第2章 The Men in the Assembly Room

Cormac Kavanagh had a talent, which he had never wanted, for being believed by men who had nothing to lose. He was thirty-four years old, Irish by birth and New York by the harder route, and he had once been the best young reporter the Clarion possessed, until the day he wrote a piece about a tenement fire that had killed eleven people and named the owner of the building, who happened to be a friend of the owner of the paper. The Clarion had printed the piece. It had printed it with three of its most important paragraphs removed and a small note at the end that the facts were in dispute. Cormac had gone to the owner of the paper, who had been Percival Hollingsworth, and had asked him, with the careful insolence of a man who still believed that owners were answerable to something, whether he would like the note to say which facts and on whose word. Percival Hollingsworth had looked at him for a long time. Then he had said, "You have a good ear and a bad temper, and the paper can use the first and cannot survive the second." And he had let him go, with two weeks' wages and a character that said nothing true. So Cormac had learned a second trade. He had stood on the corners of the printing district, in the cold and in the worse cold, and he had listened to the men who set the type and fed the presses and took home their fingers and their lungs in exchange for nine dollars a week. He had learned that a pressman can hear a bad bearing three rooms away. He had learned that a compositor can feel a missing sort with his thumb in the dark. And he had learned that the men trusted him, not because he was clever, but because he had once been fired for telling the truth about a fire, and men who spend their lives in ink remember a thing like that. Now it was a Friday night in late November, and the assembly room on Rookery Row was full to the doors. It was a long low room above a saloon, with a stove in the corner and benches scarred by a generation of knives and cigarettes. Some two hundred men were in it. They had given up their evening and their beer money to be there, and they sat with their hats in their hands and their faces turned toward the front, where Cormac stood on a crate because there was no platform. "Before we vote," he said, "I want every man to hear the number again, so that no one can say afterward that he voted without knowing what he voted for." He held up a slip of paper. "Nine dollars a week is what a pressman makes now. The machine the company has bought makes it possible to set in an hour what six men set in a day. The company has said, in writing, in a letter that I have here and that any man among you may read for himself, that the men who are displaced will be taken on as feeders and paid five dollars a week for the privilege of losing their trade. That is the number. Nine dollars to five. A man with a wife and three children pays eleven dollars a month for two rooms on Vandam Street. I do not propose to do the sum for you. I think every man here can do it." A sound went through the room, low and rough. It was not a cheer. It was the noise men make when something they already knew is said aloud by someone else. A man near the back stood up. He was old, and his hands were the hands of a man who had spent forty years picking up hot metal, and his name was Lazarus Brogan, and he had trained half the compositors in the room. "Nine to five is not the worst of it," Brogan said. "The worst of it is the fingers. Two years on them machines and a man cannot feel a sort from a slug. Then he is thirty-five years old with no trade and no fingers and no paper that will have him. I have watched it in other shops. Do not let these young ones think they will be the exception." "Sit down, Laz," someone called, not unkindly. "You are frightening the boys." "I am trying to," Brogan said, and sat. Cormac let the room settle. He was not by nature a speechmaker; he distrusted the kind of man who loved his own voice too well. What he had instead was a fact for every sentence, and he used them the way a compositor used sorts, one at a time, until the page was full. "Here is what we ask," he said. "A wage of nine dollars kept for every man the machine does not displace. A fund for the men it does displace, that they may be retrained or pensioned, and that fund paid by the company and not by us. And a written rule that no man is turned out for belonging to this assembly. That is all. We are not asking the Hollingsworth family to give up a single carriage. We are asking them to give up a small part of a very large fortune so that the men who make it may live." He folded the paper and put it in his coat. "Now," he said. "Shall we ask them nicely, or shall we ask them with our hands out of their presses?" The vote was not close. Afterward, when the room had emptied and the stove had cooled, Cormac stood at the window with Brogan and watched the street below. The gas lamps were lit along Rookery Row, and the men were going home in twos and threes, their breath white in the cold, and a few of them were already, quietly, beginning to be afraid of what they had voted for. "The old man is dead," Brogan said. "Did you hear? Percival Hollingsworth. Died in October." "I heard." "Then it is the daughter who owns us now. A girl who has been in Paris looking at pictures." "I heard that also." Brogan turned and studied him, and his old eyes were shrewd. "You wrote for her father once. You know what these people are. They do not see us. We are a number in a column to them, and the column has a bottom line, and the bottom line is fixed. She will sell us to the Bugle and be done with it, or she will break us to prove she is her father's child. Either way we lose." "Perhaps," Cormac said. "You do not believe that." Cormac looked down at the street, where the last of them were turning the corner into the dark, and thought of the tenement fire and the paragraphs that had been cut, and of Percival Hollingsworth saying, *the paper can use the first and cannot survive the second.* "I believe that people are what their interests make them," he said. "And I believe that sometimes their interests can be made to change. That is the whole of my politics, Laz, and it has kept me out of better jobs than this one." Brogan laughed, a dry sound, and pulled on his hat. "Then let us hope the heiress has interests we can afford," he said. "Because she is coming up the stairs." Cormac turned. A woman had come into the assembly room without knocking, and she stood in the doorway with the cold coming off her coat and her face pale in the lamplight. She was young; he had expected that. What he had not expected was the way she looked at the room — not as a lady looks at a place she has been told is dangerous, but the way he himself looked at a page before he edited it, hunting for the thing that was true in it and the thing that was not. "Miss Hollingsworth," Cormac said. "Mr. Kavanagh." She did not offer her hand. "I have read your letter to my father. I would like to read the rest." ---