, and the police come and the strike is over, and the settlement is over, and by tonight you are in the Tombs and the men are back on the machines at five dollars and no fund and no rule." Cormac turned and looked at him. "The wagon is bait. That is what it is. It is not even clever bait. Thorndike wants one broken head, one picture in the Bugle of a striker with a club, and he has the strike done. I will not give it to him, and neither will you." "There are eleven scabs behind you, Kavanagh. Are you going to stand there and let them print our paper?" "I am going to stand here until the men vote," Cormac said. "That is the whole of it. If the men vote for the trust, then no one needs to break a head, because the paper will be half theirs by noon and no scab will want to work it. And if the men vote against the trust, then we have decided to lose this fight, and we will lose it as men who chose it, and not because a detective with a revolver got lucky." For a long moment nobody moved. The wagon horses shifted in the cold, and the steam came off them, and the street was so quiet that Cormac could hear the presses in the Clarion behind the wall, running on what would be the last edition if the men did not vote. And then a voice came from the gate, and it was a woman's voice, and it was steady. "Let them vote," Cornelia said. She had come out of the building without a coat, in the plain gray dress, and she walked through the line of three hundred men to the space between the gate and the wagon, and stood beside Cormac as though there were nothing in the world more ordinary than an heiress standing in a strike line at seven in the morning. "You have nothing to say here," Scanlon said. "I have a building to say it from," Cornelia said. "The men vote inside, in the assembly room, and they vote now, and I will open the doors myself and stand in them, and any man who wants to go to the wagon instead of the ballot box must walk past me. Mr. Gormley, your men may keep their seats. The press-room is closed until noon. If any one of you steps down from that wagon before the vote is counted, I will have the police down on your agency for the oil you poured in my composing room, and I have the confession of the man who paid you, and it will be a very long winter for all of you." The detective looked at her for a moment, and then at the three hundred men, and then he said something to the driver, and the wagon did not move. --- The men voted at ten. It was not unanimous. Two hundred and ten voted for the trust and forty against, and Scanlon's forty walked out of the room without speaking to anyone, and that was the strike's last shot and it did no harm. The settlement was signed at noon in the assembly hall, on a table borrowed from the saloon below, with Brogan signing first for the compositors and Mulvaney's brother signing with his left hand because the right one had never come back. Cormac signed last, and when he had signed he stood up and looked around the room at the men who had voted for something they could not yet see, and he said, in the plain way he said everything, "You have taken a piece of a newspaper. Now you must learn to run it. We begin Thursday." Then he went out, and Cornelia went out after him, and they stood on the step of the assembly hall in the flat February light and did not say anything at all for a while. "Did you mean it?" she asked at last. "That they must learn to run it." "I meant it. A trust that does not know how to read a balance sheet is a trust that will be managed by the man who wrote it." He looked at her sideways. "Which is you, at present. So on Thursday you will begin teaching twenty men how a company works, and you will not enjoy it, and it will be the most important thing you ever do for them." "I had rather hoped you would teach them." "I cannot. I am not a teacher of companies. I am a teacher of strikes." He paused. "There is one more thing I have to do, and I have been putting it off, and I will do it tonight. I am going to resign as organizer of the assembly." Cornelia turned to face him. "You cannot." "I can, and I must. I have taken the men into a trust with an owner, and I have signed my name to it, and from this day forward there is not a man in the trade who will look at me and see a labor man. They will see the man who went partners with the heiress. Another organizer must lead them, someone who can stand across the table from me without being told he is mine." He smiled, and it was not a happy smile. "You asked me once what the price would be. This is the price. I have won them the paper, and I have spent myself buying it." ---