United States or Turkey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring. I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man's sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his materialism. "You've been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen said, the following morning at the breakfast-table, "How do things look?"
He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth.
It was a strength I had not possessed a few months before, on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and started for San Francisco on the ill-fated Martinez. As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her hands. I cast off the tackles and leaped after her.
From the galleries they watch the proceedings. They are mighty in committee rooms. They reason with the recalcitrant. They fight opponents in their Congress districts. There are no abler or more potent politicians than the labor leaders out of Congress. Why should rulers like Mr. Gompers and Mr. Furuseth * go to Congress? They are a Super-Congress."
Not that I a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while not accorded conviction. Time passed. Supper was at hand and the table not laid.
I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, "Poor chap!" And I could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good- bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the be- pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and pessimistic epigrams.
* Andrew Furuseth, the president of the Seamen's Union and reputed author of the Seaman's Act of 1915. Many Congressmen have felt the retaliatory power of the Federation. Even such powerful leaders as Congressman Littlefield of Maine and Speaker Cannon were compelled to exert their utmost to overcome union opposition. The Federation has been active in seating union men in Congress.
Brutality I had experienced, but it was the brutality of the intellect the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth, the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my undergraduate days. That was all.
"I have worked, I do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all. "For your living?" There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was quite beside myself "rattled," as Furuseth would have termed it, like a quaking child before a stern school-master.
In the United States, a most interesting character, Andrew Furuseth, a Norwegian, himself a sailor, and without much education but a man of wonderful force, has succeeded, largely by the aid of labor unions, in forcing through Congress bills by which no American seaman can any longer be forced against his will into this servitude nor any foreign seaman on domestic voyages.
Word Of The Day