Kabanata Kabanata 36 · Chapter XXXVI

. 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.”

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 coöperative 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’ 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-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.

“Here’s fresh meat for your axe, Kreis,” he said; “a rose-white youth

with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a Haeckelite of

him—if you can.”

Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing,

while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish

smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.

Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered,

until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin

listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that

this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market. The

books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm,

the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger

stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry,

printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer.

It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two

men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other

men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going

out in their hands and with alert, intent faces.

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received

at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of

it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and

Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn,

sneered back at them as metaphysicians. _Phenomenon_ and _noumenon_

were bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to

explain consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery,

with reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At

this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of

reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts.

When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him

that all good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford.

A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton’s Law of Parsimony, the

application of which they immediately claimed for every reasoning

process of theirs. And Martin hugged his knees and exulted in it all.

But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too, strove for Martin’s

philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to his two opponents.

“You know Berkeley has never been answered,” he said, looking directly

at Martin. “Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was not very near.

Even the stanchest of Spencer’s followers will not go farther. I was

reading an essay of Saleeby’s the other day, and the best Saleeby could

say was that Herbert Spencer _nearly_ succeeded in answering Berkeley.”

“You know what Hume said?” Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but Hamilton

gave it for the benefit of the rest. “He said that Berkeley’s arguments

admit of no answer and produce no conviction.”

“In his, Hume’s, mind,” was the reply. “And Hume’s mind was the same as

yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit there was no

answering Berkeley.”

Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head,

while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages,

seeking out tender places to prod and poke. As the evening grew late,

Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a metaphysician,

clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his feet, his gray eyes

snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and sure, made a grand attack

upon their position.

“All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but,

pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific

dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging

about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of

materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so that there could

be no foundation. Locke was the man, John Locke. Two hundred years

ago—more than that, even in his ‘Essay concerning the Human

Understanding,’ he proved the non-existence of innate ideas. The best

of it is that that is precisely what you claim. To-night, again and

again, you have asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.

“And what does that mean? It means that you can never know ultimate

reality. Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or

phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five

senses. Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born,

have no way of getting in—”

“I deny—” Kreis started to interrupt.

“You wait till I’m done,” Norton shouted. “You can know only that much

of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or

another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of

the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to

efface you by your own argument. I can’t do it any other way, for you

are both congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction.

“And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive

science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are

aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in

your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you

are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with

noumena. Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is

concerned only with appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal

knowledge cannot transcend phenomena.

“You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and

yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that

science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the

existence of matter.—You know I granted the reality of matter only in

order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive

scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive

science, so leave it alone. Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if

Spencer—”

But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and

Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and

Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as

soon as he finished.

“You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,” Martin said on the

ferry-boat. “It makes life worth while to meet people like that. My

mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can’t

accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I

guess. But I’d like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I

think I’d have had a word or two for Norton. I didn’t see that Spencer

was damaged any. I’m as excited as a child on its first visit to the

circus. I see I must read up some more. I’m going to get hold of

Saleeby. I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I’m going

to take a hand myself.”

But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin

buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in

the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.