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The familiar streets, which secretly bore the print of every size shoe he had worn since he was a tiny toddling fellow, made him meditative, almost sad. "It seems ages since I was here!" he remarked. "And yet it's like yesterday. What have I been doing? Dreaming? Will I walk into the printery, and will you come in with the 'Landing of the Pilgrims'?" Myra laughed, both glad and sad.
Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter. Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street their hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow. But his printery was his chief passion.
So the printery was rehabilitated, and one gray morning Joe, with a queer tremor at his heart, went down the street and met many of his men in the doorway. They greeted him with strange, ashamed emotion. "Morning, Mr. Joe.... It's been a long spell.... Good to see the old place again.... Bad weather we're having.... How've you been?"
Even after the presses started up they went on surreptitiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with machine-oil. This heap had been passed by the factory inspector unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod manner, gave it no thought.
There are many things you think wrong about the printery and the printery's head things you would not talk of face to face, as business time is precious and spoken words are sometimes hard to bear. Now this is what I want: Sit down and write what you think in plain English. It will do me good. Suddenly Marty looked at his boss. "Say, Joe." "What is it, Marty?" The big fellow hesitated.
And then there was a last supper of Joe Blaine and his men. Those days followed one another with ever-deepening gloom, in which the trembling printery and all the human beings that were part of it seemed steeped in a growing twilight. Do what Joe would and could in the matter of good-fellowship, loud laughter, and high jocularity, the darkness thickened staggeringly.
But during the last few months a teacher Myra Craig had been coming to the printery to have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected Joe sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had underrated poetry and music.
All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his human humorous self backed by ten years of the printery told him that the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man expected to achieve such marvels.
But Joe did not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new.
"Go 'long wid you! Marty Briggs and me are bad friends, see?" She reveled in this new gaiety of his. "Joe, you're waking up. Please take me!" "Put on your hat, your coat, and your little black gloves, young woman. Me for the printery!" They went out together, glad as young children.
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