D The Dogs of Joe Gone ESPITE his arresting history, it was not in the brusque Oklahoma town to sympathize with that unfortunate Indian, Joe Gone. In particular was sympathy beyond the group of loafers who lived in the buildings of Rotten Row, where the road from the railway station to the postoffice threw a tributary along the gulches. The want of feeling lay in the fact that these men saw little in Joe Gone to differentiate him from his people, greasy, tawdrily clothed, inane. These whites, being of that worthless cross between idler and ranch-hand which never produces even a tenant farmer, were not of fine perceptions. They hated the Indians for their "orneriness," their easy supply of funds, their race. The promiscuous social relations of the tribal members, the ease with which vice entered along avenues opened by their fluent income, the reactions following the attempt to pour Caucasian culture through schools and agencies into their rough community, had produced many a strange individual history. A man like Henry McClain, for example, could not interest himself in detailed palliations when he thought of the natural depravity of the race. The Southern indifference to inferior breeds and colors combined with this generalizing spirit. The Indians would have been mere objects of contemptuous amusement save that they were also a people to be exploited. The little town even supported several lines of cabs for lazy bucks to hail. Yet Joe Gone had lived a life that might have caused some sociologists to travel across half the continent to interview him, and that in its tragic implications would put a Lear to shame. Thirtyfive years before, when the land was new, the white man a rarity, and government paternalism but faintly foreshadowed, Joe Gone was a hopeful young man. He was on his way to leadership of one of the villages that had prospered during even the dark aftermath of the Civil War in Indian Territory. He was married and had children. An autumn epidemic fell upon the tribe, and amid general suffering he fell ill, grew more deeply emaciated as his fever raged, and one morning was found where he had dragged himself in delirium outside his lodge, stiff and cold. His body was disposed of with proper ceremony, far out on the open prairie, on a rough erection of stakes and skins. Food and drink were duly placed by his mother and wife close to his rigid fingers. Three days later, staring and ghastly, he stumbled back into the village, that scattered in terror to where the buffalo grass hid it. Some would have shot him, but the elders would not permit such trifling with the demon that had reanimated Joe Gone's body. When his people returned they would neither speak to him nor seem to see him. They passed him by as if he did not exist, and even when he slept by their fires and took the food that they ate, all-wife and child included-made as if he were not. Thus he had lived for the space of a generation. Now the white men had known him for fifteen years. His mother had died without speaking to him. His wife had remarried. His son had gone away to school and into the Northwest to farm, without noticing his existence. From the government he received his share of his nation's income, but his long isolation had bred a distrust of even white humankind. There were doubtless times when his brain so far yielded to the strain that he thought himself actually a ghost, somehow fated to dwell in an apparent vesture of flesh. There had been but one interruption of this long period of exile. He had once been present at a wheat threshing. One of the children he had taught when he was himself a youth was feeding the bundles into the shredder. The child's arm was caught and drawn among the knives, and in his agony he called wildly upon Joe Gone to extricate him. But no one had ever done Joe a service, and no one ever would. As he became more and more " queer," in the phrase of the whites who knew him, there were fewer and fewer of that race who cared to speak or nod to him. One close link with the living world, indeed, Joe Gone had. The single other tribal outcast was a lamed or diseased dog, and in the passage of years the Indian had collected around him four of these discarded canines, nursed them back to health and fatness, and cherished them into the most ardent devotion to himself. Whenever he appeared in town one or two of the dogs-the rest were at home guarding his shack-were at his heels, an entourage for which he spared little expense in providing tidbits of meat, and which repaid him by snarling ferociously at any who would stay his path. Their affection for him, be it understood, was undemonstrative. Had they offered to lick his hand he would have kicked them; he seemed to keep them at the distance that men kept voluntarily. But no affable storekeeper thought of saying, "Howdy, Joe Gone?" without inquiring, "How's them dogs of yourn to-day?" To have omitted this would have been to miss the curt growl with which Joe lifted his brown eyes, gleams of apprehension and defiance battling with their native resignation. So much for Joe's history up to August of the county fair. The fair was planned to attract half that corner of the state, and its domes of canvas and frame-for, thanks to the huge dimensions of the Oklahoma County, it was an itinerant affair, held annually in a new place-were to rise near that section of the town where dwelt the thousand Indians. As the town authorities planned its course, and traveled daily the cotton-lined avenue leading past the Indians' homes, a natural precaution occurred to them. The summer had been hot and parching, and the river had shrunk first to a series of pools and then to a corrugated, scaly bed of clay. Carried swiftly back and forth in their spring wagons, the selectmen and president of the village became cognizant of the rows of dripping red tongues and the panting sides of the troops of Indian dogs visible from the dusty roadway. One Thursday night an ordinance was passed sentencing to death all dogs found after three days without muzzles. On Monday the fair would begin, and it would not do for women and children to run the risk of being bitten by mad animals. "Constable McClain," remarked the president, "will see that everybody, especially in the Indian settlement, is warned of this ordinance." The price set upon the head of each unmuzzled dog was twenty-five cents. And warn the Indian settlement, through all its chief men, Constable McClain did, though perhaps not without a shrewd consciousness that the warning would never be conveyed to one member of the community, and that others would disregard it. The eight o'clock sun of Monday, an hour before the fair opened, saw him on his way along the dividing ridge beyond which lay the groups of Indian houses. Three stray dogs he shot in the presence of the waking Indians, drawing some plaudits for his skill, and then proceeded with slightly quickened stride to where the lonely shack of Joe Gone stood in the hot sunshine. Joe Gone was stooping over a skillet on a little rocky platform outside, the deep green and yellow of his short blanket a picturesque splotch in the dun landscape. In the foreground wandered one unmuzzled dog; three others lay recumbent in the tiny patch of shade cast by the cabin. Without a word McClain brought his gun to his shoulder and shot the beast roving in the weeds in front. At the dog's yelping leap in air Joe straightened and darted forward, and the other three animals started to their feet. One after the other, as fast as the ejector of his repeating rifle worked, McClain shot them where they were. The Indian stood stunned, stood as if he were trying to realize that the only companions he had had in thirty-five years were gone. As McClain, departing, looked back over the ridge, he saw the shapeless mass of gaudy garments that defined Joe bent unsteadily over the oldest and grayest of the dogs. For a moment his heart smote him. Oh, hell," he remarked, "what if one of them had got hyderphoby to-day and bit somebody? Better have killed the greasy old skunk of an Indian himself than let that happen." As he straddled the fence into the roadway he muttered to himself, "Nothin' on earth could have got it into that Indian's head that he'd got to muzzle his beasts." His conscience was still a little touched, and he resolved to come back with some tobacco for the old buck when he got his bounties. But at this moment he reached the centre of the road, the sun shot a sheaf of rays to the sky from the upraised instruments of a band approaching the fair, the band broke into a merry march, and McClain's heart lightened as he came trudging in, the licensed protector of the highway. A week later he passed the Indian's cabin in the dusk, and saw Joe Gone sitting alone in front, as had been his wont for many years. His face was thinner than McClain had seen it, his shoulders more stooped. His rusty black hair was unkempt, and about his figure hung an atmosphere of impenetrable apathy. When McClain passed other Indian homes nearer the town, he inquired for the recluse. "His dogs were shot," was the rejoinder. "Heem very hurt. He went off down the river week ago, mourning heem dog, and gone ever since." " I knew it," mused McClain, reassured. "The old Indian's never had any friends, and of course he don't take losses hard. I knew he'd get over it in no time." I ALLAN NEVINS. Sophronisba SHOULD scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined her against the background of that impeccable New England town from which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elmshaded streets, with houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families' hands, while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I think there are other things in Sophronisba's town, but these are the things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from. Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it. No more blessed relief comes to the conscienceburdened than the chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. She seems to have very dutifully taken her Master's degree in English literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has probably forgotten herself. For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba's career has been an indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game with the odds against them. I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and bookreviewing. There are some of Sophronisba's articles that I should like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely. There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skillful sorties of wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy. Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice that retains the least suggestion of a racy eastern twang. With the twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is going to be bright. How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance. In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba. These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably abstract, and for Sophronisba-too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus sent flying. Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them are. S A COMMUNICATION Why Suffrage Failed in New Jersey IR: The editorial conclusion in your issue of October 23rd that suffrage had failed in New Jersey because of the ineffectiveness of the suffrage propaganda is the obvious conclusion. Some observations indicate, however, that it was because of the effectiveness of our campaign that we were defeated. To illustrate, in Blairstown, a rural residence town beyond the commuter radius, we were never able to get a foothold. Our state headquarters held a few meetings there, we circularized the voters, but we never met with enough response to enable us to organize. The place carried by a small majority. Exactly the same is true of Washington, a very similar town in the same county. In Belvidere, a third town of much the same size and character in the same county, we had had an excellent organization for some years, which canvassed, held many fine meetings, with speakers of state and national reputation, and otherwise conducted a good and effective educational campaign. The town failed by a majority of ten. In Phillipsburg, an industrial city of 15,000 in the same county, a town packed with voters, enormous crowds of men stood for hours at our street meetings. We had enthusiastic and overflowing indoor meetings, able local workers, and the sentiment of the place seemed entirely friendly. On no town of its size in New Jersey did we expend more effort. It gave a heavy majority against us. This sort of thing can be paralleled in many cases. I am not aware of any town carrying in which we did no work. But many places in which we did our best and heaviest work were singled out for defeat. Bergen county, for instance, had more suffrage organizations than any other county in the state. A commuter county, its women were in close touch with the New York suffrage movement, and in no county did a larger number of able, devoted, representative women work for the amendment. If we felt sure of one county in the state, it was Bergen. And yet it where the party machines put in their work. My explanation is that where we did work conspicuous enough to attract attention, the bipartisan machine sent instructions for our defeat. If your writer could have been with our watchers at some of the Newark polling places on election day, perhaps he would have revised his opinion Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if failed; not in the commuter towns, but in Hackensack, anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first. S. B. R. as to the cause of our defeat. He would have seen the district leader of one of the dominant parties, generally of the Democratic, acting as the anti-watcher, busily combing the district all day to get out every vote against us; electioneering against us at the very door of the polling place, and even inside, although the law says there shall be no soliciting of votes within one hundred feet of the entrance. He would have seen our women watchers repeatedly ordered out of the polls, even threatened with arrest and with bodily ejection, although they were there strictly in accordance with the New Jersey election law, as interpreted and endorsed by the County Board of Elections. In one case our watcher actually saw money passed by the district leader to a voter; but in case of a suit brought, it would be necessary to prove that this money was not passed in pay ment of a debt. It was current talk about this polling place that the amount passed, five dimes, was being paid generally for votes in this district-so cheaply were we held. In many districts just before seven, the closing hour, streams of men poured out of saloons nearby into the polling places. Many of them were partially intoxicated, in some cases so much so that they required and received assistance in marking their ballots, because they were unable to do it themselves. There is no city in the state where such able, effective and long-continued propaganda was carried on as in Newark, and that was where our heavy defeat came. We campaigned Newark ward by ward, with street meetings in the quiet residence neighborhoods, to which we got the people out by strenuous advertising; to wit, dodgers left in every house, and a cowbell loudly rung for blocks around at meeting time. We held the largest mass meetings ever held in Newark, with speakers of national and international fame. For three years past we have spoken before organizations of every sort and kind in Newark. We covered every factory with noon meetings. During the last weeks thousands of men listened to our speakers nightly on the streets. In our headquarters were the signatures of thousands of men who had promised to vote for the amend ment. Our fatal weakness was not in propaganda, but in the organization of our forces on election day. There, indeed, we were children compared with the bipartisan machine. Our women, totally without political experience, could not cope with the machine leaders, trained by years of intensive party organization. It was not a legal holiday, and very few men could leave their work or business during the day to help us. The men very generally watched the count for us in the evening. We implored the legislature when the bill was passed not to put our election day upon a registration day. But they did it, and consequently thousands of men registered and then immediately voted; and there was no way to tell whether those men were legal voters or not. The campaign of the opposition was a joke, so far as propaganda went. They did no street work, they held almost no public meetings, they spoke before few organizations, compared to the suffragists. They depended for their victory upon the smooth, perfect action of the party machines on election day, and this was sufficient. As a matter of fact, the vote we received was the greatest of all tributes to the effectiveness of our propaganda. Only two things got us that vote: the justice of our cause, and the effectiveness of our educational campaign. With no offices to promise, with no franchises or contracts to serve as the rich prizes of success, in the position of a third party with the two dominant parties combined against us, with no votes of our own to cast, we polled more votes than any third party candidate ever polled in this state except Theodore Roosevelt, a national hero. The Socialist party polls 15,000 votes in this state. The Progressives polled 45,000 at the last state election. We polled 132,000. The very effectiveness of our campaign aroused the machines to definite and strenuous action against us. In every section it was the most distinguished and notorious boss who organized the opposition. Sometimes he was of one party, sometimes of the other. We do not claim that we lost the election by fraud. There was apparently fraud, but not enough to change the result. We do absolutely claim, however, that the work of the two old party machines defeated us. It is just as well for suffragists to know this. The suffrage movement has reached the status of a third party, with both the old party organizations to beat in any election. In an ordinary election the Republicans have the Democrats to beat, and vice versa; but we have them both to beat. Third parties in this country have won by slipping in between the two old parties. It was so that Lincoln won the first time. But we cannot slip in between, because they are combined against us. We shall win eventually. A group of inexperienced women who can do what we did against the parties which control the political destinies of the state and nation the first time we tried it, will win eventually. But it means converting enough voters in both parties to overthrow their own machines, and to beat numerically every purchasable element in those machines. It is a big contract; as big as any group of men in this country ever undertook, and I submit that the able publications in this country, like THE NEW REPUBLIC, should understand the real cause of our defeat. And I submit that the men in this country who do not believe in machine rule, who believe that party machines represent the invisible government and oppose the things which that invisible government does not want, should recognize our position, and give us more help than they have done hitherto. MINNIE J. REYNOLDS, Executive Secretary Women's Political Union of New Jersey. Newark, N. J. CORRESPONDENCE No Moral Necessity for War SIR: It is difficult to believe that your editorial, "The Reality of Peace," was not suggested by Mr. Robert Herrick's "Recantation of a Pacifist" and was printed to offset its effect. If indeed we need not "be deceived by the war's reported moral gains," why print such attempted deceptions? Is it a "horrible example" showing how easily an intelligent man succumbs when exposed to the fever, or is it because you believe that civilized men may honestly differ on the fundamental question that this raises? We start out with the proposition that all life is war, but that we are so imaginatively torpid that we do not know it. Admittedly the difference between life in the industrial world and war is one of degree. It appears, however, that war is the only sufficiently shocking and exciting experience to rouse the conscience. This might be so if from any rational point of view war were not so utterly wasteful and unnecessary, and hence the mellowest of melodramas. "It is only the weakling who finds nothing to fight about." "No man-no nation is worthy of life, who is not ready to lay it down at necessity. And some matters are of a primary necessity, unarguable, fundamental." Precisely. Which? Well, one of them in almost any society is public peace. It is the same old devil's favorite, biologic necessity, a poor name for might makes right; for the mailed fist pauses |