Chapter XLV
IN WHICH LIDA BOWMAN CONSIDERS HER UNIVERSE AND TOM VAN DORN WINS ANOTHER VICTORY
For a long and weary night and a day of balancing doubt, and another dull night, little Ben Bowman lay limp and crumpled on his cot--a broken lump of clay hardly more than animate. Lida Bowman, his mother, all that time sat in the hall of the hospital outside the door of his room. The stream of sorrow that winds through a hospital passed before her unheeded. Her husband came, sat with her silently for a while, went, and came again, many times. But she did not go. In the morning of the second day as she stood peering through the door crack at the child she saw his little body move in a deep sigh, and saw his black eyes open for a second and close as he smiled. Dr. Nesbit, who stood beside her, grasped her hand and led her away.
"I think the worst is over, Lida," he said, and held her hand as they walked down the hall. He sat with her in the waiting room, into which the earliest tide of visitors had not begun to flow, and promised her that if the child continued to rally from the shock, she might stand by his bed at noon. Then for the first time she wept. He stood by the window looking out at the great pillars of smoke that were smudging the dawn, at the smelter fumes that were staining the sky, at the hurrying crowd of men and women and children going into the mines, the mills, the shops, hurrying to work with the prod of fear ever in their backs--fear of the disgrace of want, fear of the shame of beggary, fear to hear some loved one ask for food or warmth or shelter and to have it not. When the great motherly body had ceased its paroxysms, he went to Mrs. Bowman and touched her shoulder.
"Lida," he said, "it isn't much--but I'm glad of one thing. My bill is on the statutes to give people who are hurt, as Ben was, their money from the company without going to law and dividing with the lawyers. It is on the books good and tight; referred to the people and approved by them and ground clear through the state supreme court and sustained. It isn't much, Lida--Heaven knows that--but little Ben will get his money without haggling and that money will help to start him in life."
She turned a tear-swollen face to him, but again her grief overcame her. He stood with one wrinkled hand upon her broad shoulder, and with the other patted her coarse hair. When she looked up at him, again he said gently:
"I know, Lida, that money isn't what you mothers want--but--"
"But we've got to think of it, Doc Jim--that's one of the curses of poverty, but, oh, money!--It won't bring them back strong and whole--who leave us to go to work, and come back all torn and mashed."
She sat choking down the sobs that came surging up from her great bosom, and weaving to and fro as she fought back her tears. The Doctor sat beside her and took her red unshapely hands unadorned except by the thin gold wedding ring that she had worn in toil for over thirty years.
"Lida, sometimes I think only God and the doctors know how heavy women's loads are," said the Doctor.
"Ain't that so--Doc Jim!" she cried. "Ain't that the truth? I've had a long time to think these two days and nights--and I've thought it all over and all out. Here I am nearly fifty and eight times you and I have fought it out with death and brought life into this world. I'm strong--I don't mind that. I joyed at their coming, and made the others edge over at the table, and snuggle up in the bed, and we've been happy. Even the three that are dead--I'm glad they came; I'm thankful for 'em. And Dick he's been so proud of each one, and cuddled it, and muched it--"
Her voice broke and she sobbed, "Oh, little Ben--little Ben, how pappy made over his hair--he was born with hair--don't you mind, Doc Jim?"
The Doctor laughed and looked into the past as he piped, "Curliest headed little tyke, and don't you remember Laura gave him Lila's baby things she'd saved for all those years?"
"Yes, Doc Jim--don't I? God knows, Doc, she's been a mother to the whole Valley--when I got up I found I was the twentieth woman up and down the Valley she'd given Lila's little things to--just to save our pride when she thought we would not take 'em any other way. Don't I know--all about it--and she's still doing it--God bless her, and she's been here every morning, noon and night since--since--she came with a little beef tea, or some of her own wine, or a plate of hot toast in her basket--that she made me eat. Why, if it wasn't for her and Henry and Violet and Grant--what would God's poor in this Valley do in trouble--I sure dunno."
There came an unsteady minute, when the Doctor stroked her hand and piped, "Well, Lida--you folks in the Valley don't get half the fun out of it that the others get. It's pie for them."
The woman folded her hands in her lap and sighed deeply. "Doc Jim," she began, "eight times I've brought life into this world. The three that went, went because we were poor--because we couldn't buy life for 'em. They went into the mills and the mines with Dick's muscle. One is at home, waiting till the wheels get hungry for her. Four I've fed into the mills that grind up the meat we mothers make." She stared at him wildly and cried "O God--God, Doc Jim--what justice is there in it? I've been a kind of brood-mare bearing burden carriers for Dan Sands, who has sold my blood like cheese in his market. My mother sent three boys to the war who never came back and I've heard her cry and thank God He'd let her. But my flesh and blood--the little ones that Dick and me have coddled and petted and babied--they've been fed into the wheels to make profits--profits for idlers to squander--profits to lure women to shame and men to death. That's what I've been giving my body and soul for, Doc Jim. Little Ben up there has given his legs and his arms--oh, those soft little arms and the cunning little legs I used to kiss--for what? I'll tell you--he's given them so that by saving a day's work repairing a car, some straw boss could make a showing to a superintendent, and the superintendent could make a record for economy to a president, and a president could increase dividends--dividends to be spent by idlers. And idleness makes drunkards who make harlots who make hell--and all my little boy's arms and legs will go for is for sin and shame."
The Doctor returned to the window and she cried bitterly: "Oh, you know that's the truth--the God's truth, Doc Jim. Where's my Jean? She went into the glass factory--worked twelve hours a day on a job that would have crippled her for life in another year, and then went away with that Austrian blower--and when he threw her out, she was ashamed to write--and for a long time now I've read the city papers of them women who kill themselves--hoping to find she was dead. And Mugs--you know what South Harvey's made of him--"
She rose and walked to the window. Standing beside him she cried:
"I tell you, Doc Jim--I hate it." She pointed to the great black mills and mine shafts and the piles of brick and lumber and sheet iron that stretched before her for a mile. "I hate it, and I'm going to hit it once before I die. Don't talk peace to me. I've got a right to hit it and hit it hard--and if my time ever comes--"
A visitor was shown into the room, and Mrs. Bowman ceased speaking. She was calm when the Doctor left her and at noon she stood beside the cot, and saw little Ben smile at her. Then she went away in tears. As she passed out of the door of the hospital into the street, she met Grant Adams coming in to inquire about little Ben.
"He knows me now," she said. "I suppose he'll get well--without legs--and with only one arm--I've seen them on the street selling pencils--oh, little Ben!" she cried. Then she turned on Grant in anger. "Grant Adams--go on with your revolution. I'm for it--and the quicker the better--but don't come around talking peace to me. Us mothers want to fight."
"Fighting, in the long run, will do no good, Mrs. Bowman," said Grant. "It will hurt the cause.
"But it will do us good," she answered.
"Force against force and we lose--they have the guns," he persisted.
"Well, I'd rather feed my babies to good merciful guns than to wheels," she replied, and then softened as she took his hand.
"I guess I'm mad to-day, Grant. Go on up. Maybe they'll let you look at him. He smiled at me--just as he did when Doctor Nesbit showed him to me the day he was born."
She kept back her tears with an effort, and added, "Only the Doc tried to tell me that babies don't smile. But I know better, Ben smiled--just like the one to-day."
"Well, Mrs. Bowman," rejoined Grant, "there's one comfort. Dr. Nesbit's law makes it possible for you to get your damages without going to law and dividing with some lawyer. However the Doctor and I may differ--we down here in the mines and mills must thank him for that."
"Oh, Doc Jim's all right, Grant," answered Mrs. Bowman, relapsing into her lifetime silence.
It was nearly three months later and spring was at its full, before they discharged little Ben from the hospital. But the last fortnight of his stay they had let him visit outside the hospital for a few hours daily. And to the joy of a great crowd in the Hot Dog saloon, he sat on the bar and sang his little heart out. They took him down to Belgian hall at noon, and he sang the "Marseillaise" to the crowd that gathered there. In the hospital, wherever they would let him, after he had visited the Hot Dog, he sang--sang in the big ward where he sat by a window, sang in the corridors, whenever the patients could hear him, and sang Gospel hymns in his cot at bedtime.
He was an odd little bundle, that Henry Fenn carried into the offices of the Wahoo Valley Fuel Company one afternoon in early June, with Dick Bowman following proudly, as they made the proof of the claim for compensation for the accident. The people in the offices were kind and tenderly polite to the little fellow. Henry saw that all the papers were properly made out, and the clerk in the office told Dick and Henry to call for the check next day but one--which was pay day.
So they carried little Ben away and Mrs. Bowman--though it was barely five o'clock--began fixing Ben up for the wedding of Jasper Adams and Ruth Morton. It was the first public appearance as a singer that little Ben had made in Harvey. His appearance was due largely to the notion of Captain Morton, supported and abetted by George Brotherton. So little Ben Bowman was smuggled behind a palm in the choir loft and permitted to sing "O Promise Me" during the services.
"Not," explained the Captain to Mr. Brotherton in the barn where he was smoking, the afternoon before the ceremony, "not that I cared a whoop in Texas about Ben--though 'y gory, the boy sings like a canary; but it was the only excuse I could find for slipping a hundred dollars to the Bowman family, without making Dick and Lida think it was charity--eh?"
The wedding made a dull evening for Grant. He carried little Ben in his arms out of the crowd at the church, and gathering up the Bowmans and his father, went home without stopping for the reception or for the dance or for any of the subsidiary attractions of the ceremony which Jasper and the Captain, each delighting in tableaux and parades, had arranged for. Little Ben's arm was clinging to Grant's neck as he piloted his party to the street car. They passed the Van Dorn house and saw old Daniel Sands come tottering down the walk from the Van Dorn home, between Ahab Wright and young Joe Calvin. Daniel Sands stumbled as he shuffled past Amos Adams and Amos put out an arm to catch Daniel. He regained his balance and without recognizing who had helped him, cackled:
"Tom's a man of his word, boys--when he promises--that settles it. Tom never lies." And his senile voice shrilled in a laugh. Then the old banker recognized Amos Adams with Grant in the moonlight. "Hi, old spook chaser," he chirped feebly, still holding to Amos Adams's arm; "sorry I couldn't get to my nevvy's wedding--Morty went--Morty's our social man," he laughed again. "But I had some other important matters--business--very important business."
The Sands' party was moving toward the Sands' limousine, which stood purring at the curb. Ahab Wright and young Joe Calvin boosted the trembling old man into the car, and Ahab Wright slipped back and returned to the wedding reception, from which he had stolen away. Ahab was obviously embarrassed at being caught in the conference with Sands and Van Dorn, but Daniel Sands as he climbed into the car, sinking cautiously among the cushions and being swathed in robes by the chauffeur, was garrulous. He kept carping at Amos Adams who stood by with his son and the Bowmans, waiting for the street car.
"Lost your only sane son, Amos," he said. "The fool takes after you, and the fiddler after his mother--but Jap--he's real Sands--he's like me."
He laughed at his joke, and when his breath came back he went on.
"There's Morty--he's like both the fool and the fiddler--both the fool and the fiddler--and not a bit like me."
"Morty isn't very well, Daniel," said Amos Adams, ignoring all that the old man had said. "Don't you think, Daniel, you're letting that disease get too deep a hold on Morty? With all your money, Dan, I think you'd--"
"With all my money--with all my money, Amos," cried the old man, shaking his hands, "with all my money--I can just stand and wait. Amos--he's a fool, I know--but he's the only boy I've got--the only boy. And with all my money--what good will it do me? Anne won't have it--and Morty's all I've got and he's going before I do. Amos--Amos--tell me, Amos--what have I done to deserve this of God? Haven't I done as I ort? Why is this put on me?" He sat panting and blinking and shaking his ever-denying, palsied head. Amos did not reply. The chauffeur was taking his seat in the car. "Ain't I paid my share in the church? Ain't I give parks to the city? Ain't I had family prayers for fifty years? Ain't I been a praying member all my life nearly? Ain't I supported missions? Why," he panted, "is it put on me to die without a son to bear my name and take care of my property? I made over two millions to him the other day. But why, Amos," the old man's voice was broken and he whimpered, "has the Lord sent this to Morty?"
Amos did not reply, but the big voice of Grant spoke very softly: "Uncle Dan, Morty's got tuberculosis--you know that. Tuberculosis has made you twenty per cent. interest for twenty years--those hothouses for consumption of yours in the Valley. But it's cost the poor scores and scores of lives. Morty has it." Grant's voice rose solemnly. "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord, I will repay. You've got your interest, and the Lord has taken his toll."
The old man showed his colorless gums as he opened a raging mouth.
"You--you--eh, you blasphemer!" He shook as with a chill and screamed, "But we've got you now--we'll fix you!"
The car for Harvey came, and the Adamses climbed in.
Amos Adams, sitting on the hard seat of the street car looking into the moonlight, considered seriously his brother-in-law, and his low estate. That he had to be helped into his limousine, that he had to be wrapped up like a baby, that his head was palsied and his hands fluttering, seemed strange and rather inexplicable to Amos. He counted Daniel a young man, four years his junior, barely seventy-nine; a man who should be in his prime. Amos did not realize that his legs had been kept supple by climbing on and off a high printer's stool hourly for fifty years, and that his body had buffeted the winds of the world unprotected all those years and had kept fit. But Daniel Sands's sad case seemed pathetic to the elder Adams and he cut into some rising stream of conversation from Grant and the Bowmans inadvertently with: "Poor Daniel--Morty doomed, and Daniel himself looking like the breaking up of a hard winter--poor Daniel! He doesn't seem to have got the hang of things in this world; he can't seem to get on some way. I'm sorry for Daniel, Grant; he might have made quite a man if he'd not been fooled by money."
Clearly Amos was meditating aloud; no one replied and the talk flowed on. But the old man looked into the moonlight and dreamed dreams.
The next day was Grant's day at his carpenter's bench, and when he came to his office with his kit in his hands at five o'clock in the afternoon, he found Violet Hogan waiting with the letters he was to sign, and with the mail opened and sorted. As he was signing his letters Violet gave him the news of the day:
"Dick Bowman ran in at noon and asked me to see if I could get Dr. Nesbit and George Brotherton and Henry Fenn down here this evening to talk over his investment of little Ben's money. The check will come to-morrow." Grant looked up from his desk, but before he could ask a question Violet answered: "They'll be down at eight. The Doctor is that proud! And Mr. Brotherton is cutting lodge--the Shriners, themselves--to come down."
It was a grave and solemn council that sat by Grant Adams's desk that evening discussing the disposal of little Ben's five thousand. Excepting Mr. Brotherton, no one there had ever handled that much money at one time. For though the Doctor was a man of affairs the money he handled in politics came easy and went easy, and the money he earned Mrs. Nesbit always had invested for him. So he and Lida Bowman sat rather apart while Dick and Brotherton considered the safety of bonds and mortgages and time deposits and other staple methods of investing the vast sum which was about to be paid to them for Ben's accident. They also considered plans for his education--whether he should learn telegraphy or should cultivate his voice, or go to college or what not. In this part of the council the Doctor took a hand. But Lida Bowman kept her wonted silence. The money could not take the bitterness from her loss; though it did relieve her despair. While they talked, as a mere incident of the conversation, some one spoke of having seen Joe Calvin come down to the Wahoo Fuel Company's offices that day in his automobile. Doctor Nesbit recalled having seen Calvin conferring with Tom Van Dorn and Daniel Sands in Van Dorn's office that afternoon. Then Dick Bowman craning his neck asked for the third time when Henry Fenn would show up; and for the third time it was explained that Henry had taken the Hogan children to the High School building in Harvey to behold the spectacle of Janice Hogan graduating from the eighth grade into the High School. Then Dick explained:
"Well, I just thought Henry would know about this paper I got to-day from the constable. It's a legal document, and probably has something to do with getting Benny's money or something. I couldn't make it out so I thought I'd just let Henry figure on it and tell me what to do." And when a few minutes later Fenn came in, with a sense of duty to the Hogans well done, Dick handed Fenn the paper and asked with all the assurance of a man who expects the reassurance of an affirmative answer:
"Well, Henry--she's all right, ain't she? Just some legal formality to go through, I suppose?"
Henry Fenn took the document from Bowman's hand. Henry stood under the electric, read it and sat thinking for a few seconds, with widely furious eyes.
"Well," he said, "they've played their trump, boys. Doc Jim--your law's been attacked in the federal court--under Tom Van Dorn--damn him!"
The group barked a common question in many voices. Fenn replied: "As I make it out, they got a New York stockholder of the Wahoo Valley Fuel Company to ask for an injunction against paying little Ben his money to-morrow, and the temporary injunction has been granted with the hearing set for June 16."
"And won't they pay us without a suit?" asked Bowman. "Why, I don't see how that can be--they've been paying for accidents for a year now."
"Why, the law's through all the courts!" queried Brotherton.
"The state courts--yes," answered Fenn, "but they didn't own the federal court until they got Tom in."
Bowman's jaw began to tremble. His Adam's apple bobbed like a cork, and no one spoke. Finally Dr. Nesbit spoke in his high-keyed voice: "I presume legal verbiage is all they talk in hell!" and sat pondering.
"Is there no way to beat it?" asked Brotherton.
"Not in this court, George," replied Fenn, "that's why they brought suit in this court."
"That means a long fight--a big law suit, Henry?" asked Bowman.
"Unless they compromise or wear you out," replied the lawyer.
"And can't a jury decide?"
"No--it's an injunction. It's up to the court, and the court is Tom Van Dorn," said Fenn.
Then Dick Bowman spoke: "And there goes little Ben's school and a chance to make something out of what's left of him. Why, it don't look right when the legislature's passed it, and the people's confirmed it and nine lawyers in all the state courts have said it's law,--for the attorney for the company holding a job as judge to turn over all them forms of law. Can't we do something?"
"Yes," spoke the big voice of Grant Adams for the first time since Fenn made his announcement, "we can strike--that's one thing we can do. Why," he continued, full of emotion, "I could no more hold those men down there against a strike when they hear this than I could fly. They'll have to fight for this right, gentlemen!"
"Be calm now, Grant," piped the Doctor; "don't go off half cocked."
Grant's eyes flared--his nose dilated and the muscles of his heavy jaw worked and knotted. He answered in a harsh voice:
"Oh, I'll be calm all right, Doctor. I'm going down in the morning and plead for peace. But I know my people. I can't hold 'em."
Those in the room stood for a moment in dazed silence; then the Doctor and Brotherton, realizing the importance of further discussion that night, soon withdrew from the room, leaving Dick voluble in his grief and Lida, his wife, stony and speechless beside him. She shook no sympathizing hand, not even Grant's, as the Bowmans left for home. But she climbed out of the chair and down the stairs on tired, heavy feet.
In the morning there was turmoil in the Valley. In the Times Jared Thurston, with the fatuous blundering which characterizes all editors of papers like his, printed the news that little Ben Bowman would be denied his rights, as a glorious victory over the reformers. In an editorial, written in old Joe Calvin's best style, the community was congratulated upon having one judge at last who would put an end to the socialistic foolishness that had been written by demagogues on the state statute books, and hinting rather broadly that the social labor program adopted by the people at the last election through the direct vote would go the way of the fool statute under which the Bowman lad hoped to cheat the courts of due process of law.
In vain did Grant Adams try to rally carpenters to the trocha. He pleaded with the men to raise a special fund to take little Ben's case through the federal courts; but he failed.
The Wahoo Valley saw in the case of little Ben Bowman the drama of greed throttling poverty, all set forth in stark, grim terms that no one could question. The story appealed directly to the passions of the Valley and the Valley's voice rose in the demand to resort to its last weapon of defense. The workers felt that they must strike or forfeit their self-respect. And day by day the Times, gloating at the coming downfall in Van Dorn's program of labor-repression, threw oil on the flaming passions of the Valley, so labor raged and went white hot. The council of the Wahoo Valley Trades Workers came together to vote on the strike. Every unit of seven was asked to meet and vote. Grant sat in his office with the executive committee a day and a night counting the slowly returning votes. Grant had influence enough to make them declare emphatically for a peaceful strike. But the voice of the Valley was for a strike. The spring was at its full. The little garden plots were blooming. The men felt confident. A conference of the officials of the council was called to formulate the demands. Grant managed to put off the strike until the hearing on the temporary injunction, June 16, was held. But the men drew up their demands and were ready for the court decision which they felt would be finally against them.
The Wahoo Valley was stirred deeply by the premonitions of the coming strike. It was proud of its record for industrial peace, and the prospect of war in the Valley overturned all its traditions.
Market Street had its profound reaction, too. Market Street and the Valley, each in its own way, felt the dreaded turmoil coming, knew what commercial disaster the struggle meant, but Market Street was timid and powerless and panic-stricken. Yet life went on. In the Valley there were births and deaths and marriages, and on the hill in Harvey, Mrs. Bedelia Nesbit was working out her plans to make over the Nesbit house, while Lila, her granddaughter, was fluttering about in the seventh Heaven, for she was living under the same sky and sun and stars that bent over Kenyon, her lover, home from Boston for the Morton-Adams wedding. He might be hailed as a passing ship once or twice a day, if she managed to time her visits to Market Street properly, or he might be seen from the east veranda of her home at the proper hour, and there was a throb of joy that blotted out all the rest of the pale world. There was one time; two times indeed they were, and a hope of a third, when slipping out from under the shadow of her grandmother's belligerent plumes, Lila had known the actual fleeting touch of hands; the actual feasting of eyes and the quick rapture of meeting lips at a tryst. And when Mrs. Nesbit left for Minneapolis to consult an architect, and to be gone two weeks--Harvey and the Valley and the strike slipped so far below the sky-line of the two lovers that they were scarcely aware that such things were in the universe.
Kenyon could not see even the grim cast of decision mantling Grant's face. Day by day, while the votes assembled which ordered the strike, the deep abiding purpose of Grant Adams's soul rose and stood ready to master him. He and the men seemed to be coming to their decision together. As the votes indicated by a growing majority their determination, in a score of ways Grant made it evident to those about him, that for him time had fruited; the day was ready and the hour at hand for his life plans to unfold. Those nearest him knew that the season of debate for Grant Adams had passed. He was like one whose sails of destiny are set and who longs to put out into the deep and let down his nets. So he passed the long days impatiently until the hearing of the injunction in little Ben's suit arrived, and every day burned some heavier line into his face that recorded the presence of the quenchless fire of purpose in his heart.
A smiling, affable man was Judge Thomas Van Dorn in his court the morning of June 16. He had his ticket bought for Chicago and a seat in the great convention of his party assured. He walked through the court room, rather dapperly. He put his high silk hat on the bench beside him, by way of adding a certain air of easy informality to the proceedings. His red necktie brought out every thin wrinkle in his burnished brown face and upon the pink brow threaded by a chain lightning of a scar. The old mushy, emotional voice of his youth and maturity had thickened, and he talked loudly. He listened to arguments of counsel. Young Joe Calvin, representing the Fuel Company, was particularly eloquent. Henry Fenn knew that his case was hopeless, but made such reply as he could.
"Well," cut in the court before Fenn was off his feet at the close of his argument, "there's nothing to your contention. The court is familiar with those cases, cited by counsel. Either the constitution means what it says or it doesn't. This court is willing to subscribe to a fund to pay this Bowman child a just compensation. This is a case for charity and the company is always generous in its benevolence. The Socialists may have the state courts, and the people are doubtless crazy--but this court will uphold the constitution. The injunction is made permanent. The court stands adjourned."
The crowd of laborers in the court room laughed in the Judge's face. They followed Grant Adams, who with head bowed in thought walked slowly to the street car. "Well, fellows," said Grant, "here's the end. As it stands now, the law considers steel and iron in machinery more sacred than flesh and blood. The court would have allowed them to appropriate money for machines without due process of law; but it enjoins them from appropriating money for flesh and blood." He was talking to the members of the Valley Labor Council as they stood waiting for a car. "We may as well miss a car and present our demands to the Calvins. The sooner we get this thing moving, the better."
Ten minutes later the Council walked into the office of Calvin and Calvin. There sat Joseph Calvin, the elder, a ratty little man still, with a thin stringy neck and with a bald head. His small, mousy eyes blinked at the workmen. He was exceedingly polite. He admitted that he was attorney for the owners' association in the Valley, that he could if he chose speak for them in any negotiations they might desire to make with their employees, but that he was authorized to say that the owners were not ready to consider or even to receive any communication from the men upon any subject--except as individual employees might desire to confer with superintendents or foremen in the various mines and mills.
So they walked out. At labor headquarters in South Harvey, Nathan Perry came sauntering in.
"Well, boys--let's have your agreement--I think I know what it is. We're ready to sign."
In an hour men were carrying out posters to be distributed throughout the Valley, signed by Grant Adams, chairman of the Wahoo Valley Trades Workers' Council. It read:
STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE
The managers of our mines and mills in the Wahoo Valley have refused to confer with representatives of the workers about an important matter. Therefore we order a general strike of all workers in the mines and mills in this District. Workers before leaving will see that their machines are carefully oiled, covered, and prepared to rest without injury. For we claim partnership interest in them, and should protect them and all our property in the mines and mills in this Valley. During this strike, we pledge ourselves.
To orderly conduct.
To keep out of the saloons.
To protect our property in the mines and mills.
To use our influence to restrain all violence of speech or conduct. And we make the following demands:
First. That prices of commodities turned out in this district shall not be increased to the public as a result of concessions to us in this strike, and to that end we demand.
Second. That we be allowed to have a representative in the offices of all concerns interested, said representative to have access to all books and accounts, guaranteeing to labor such increases in wages as shall be evidently just, allowing 8 per cent. dividends on stock, the payment of interest on bonds, and such sums for upkeep, maintenance, and repairs as shall not include the creation of a surplus or fund for extensions.
Third, we demand that the companies concerned shall obey all laws enacted by the state or nation to improve conditions of industry until such laws have been passed upon by the supreme courts of the state and of the United States.
Fourth, we demand that all negotiations between the employers and the workers arising out of the demands shall be conducted on behalf of the workers by the Trades Workers' Council of the Wahoo Valley or their accredited representatives.
During this strike we promise to the public righteous peace; after the strike we promise to the managers of the mines and mills efficient labor, and to the workers always justice.
STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE
At two o'clock that June afternoon the whistle of the big engine in the smelter in South Harvey, the whistle in the glass factory at Magnus, and the siren in the cement mill at Foley blew, and gradually the wheels stopped, the machines were covered, the fires drawn, the engines wiped and covered with oil, and the men marched out of all the mills and mines and shops in the district. There was no uproar, no rioting, but in an hour all the garden patches in the Valley were black with men. The big strike of the Wahoo Valley was on.
Chapter XLVI
WHEREIN GRANT ADAMS PREACHES PEACE AND LIDA BOWMAN SPEAKS HER MIND
A war, being an acute stage of discussion about the ownership of property, is a war even though "the lead striker calls it a strike," and even though he proposes to conduct the acute stage of the discussion on high moral grounds. The gentleman who is being relieved of what he considers at the moment his property, has no notion of giving it up without a struggle, no matter how courteously he is addressed, nor upon what exalted grounds the discussion is ranging. It is a world-old mistake of the Have-nots to discount the value which the Haves put upon their property. The Have-nots, generally speaking, hold the property under discussion in low esteem. They have not had the property in question. They don't know what a good thing it is--except in theory. But the Haves have had the property and they will fight for it, displaying a degree of feeling that always surprises the Have-nots, and naturally weakens their regard for the high motives and disinterested citizenship of the Haves.
Now Grant Adams in the great strike in the Wahoo Valley was making the world-old mistake. He was relying upon the moral force of his argument to separate the Haves from their property. He had cared little for the property. The poor never care much for property--otherwise they would not be poor. So Grant and his followers in the Valley--and all over the world for that matter,--(for they are of the great cult who believe in a more equitable distribution of property, through a restatement of the actual values of various servants to society), went into their demands for partnership rights in the industrial property around them, in a sublime and beautiful but untenable faith that the righteousness of their cause would win it. The afternoon when the men walked out of the mines and mills and shops, placards covered the dead walls of the Valley and the hired billboards in Harvey setting forth the claims of the men. They bought and paid for twenty thousand copies of Amos Adams's Tribune, and distributed it in every home in the district, setting forth their reasons for striking. Great posters were spread over the town and in the Valley declaring "the rule of this strike is to be square, and to be square means that the strikers will do as they would be done by. There will be no violence."
Now it would seem that coming to the discussion with these obviously high motives, and such fair promises, the strikers would have been met by similarly altruistic methods. But instead, the next morning at half past six, when a thousand strikers appeared bearing large white badges inscribed with the words, "We stand for peace and law and order," and when the strikers appeared before the entrance to the shaft houses and the gates and doors of the smelters and mills, to beg men and women not to fill the vacant places at the mills and mines, the white-badged brigade was met with five hundred policemen who rudely ordered the strikers to move on.
The Haves were exhibiting feeling in the matter. But the mines and mills did not open; not enough strike-breakers appeared. So that afternoon, a great procession of white-badged men and white-clad women and children, formed in South Harvey, and, headed by the Foley Brass Band, marched through Market Street and for five miles through the streets of Harvey singing. Upon a platform carried by eight white-clad mothers, sat little Ben Bowman swathed in white, waving a white flag in his hand, and leading the singing. Over the chair on which he sat were these words on a great banner. "For his legal rights and for all such as he we demand that the law be enforced."
For two hours the procession wormed through Harvey. The streets were crowded to watch it. It made its impression on the town. The elder Calvin watched it with Mayor Ahab Wright, in festal side whiskers, from the office of Calvin & Calvin. Young Joe Calvin from time to time came and looked over their shoulders. But he was for the most part too busily engaged, making out commissions for deputy sheriffs and extra policemen, to watch the parade. As the parade came back headed for South Harvey, the ear of the young man caught a familiar tune. He watched Ahab Wright and his father to see if they recognized it. The placid face of the Mayor betrayed no more consciousness of the air than did his immaculate white necktie. The elder Calvin's face showed no appreciative wrinkles. The band passed down the street roaring the battle hymn of labor that has become so familiar all over the world. The great procession paused uncovered in the street, while Little Ben waved his flag and raised his clear, boyish voice with its clarion note and sang, as the procession waved back. And at the spectacle of the crippled child, waving his one little arm, and lifting his voice in a lusty strain, the sidewalk crowd cheered and those who knew the tune joined.
Young Joe Calvin stood with his hands on the shoulders of the two sitting men. "Mr. Mayor, do you know that tune?" said Young Joe.
Mr. Mayor, whose only secular tune was "Yankee Doodle," confessed his ignorance. "Listen to the words," suggested Young Joe. Old Joe put his hand to his right ear. Ahab Wright leaned forward, and the words of the old, old cry of the Reds of the Midi came surging up:
"To arms! to arms!--ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe! March on! March on! all hearts resolved On victory or death."
When Ahab Wright caught the words he was open mouthed with astonishment. "Why--why," he cried, "that--why, that is sedition. They're advocating murder!"
Young Joe Calvin's face did not betray him, and he nodded a warning head. Old Joe looked the genuine consternation which he felt.
"We can't have this, Ahab--this won't do--a few days of this and we'll have bloodshed."
It did not occur to Ahab Wright that he had been singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and "I Am a Soldier of the Cross," and "I'll Be Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," all of his pious life, without ever meaning anything particularly sanguinary. He heard the war song of the revolution, and being a literal and peth-headed man, prepared to defend the flag with all the ardor that had burned in John Kollander's heart for fifty years.
"I tell you, Mr. Mayor, we need the troops. The Sheriff agrees with me--now you hear that," said young Joe. "Will you wait until some one is killed or worse, until a mine is flooded, before sending for them?"
"You know, Ahab," put in old Joe, "the Governor said on the phone this morning, not to let this situation get away from you."
The crowd was joining the singing. The words--the inspiring words of the labor chant had caught the people on the sidewalk, and a great diapason was rising:
"March on! March on!--all hearts resolved On victory or death."
"Hear that--hear that, Ahab!" cried old Joe. "Why, the decent people up town here are going crazy--they're all singing it--and that little devil is waving a red flag with the white one!"
Ahab Wright looked and was aghast. "Doesn't that mean rebellion--anarchy--and bloodshed?" he gasped.
"It means socialism," quoth young Joe, laconically, "which is the same thing."
"Well, well! my! my! Dear me," fretted Ahab, "we mustn't let this go on."
"Shall I get the Governor on the phone--you know we have the Sheriff's order here--just waiting for you to join him?" asked young Joe.
The Haves were moving the realm of the discussion about their property from pure reason to the baser emotions.
"Look, look!" cried the Mayor. "Grant Adams is standing on that platform--and those women have to hold him up--it's shameful. Listen!"
"I want to say to my old neighbors and friends here in Harvey," cried Grant, "that in this strike we shall try with all our might, with all our hearts' best endeavors, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Our property in the mines and mills in this Valley, we shall protect, just as sacredly as our partners on Wall Street would protect it. It is our property--we are the legatees of the laborers who have piled it up. You men of Harvey know that these mines represent little new capital. They were dug with the profits from the first few shafts. The smelters rose from the profits of the first smelters in the district. Where capital has builded with fresh investment--we make no specific claim, but where capital has builded here in this district from profits made in the district--profits made by reason of cheating the crippled and the killed, profits made by long deadly hours of labor, profits made by cooking men's lungs on the slag dump, profits made by choking men to death, unrequited, in cement dust, profits sweated out of the men at the glass furnaces--where capital has appropriated unjustly, we expect to appropriate justly. We shall take nothing that we do not own. This is the beginning of the rise of the Democracy of Labor--the dawn of the new day." He waved his arm and his steel claw and chanted:
"March on!--March on!--all hearts resolved,"
And in a wave of song the response came
"To victory or death."
Grant Adams flaunted his black slouch hat; then he sprang from the platform, and hurried to the front of the procession. The band struck up a lively tune and the long trail of white-clad women and white-badged men became animate.
"Well, Ahab--you heard that? That is rebellion," said old Joe, squinting his mole-like eyes. "What are you going to do about that--as the chief priest of law and order in this community?"
Five minutes later Ahab Wright, greatly impressed with the dignity of his position, and with the fact that he was talking to so superior a person as a governor, was saying:
"Yes, your excellency--yes, I wanted to tell you of our conditions here in the Valley. It's serious--quite serious." To the Governor's question the Mayor replied:
"No--no--not yet, but we want to prevent it. This man Adams--Grant Adams, you've heard about him--"
And then an instant later he continued, "Yes--that's the man, Governor--Dr. Nesbit's friend. Well, this man Adams has no respect for authority, nor for property rights, and he's stirring up the people."
Young Joe Calvin winked at his father and said during the pause,
"That's the stuff--the old man's coming across like a top."
Ahab went on: "Exactly--'false and seditious doctrines,' and I'm afraid, Governor, that it will be wise to send us some troops."
The Calvins exchanged approving nods, and young Joe, having the enthusiasm of youth in his blood, beat his desk in joyous approval of the trend of events.
"Oh, I don't know as to that," continued Ahab, answering the Governor. "We have about four thousand men--perhaps a few more out. You know how many troops can handle them."
"Tell him we'll quarter them in the various plants, Ahab," cut in old Joe, and Ahab nodded as he listened.
"Well, don't wait for the tents," he said. "Our people will quarter the men in the buildings in the centers of the disturbance. Our merchants can supply your quartermaster with everything. We have about a thousand policemen and deputy sheriffs--"
While the Mayor was listening to the Governor, Calvin senior said to his son, "Probably we'd better punch him up with that promise about the provo marshal," and young Joe interrupted:
"And, Mr. Mayor, don't forget to remind him of the promise he made to Tom Van Dorn,--about me."
Ahab nodded and listened. "Wait," he said, putting his hand over the telephone receiver, and added in a low voice to those in the room: "He was just talking about that and thinks he will not proclaim martial law until there is actual violence--which he feels will follow the coming of the troops, when the men see he is determined. He said then that he expected Captain Calvin of the Harvey Company to take charge, and the Governor will speak to the other officers about it." Ahab paused a moment for further orders. "Well," said the elder Calvin, "I believe that's all."
"Will there be anything else to-day, Joe?" asked Ahab, unconsciously assuming his counter manner to young Joe Calvin, who replied without a smile:
"Well--no--not to-day, thank you," and Ahab went back to the Governor and ended the parley.
The Times the next morning with flaring headlines announced that the Governor had decided to send troops to the Wahoo Valley to protect the property in the mines and mills for the rightful owners and to prevent any further incendiary speaking and rioting such as had disgraced Market Street the day before. In an editorial the Governor was advised to proclaim martial law, as only the strictest repression would prevent the rise of anarchy and open rebellion to the authorities.
The troops came on the early morning trains, and filed into the sheds occupied by the workmen before the strike. The young militiamen immediately began pervading South Harvey, Foley and Magnus, and when the strikers lined up before the gates and doors of their former working places at seven o'clock that morning they met a brown line of youths--devil-may-care young fellows out for a lark, who liked to prod the workmen with their bayonets and who laughingly ordered the strikers to stop trying to keep the strike-breakers from going to work. The strikers were bound by their pledges to the Trades Council not to touch the strike-breakers under any circumstances. The strikers--white-badged and earnest-faced--made their campaign by lining up five on each side of a walk or path through which the strike-breakers would have to pass to their work, and crying:
"Help us, and we'll help you. Don't scab on us--keep out of the works, and we'll see that you are provided for. Join us--don't turn your backs on your fellow workers."
They would stretch out their arms in mute appeal when words failed, and they brought dozens of strike-breakers away from their work. And on the second morning of the strike not a wheel turned in the district.
All morning Grant Adams moved among the men. He was a marked figure--with his steel claw--and he realized that he was regarded by the militiamen as an ogre. A young militiaman had hurt a boy in Magnus--pricked him in the leg and cut an artery. Grant tried to see the Colonel of the company to protest. But the soldier had been to the officer with his story, and Grant was told that the boy attacked the militiaman--which, considering that the boy was a child in his early teens and the man was armed and in his twenties, was unlikely. But Grant saw that his protests would not avail. He issued a statement, gave it to the press correspondents who came flocking in with the troops, and sent it to the Governor, who naturally transferred it back to the militiamen.
In the afternoon the parade started again--the women and children in white, and the men in white coats and white working caps. It formed on a common between Harvey and South Harvey, and instead of going into Harvey turned down into the Valley where it marched silently around the quiet mills and shafts and to the few tenements where the strike-breakers were lodged. A number of them were sitting at the windows and on the steps and when the strikers saw the men in the tenements, they raised their arms in mute appeal, but spoke no word. Down the Valley the procession hurried and in every town repeated this performance. The troops had gathered in Harvey and were waiting, and it was not until after three o'clock that they started after the strikers. A troop of cavalry overtook the column in Foley, and rode through the line a few times, but no one spoke, and the cavalrymen rode along the line but did not try to break it. So the third day passed without a fire in a furnace in the district.
That night Grant Adams addressed the strikers in Belgian Hall in South Harvey, in Fraternity Hall in Magnus and on a common in Foley. The burden of his message was this: "Stick--stick to the strike and to our method. If we can demonstrate the fact that we have the brains to organize, to abandon force, to maintain ourselves financially, to put our cause before our fellow workers so clearly that they will join us--we can win, we can enter into the partnership in these mills that is ours by right. The Democracy of Labor is a Democracy of Peace--only in peace, only by using the higher arts of peace under great provocation may we establish that Democracy and come into our own. Stick--stick--stick to the strike and stick to the ways of peace. Let them rally to their Colonels and their tin soldiers--and we shall not fear--for we are gathered about the Prince of Peace."
The workmen always rose to this appeal and in Foley where the Letts had worked in the slag-dump, one of them, who did not quite understand the association of words implied by the term the Prince of Peace, cried:
"Hurrah for Grant, he is the Prince of Peace," and the good natured crowd laughed and cheered the man's mistake.
But the Times the next morning contained this head:
"Shame on Grant Adams, Trying to Inflame Ignorant Foreigners. Declares he is the Prince of Peace and gets Applause from his Excited Dupes--Will he Claim to be Messiah?"
It was a good story--from a purely sensational viewpoint, and it was telegraphed over the country, that Grant Adams, the labor leader, was claiming to be a messiah and was rallying foreigners to him by supernatural powers. The Times contained a vicious editorial calling on all good citizens to stamp out the blasphemous cult that Adams was propagating. The editorial said that the authorities should not allow such a man to speak on the streets maintained by tax-payers, and that with the traitorous promises of ownership of the mines and mills backing up such a campaign, rebellion would soon be stalking the street and bloodshed such as had not been seen in America for a generation would follow. The names which the Times called Grant Adams indicated so much malice, that Grant felt encouraged, and believed he had the strike won, if he could keep down violence. So triumph flambeaued itself on his face. For two peaceful days had passed. And peace was his signal of victory.
But during the night a trainload of strike-breakers came from Chicago. They were quartered in the railroad yards, and Grant ordered a thousand pickets out to meet the men at daybreak. Grant called out the groups of seven and each lodging house, tenement and car on the railroad siding was parceled out to a group. Moreover, Grant threw his army into action by ordering twenty groups into Sands Park, through which the strike-breaking smelter men would pass after the pickets had spoken to the strike-breakers in their door yards. Lining the park paths, men stood in the early morning begging working men not to go into the places made vacant by the strike. In addition to this, he posted other groups of strikers to stand near the gates and doors of the working places, begging the strike-breakers to join the strikers.
Grant Adams, in his office, was the motive power of the strike. By telephone his power was transferred all over the district. Violet Hogan and Henry Fenn were with him. Two telephones began buzzing as the first strikers went into Sands Park. Fenn, sitting by Grant, picked up the first transmitter; Violet took the other. She took the message in shorthand. Fenn translated a running jargon between breaths.
"Police down in Foley--Clubbing the Letts.--No bloodshed.--They are running back to their gardens."
"Tell the French to take their places," said Grant--"There are four French sevens--tell him to get them out right away--but not to fight the cops. Militia there?"
"No," answered Fenn, "they are guarding the mill doors, and this happened in the streets near the lodging houses."
"Mr. Adams," said Violet, reading, "there's some kind of a row in Sands Park. The cavalry is there and Ira Dooley says to tell you to clear out the Park or there will be trouble."
"Get the boys on the phone, Violet, and tell them I said leave the Park, then, and go to the shaft houses in Magnus--but to march in silence--understand?"
Fenn picked up the transmitter again, "What's that--what's that--" he cried. Then he mumbled on, "He says the cops have ax-handles and that down by the smelters they are whacking our people right and left--Three in an ambulance?--The Slavs won't take it? Cop badly hurt?" asked Fenn.
Grant Adams groaned, and put his head in his hand, and leaned on the desk. He rose up suddenly with a flaming face and said: "I'm going down there--I can stop it."
He bolted from the room and rattled down the stairs. In a minute he came running up. "Violet--" he called to the woman who was busy at the telephone--"shut that man off and order a car for me quick--they've stolen my crank and cut every one of my tires. For God's sake be quick--I must get down to those Slavs."
In a moment Violet had shut off her interviewer, and was calling the South Harvey Garage. Henry Fenn, busy with his phone, looked up with a drawn face and cried:
"Grant--the Cossacks--the Cossacks are riding down those little Italians in Sands Park--chasing them like dogs from the paths--they say the cavalry is using whips!"
Grant stood with bowed head and arched shoulders listening. The muscles of his jaw contracted, and he snapped his teeth.
"Any one hurt?" he asked. Fenn, with the receiver to his ear went on, "The Dagoes are not fighting back--the cavalrymen are shooting in the air, but--the lines are broken--the scabs are marching to the mines through a line of soldiers--we've stopped about a third from the cars--they are forming at the upper end of the Park--our men, they--"
"Good-by," shouted Grant, as he heard a motor car whirring in the distance.
Turning out of the street he saw a line of soldiers blocking his way. He had the driver turn, and at the next corner found himself blocked in. Once more he tried, and again found himself fenced in. He jumped from the car, and ran, head down, toward the line of young fellows in khaki blocking the street. As he came up to them he straightened up, and, striking with his hook a terrific blow, the bayonet that would have stopped him, Grant caught the youth's coat in the steel claw, whirled him about and was gone in a second.
He ran through alleys and across commons until he caught a street car for the smelters. Here he heard the roar of the riot. He saw the new ax-handles of the policemen beating the air, and occasionally thudding on a man's back or head. The Slavs were crying and throwing clods and stones. Grant ran up and bellowed in his great voice:
"Quit it--break away--there, you men. Let the cops alone. Do you want to lose this strike?"
A policeman put his hand on Grant's shoulder to arrest him. Grant brushed him aside.
"Break away there, boys," he called. The Slavs were standing staring at him. Several bloody faces testified to the effectiveness of the ax-handles.
"Stand back--stand back. Get to your lines," he called, glaring at them. They fell under his spell and obeyed. When they were quiet he walked over to them, and said gently:
"It's all right, boys--grin and bear it. We'll win. You couldn't help it--I couldn't either." He smiled. "But try--try next time." The strike-breakers were huddled back of the policemen.
"Men," he shouted to the strike-breakers over the heads of the policemen, "this strike is yours as well as ours. We have money to keep you, if you will join us. Come with us--comrades--Oh, comrades, stand with us in this fight! Go in there and they'll enslave you--they'll butcher you and kill you and offer you a lawsuit for your blood. We offer you justice, if we win. Come, come," he cried, "fellow workers--comrades, help us to have peace."
The policemen formed a line into the door of the shaft house. The strike-breakers hesitated. Grant approached the line of policemen, put up his arm and his maimed hand, lifted his rough, broken face skyward and cried, "O--O--O, God, pour Thy peace into their hearts that they may have mercy on their comrades."
A silence fell, the strike-breakers began to pass through the police lines to join the strikers. At first only one at a time, then two. And then, the line broke and streamed around the policemen. A great cheer went up from the street, and Grant Adams's face twitched and his eyes filled with tears. Then he hurried away.
It was eight o'clock and the picketing for the day was done, when Grant reached his office.
"Well," said Fenn, who had Violet's notes before him, "it's considerably better than a dog fall. They haven't a smelter at work. Two shafts are working with about a third of a force, and we feel they are bluffing. The glass works furnaces are cold. The cement mills are dead. They beat up the Italians pretty badly over in the Park."
The Times issued a noon extra to tell of the incident in front of the smelter, and expatiated upon the Messianic myth. A tirade against Grant Adams in black-faced type three columns wide occupied the center of the first page of the extra, and in Harvey people began to believe that he was the "Mad Mullah" that the Times said he was.
When Dr. Nesbit drove his electric home that noon, he found his daughter waiting for him. She stood on the front porch, with a small valise beside her. She was dressed in white and her youthful skin, fresh lips, glowing eyes and heightened color made her seem younger than the woman of forty that she was. Her father saw in her face the burning purpose to serve which had come to indicate her moments of decision. The Doctor had grown used to that look of decision and he knew that it was in some way related to South Harvey and the strike. For during her years of work in the Valley, its interests had grown to dominate her life. But the Valley and its interests had unfolded her soul to its widest reach, to its profoundest depths. And in her features were blazoned, at times, all the love and joy and strength that her life had gathered. These were the times when she wore what her father called "the Valley look." She had "the Valley look" in her face that day when she stood waiting for her father with the valise beside her--a beautiful woman.
"Father--now don't stop me, dear. I'm going to Grant. Mother will be home in a few days. I've told Lila to stay with Martha Morton when you are not here. It's always secure and tranquil up here, you know. But I'm going down in the Valley. I'm going to the strike."
"Going to the strike?" repeated her father.
"Yes," she answered, turning her earnest eyes upon him as she spoke. "It's the first duty I have on earth--to be with my people in this crisis. All these years they have borne me up; have renewed my faith; they have given me courage. Now is my turn, father. Where they go, I go also." She smiled gently and added, "I'm going to Grant."
She took her father's hands. "Father--Oh, my good friend--you understand me--Grant and me?--don't you? Every man in the crisis of his life needs a woman. I've been reading about Grant in the papers. I can see what really has happened. But he doesn't understand how what they say happens, for the next few days or weeks or months, while this strike is on, is of vastly more importance than what really happens. He lacks perspective on himself. A woman, if she is a worthy friend--gives that to a man. I'm going to Grant--to my good friend, father, and stand with him--very close, and very true, I hope!"
Trouble moved over the Doctor's face in a cloud. "I don't know about Grant, Laura," he said. "All this Messiah and Prince of Peace tomfoolery--and--"
"Why, you know it never happened, don't you, father? You know Grant is not a fool--nor mad?"
"Oh, I suppose so, Laura--but he approximates both at times," piped the father raspingly.
"Father--listen here--listen to me, dear. I know Grant--I've known him always. This is what is the matter with Grant. I don't think one act in all his life was based on a selfish or an ulterior motive. He has spent his life lavishly for others. He has given himself without let or hindrance for his ideals--he gave up power and personal glory--all for this cause of labor. He has been maimed and broken for it--has failed for it; and now you see what clouds are gathering above him--and I must go to him. I must be with him."
"But for what good, Laura?" asked her father impatiently.
"For my own soul's good and glory, dear," she answered solemnly. "To live my faith; to stand by the people with whom I have cast my lot; to share the great joy that I know is in Grant's heart--the joy of serving; to triumph in his failure if it comes to that!--to be happy--with him, as I know him no matter what chance and circumstance surround him. Oh--father--"
She looked up with brimming eyes and clasped his hand tightly while she cried: "I must go--Oh, bless me as I go--" And the father kissed her forehead.
An hour later, while Grant Adams, in his office, was giving directions for the afternoon parade a white-clad figure brightened the doorway.
"Well, Grant, I have come to serve," she smiled, "under you."
He turned and rose and took her hands in his one flinty hand and said quietly: "We need you--we need you badly right this minute."
She answered, "Very well, then--I'm ready!"
"Well, go out and work--talk peace, don't let them fight, hold the line calm and we'll win," he said.
She started away and he cried after her, "Come to Belgian Hall to-night--we may need you there. The strike committee and the leader of each seven will be there. It will be a war council."
Out to the works went Laura Van Dorn. Mounted policemen or mounted deputies or mounted militiamen stood at every gate. As the strike-breakers came out they were surrounded by the officers of the law, who marched away with the strangers. The strikers followed, calling upon their fellow workers, stretching out pleading arms to them and at corners where the strikers were gathered in any considerable numbers, the guards rode into the crowd waving their whips. At a corner near the Park a woman stepped from the crowd and cried to the officers:
"That's my boy in there--I've got a right to talk to him."
She started to crowd between the horses, and the policemen thrust her back.
"Karl--Karl," she cried, "you come out of there; what would papa say--and you a scab."
She lifted her arms beseechingly and started toward the youth. A policeman cursed her and felled her with a club.
She lay bleeding on the street, and the strikers stood by and ground their teeth. Laura Van Dorn stooped over the woman, picked her up and helped her to walk home. But as she turned away she saw five men walk out of the ranks of the strike-breakers and join the men on the corner. A cheer went up, and two more came.
Belgian Hall was filled with workers that night--men and women. In front of the stage at a long table sat the strike committee. Before them sat the delegates from the various "locals" and the leaders of the sevens. A thousand men and women filled the hall--men and women from every quarter of the globe. That night they had decided to admit the Jews from the Magnus paint works--the Jews whom the Russians scorned, and the Lettish people distrusted. Behind all of the delegates in a solid row around the wall stood the police, watching Grant Adams. He did not sit with the strike committee but worked his way through the crowd, talking to a group here and encouraging a man or woman there--but always restless, always fearing trouble. It was nine o'clock when the meeting opened by singing "The International." It was sung in twenty tongues, but the chorus swelled up and men and women wept as they sang.
"Oh, the Brotherhood of men Shall be the human race."
Then the delegates reported. A Greek woman told how she had been chased by men on horseback through the woods, in the Park. A Polack man showed a torn hand that had come under an ax-handle. A Frenchman told how he had been pursued by a horseman while going for medicine for his sick child. A Portuguese told how he had brought from the ranks of the strike-breakers a big fellow worker whom he knew in New Jersey. The Germans reported that every one of their men in the Valley was out and working in his garden. Over and over young girls told of insults they had received. A mania of brutality seemed to have spread through the officers of the law. A Scotch miner's daughter showed a tear in her dress made by a soldier's bayonet--
"'In fun,' he said, but I could see na joke."
In all the speeches there was a spirit of camaraderie--of fellowship, of love. "We are one blood now," a Danish miner cried, in broken English, "we are all Americans, and America will be a brotherhood--a brotherhood in the Democracy of Labor, under the Prince of Peace." A great shout arose and the crowd called:
"Grant--Grant--Brother Grant."
But he stood by the table and shook his head. After a girl picket and a woman--one a Welsh girl, the other a Manx miner's mother--had told how they were set upon in the Park by the soldiers, up rose a pale, trembling woman from among the Hungarians, her brown, blotched face and her big body made the men look down or away. She spoke in broken, uncertain English.
"We haf send to picket our men and yet our boys, and they beat them down. We haf our girls send, and they come home crying. But I say to God this evening--Oh, is there nothing for me--for me carrying child, and He whisper yais--these soldiers, he haf wife, he haf mother." She paused and shook with fear and shame. "Then I say to you--call home your man--your girl so young, and we go--we women with child--we with big bellies, filled with unborn--we go--O, my God, He say we go, and this soldier--he haf wife, he haf mother--he will see;--we--we--they will not strike us down. Send us, oh, Grant, Prince of Peace, to the picket line next morning."
Her voice broke and she sat down covering her head with her skirt and weeping in excitement.
"Let me go," cried a clear voice, as a brown-eyed Welsh woman rose. "I know ten others that will go."
"I also," cried a German woman. "Let us organize to-night. We can have two hundred child-bearing women!"
"Yes, men," spoke up a trim-looking young wife from among the glassworkers, "we of old have been sacred--let us see if capital holds us sacred now--before property."
Grant leaned over to Laura and asked, "Would it do? Wouldn't they shame us for it?"
The eyes of Laura Van Dorn were filled with tears. They were streaming down her face.
"Oh, yes," she cried, "no deeper symbol of peace is in the earth than the child-bearing woman. Let her go."
Grant Adams rose and addressed the chair: "Mr. Chairman--I move that all men and all women except those chosen by these who have just spoken, be asked to keep out of the Park to-morrow morning, that all the world may know how sacred we hold this cause and with what weapons of peace we would win it."
So it was ordered, and the crowd sang the International Hymn again, and then the Marseillaise, and went home dreaming high dreams.
As Grant and Laura walked from the hall, the last to leave the meeting, after the women had finished making out their list of pickets, the streets were empty and they met--or rather failed to meet, Mrs. Dick Bowman, with Mugs in tow, who crossed the street obviously to avoid Grant and his companion.
Grant and Laura, walking briskly along and planning the next day's work, passed the smelters where the soldiers were on sentry duty. They passed the shaft houses where Harvey militiamen were bunked and guarded by sentinels. They passed the habiliments of war in a score of peaceful places.
"Grant," cried Laura, "I really think now we'll win--that the strike of peace will prove all that you have lived for."
"But if we fail," he replied, "it proves nothing--except perhaps that it was worth trying, and will be worth trying and trying and trying--until it wins!"
It was half past twelve. Grant Adams, standing before the Vanderbilt House, talking with Henry Fenn, was saying, "Well, Henry, one week of this--one week of peace--and the triumph of peace will be--"
A terrific explosion shut his mouth. Across the night he saw a red glare a few hundred feet away. An instant later it was dark again. He ran toward the place where the glare had winked out. As he turned a corner, he saw stars where there should have been shaft house No. 7 of the Wahoo Fuel Company's mines, and he knew that it had been destroyed. In it were a dozen sleeping soldiers of the Harvey Militia Company, and it flashed through his mind that Lida Bowman at last had spoken.
Chapter XLVII
IN WHICH GRANT ADAMS AND LAURA VAN DORN TAKE A WALK DOWN MARKET STREET AND MRS. NESBIT ACQUIRES A LONG LOST GRANDSON-IN-LAW
Grant Adams and Henry Fenn were among the first to arrive at the scene of the explosion. Henry Fenn had tried to stop Grant from going so quickly, thinking his presence at the scene would raise a question of his guilt, but he cried:
"They may need me, Henry--come on--what's a quibble of guilt when a life's to save?"
When they came to the pile of débris, they saw Dick Bowman coming up--barefooted, coatless and breathless. Grant and Fenn had run less than fifteen hundred feet--Dick lived a mile from the shaft house. Grant Adams's mind flashed suspicion toward the Bowmans. He went to Dick across the wreckage and said:
"Oh, Dick--I'm sorry you didn't get here sooner."
"So am I--so am I," cried Dick, craning his long neck nervously.
"Where is Mugs?" asked Grant, as the two worked with a beam over a body--the body of handsome Fred Kollander--lying near the edge of the litter.
"He's home in bed and asleep--and so's his mother, too, Grant, sound asleep."
During the first minutes after the explosion, men near by like Grant and Fenn came running to the scene of the wrecked shaft by the scores, and as Grant and Dick Bowman spoke the streets grew black with men, workmen, policemen, soldiers, citizens, men by the hundreds came hurrying up. The great siren whistles of the water and light plants began to bellow; fire bells and church bells up in Harvey began to ring, and Grant knew that the telephone was alarming the town. Ten minutes after the explosion, while Grant was ordering his men in the crowd to organize for the rescue, a militia colonel appeared, threw a cordon of men about the ruins and the police and soldiers took charge, forcing Grant and his men away. The first few moments after he had been thrust out of the relief work, Grant spent sending his men in the crowd to summon the members of the Council; then he turned and hurried to his office in the Vanderbilt House. For an hour he wrote. Henry Fenn came, and later Laura Van Dorn appeared, but he waved them both to silence, and without telling them what he had written he went with them to the hall where the Valley Council was waiting in a turmoil of excitement. It was after two o'clock. South Harvey was a military camp. Thousands of citizens from Harvey were hurrying about. As he passed along the street, the electric lights showed him little groups about some grief-stricken parent or brother or sister of a missing militiaman. Automobiles were roaring through the streets carrying officers, policemen, prominent citizens of Harvey. Ahab Wright and Joe Calvin and Kyle Perry were in a car with John Kollander who had come down to South Harvey to claim the body of his son, Fred. Grant saw the Sands's car with Morty in it supporting a stricken soldier. The car was halted at the corner by the press of traffic, and as Grant and Laura and Henry passed, Morty said under the din: "Grant--Grant, be careful--they are turning Heaven and earth to find your hand in this; it will be only a matter of days--maybe only hours, until they will have their witnesses hired!"
Grant nodded. The car moved on and Grant and his friends pressed through the throng to the hall where the Valley Council was waiting. There Grant stood and read what he had written. It ran thus:
"For the death by dynamite of the militiamen who perished at midnight in shaft No. 7 of the Wahoo Fuel Company's mines, I take full responsibility. I have assumed a leadership in a strike which caused these deaths. I shirk no whit of my share in this outrage. Yet I preached only peace. I pleaded for orderly conduct. I appealed to the workers to take their own not by force of arms but by the tremendous force of moral right. That ten thousand workers respected this appeal, I am exceedingly proud. That one out of all the ten thousand was not convinced of the justice of our cause and the ultimate triumph by the force of righteousness I am sorry beyond words. I call upon my comrades to witness what a blow to our cause this murder has been and to stand firm in the faith that the strike must win by ways of peace.
"Yet, whoever did this deed was not entirely to blame--however it may cripple his fellow-workers. A child mangled in the mines denied his legal damages; men clubbed for telling of their wrongs to their fellow-laborers who were asked to fill their places; women on the picket line, herded like deer through the park by Cossacks whipping the fleeing creatures mercilessly; these things inflamed the mind of the man who set off the bomb; these things had their share in the murder.
"But I knew what strikes were. I know indeed what strikes still are and what this strike may be. I sorrow with those families whose boys perished by the bomb in shaft house No. 7. I grieve with the families of those who have been beaten and broken in this strike. But by all this innocent blood--blood shed by the working people--blood shed by those who ignorantly misunderstand us, I now beg you, my comrades, to stand firm in this strike. Let not this blood be shed in vain. It may be indeed that the men of the master class here have not descended as deeply as we may expect them to descend. They may feel that more blood must be spilled before they let us come into our own. But if blood is shed again, we must bleed, but let it not be upon our hands.
"Again, even in this breakdown of our high hopes for a strike without violence, I lift my voice in faith, I hail the coming victory, I proclaim that the day of the Democracy of Labor is at hand, and it shall come in peace and good will to all."
When he had finished reading his statement, he sat down and the Valley Council began to discuss it. Many objected to it; others wished to have it modified; still others agreed that it should be published as he had read it. In the end, he had his way. But in the hubbub of the discussion, Laura Van Dorn, sitting near him, asked:
"Grant, why do you take all this on your shoulders? It is not fair, and it is not true--for that matter."
He answered finally: "Well, that's what I propose to do."
He was haggard and careworn and he stared at the woman beside him with determination in his eyes. But she would not give up. Again she insisted: "The people are inflamed--terribly inflamed and in the morning they will be in no mood for this. It may put you in jail--put you where you are powerless."
He turned upon her the stubborn, emotional face that she rarely had seen but had always dreaded. He answered her:
"If anything were to be gained for the comrades by waiting--I'd wait." Then his jaws closed in decision as he said: "Laura, that deed was done in blind rage by one who once risked his life to save mine. Then he acted not blindly but in the light of a radiance from the Holy Ghost in his heart! If I can help him now--can even share his shame with him--I should do it. And in this case--I think it will help the cause to make a fair confession of our weakness."
"But, Grant," cried the woman, "Grant--can't you see that the murder of these boys--these Harvey boys, the boys whose mothers and fathers and sweethearts and young wives and children are going about the streets as hourly witnesses against you and our fellow-workers here--will arouse a mob spirit that is dangerous?"
"Yes--I see that. But if anything can quell the mob spirit, frank, open-hearted confession will do it." He brushed aside her further protests and in another instant was on his feet defending his statement to the Valley Council. Ten minutes later the reporters had it.
At six o'clock in the morning posters covered South Harvey and the whole district proclaiming martial law. They were signed by Joseph Calvin, Jr., provost marshal, and they denied the right of assembly, except upon written order of the provost marshal, declared that incendiary speech would be stopped, forbade parades except under the provost marshal's inspection, and said that offenders would be tried by court-martial for all disobediences to the orders of the proclamation. The proclamation was underscored in its requirements that no meeting of any kind might be held in the district or on any lot or in any building except upon written consent of the owner of the lot or building and with the permission of the provost marshal. Belgian Hall was a rented hall, and the Wahoo Fuel Company controlled most of the available town lots, leaving only the farms of the workers, that were planted thick with gardens, for even the most inoffensive meeting.
And at ten o'clock Grant Adams had signed a counter proclamation declaring that the proclamation of martial law in a time of peace was an usurpation of the constitutional rights of American citizens, and that they must refuse to recognize any authority that abridged the right of free assemblage, a free press, free speech and a trial by jury. Amos Adams sent the workers an invitation to meet in the grove below his house. Grant called a meeting for half-past twelve at the Adams homestead. It was a direct challenge.
The noon extra edition of the Times, under the caption, "The Governor Is Right," contained this illuminating editorial:
"Seven men dead--dynamited to death by Grant Adams; seven men dead--the flower of the youth of Harvey; seven men dead for no crime but serving their country, and Grant Adams loose, poisoning the minds of his dupes, prating about peace in public and plotting cowardly assassination in private. Of course, the Governor was right. Every good citizen of this country will commend him for prompt and vigorous action. In less than an hour after the bomb had sent the seven men of the Harvey Home Guards to eternity, the Governor had proclaimed martial law in this district, and from now on, no more incendiary language, no more damnable riots, miscalled parades will menace property, and no more criminal acts done under the cover of the jury system will disgrace this community under the leadership of this creature Adams.
"In his manifesto pulingly taking the blame for a crime last night so obviously his that mere denial would add blood to the crime itself, Adams says in extenuation that 'women were herded before the Cossacks like deer in the park,' while they were picketing. But he does not say that in the shameful cowardice so characteristic of his leadership in this labor war, he forced, by his own motion, women unfit to be seen in public, much less to fight his battles, under the hoofs of the horses in Sands Park this morning, and if the Greek woman, who claims she was dragooned should die, the fault, the crime of her death in revolting circumstances, will be upon Grant Adams's hands.
"When such a leader followed by blind zealots like the riff-raff who are insanely trailing after this Mad Mullah who claims divine powers--save the mark--when such leaders and such human vermin as these rise in a community, the people who own property, who have built up the community, who have spent their lives making Harvey the proud industrial center that she is--the people who own property, we repeat, should organize to protect it. The Governor suspending while this warlike state exists the right of anarchists who turn it against law and order, the right of assembling, and speech and trial by jury, has set a good example. We hear from good authority that the Adams anarchists are to be aided by another association even more reckless than he and his, and that Greeley county will be flooded by bums and thugs and plug-uglies who will fill our jails and lay the burden of heavy taxes upon our people pretending to defend the rights of free speech.
"A law and order league should be organized among the business men of Harvey to rid the county of these rats breeding social disease, and if courageous hearts are needed, and extraordinary methods necessary--all honest people will uphold the patriots who rally to this cause."
At twelve o 'clock crowds of working people began to swarm into Adams's grove. Five hundred horsemen were lined up at the gate. Around a temporary speaker's stand a squad of policemen was formed. The crowd stood waiting. Grant Adams did not appear. The crowd grew restless; it began to fear that he had been arrested, that there had been some mishap. Laura Van Dorn, sensing the uncertainty and discouragement of the crowd, decided to try to hold it. It seemed to her as she watched the uneasiness rising slowly to impatience in the men and women about her, that it was of much importance--tremendous importance indeed--to hold these people to their faith, not especially in Grant, though to her that seemed necessary, too, but at bottom to hold their faith firm in themselves, in their own powers to better themselves, to rise of their own endeavors, to build upon themselves! So she walked quickly to the policeman before the steps leading to the stand and said smilingly:
"Pardon me," and stepped behind him and was on the stand before he realized that he had been fooled. Her white-clad figure upon the platform attracted a thousand eyes in a second, and in a moment she was speaking:
"I am here to defend our ancient rights of meeting, speaking, and trial by jury." A policeman started for her. She smiled and waved him back with such a dignity of mien that her very manner stopped him.
When he hesitated, knowing that she was a person of consequence in Harvey, she went on: "No cause can thrive until it maintains anew its right to speech, to assemble and to have its day in court before a jury. Every cause must fight this world-old fight--and then if it is a just cause, when it has won those ancient rights--which are not rights at all but are merely ancient battle grounds on which every cause must fight, then any cause may stand a chance to win. I think we should make it clear now that as free-born Americans, no one has a right to stop us from meeting and speaking; no one has a right to deny us jury trials. I believe the time has come when we should ignore rather definitely--" she paused, and turned to the policeman standing beside her, "we should ignore rather finally this proclamation of the provost marshal and should insist rather firmly that he shall try to enforce it."
A policeman stepped suddenly and menacingly toward her. She did not flinch. The dignity of five generations of courtly Satterthwaites rose in her as she gazed at the clumsy officer. She saw Grant Adams coming up at a side entrance to the grove. The policeman stopped. She desired to divert the policeman and the crowd from Grant Adams. The crowd tittering at the quick halt of the policeman, angered him. Again he stepped toward her. His face was reddening. The Satterthwaite dignity mounted, but the Nesbit mind guided her, and she said coldly: "All right, sir, but you must club me. I'll not give up my rights here so easily."
Three officers made a rush for her, grabbed her by the arms, and, struggling, she went off the platform, but she left Grant Adams standing upon it and a cheering crowd saw the ruse.
"I'm here," he boomed out in his great voice, "because 'the woods were man's first temples' and we'll hold them for that sacred right to-day." The police were waiting for him to put his toe across the line of defiance. "We'll transgress this order of little Joe Calvin's--why, he might as well post a trespass notice against snowslides as against this forward moving cause of labor." His voice rose, "I'm here to tell you that under your rights as citizens of this Republic, and under your rights in the coming Democracy of Labor, I bid you tear up these martial law proclamations to kindle fires in your stoves."
He glared at the policemen and held up his hand to stop them as they came. "Listen," he cried, "I'm going to give you better evidence than that against me. I, as the leader of this strike--take this down, Mr. Stenographer, there--I'll say it slowly; I, as the leader of this movement of the Democracy of Labor, as the preacher preaching the era of good will and comradeship all over the earth, bid you, my fellow-workers, meet to preach Christ's workingman's gospel wherever you can hire a hall or rent a lot, to parade your own streets, and to bare your heads to clubs and your breasts to bullets if need be to restore in this district the right of trial by jury in times of peace. And now,"--the crowd roared its approval. He glared defiance at the policemen. He raised his voice above the din, "And now I want to tell you something more. Our property in these mills and mines--" again the crowd bellowed its joyous approval of his words and Grant's face lighted madly, "our property--the property we have earned, we must guard against the violence of the very master class themselves; for under this infernal Russian ukase of little Joe Calvin, the devil only knows what arson and loot and murder--" the crowd howled wildly; a policeman blew his whistle and when the mêlée was over Grant Adams was in the midst of the blue-coated squad marching toward the gate.
At the gate, on a pawing white horse, sat young Joe Calvin. The crowd, following the officers, came upon the first squad of policemen--the squad that took Laura Van Dorn from the stand. The two squads joined with their prisoners, and back of the officers came the yelling, hooting crowd, pushing the officers along. As the officers came up, the provost marshal cried:
"Turn them over to my men here. Men, handcuff them together." In an instant it was done.
Then the cavalry formed in two lines, and between them marched Laura Van Dorn and Grant Adams, manacled together. Up through the weed-grown commons between South Harvey and the big town they marched under the broiling sun. The crowd trudged after them--trailing behind for the most part, but often running along by the horsemen and calling words of sympathy to Grant or reviling the soldiers.
Down Market Street they all came--soldiers, prisoners and straggling crowd. The town, prepared by telephone for the sight, stood on the streets and hurrahed for Joe Calvin. He had brought in his game, and if one trophy was a trifle out of caste for a prisoner, a bit above her station, so much the worse for her. The blood of the seven dead soldiers was crying for vengeance in Harvey--the middle-class nerve had been touched to the quick--and Market Street hooted at the prisoners, and hailed Joe Calvin on his white charger as a hero of the day.
For the mind of a crowd is a simple mind. It draws no fine distinctions. It has no memory. It enjoys primitive emotions, and takes the most rudimentary pleasures. The mind of the crowd on Market Street in Harvey that bright, hot June day, when Joe Calvin on his white steed at the head of his armed soldiers led Grant Adams and Laura Van Dorn up the street to the court house, saw as plainly as any crowd could see anything that Grant Adams was the slayer of seven mangled men, whose torn bodies the crowd had seen at the undertaker's. It saw death and violation of property rights as the fruit of Grant Adams's revolution, and if this woman, who was of Market Street socially, cared to lower herself to the level of assassins and thugs, she was getting only her deserts.
So Grant and Laura passed through the ranks of men and women whom they knew and saw eyes turned away that might have recognized them, saw faces averted to whom they might have looked for sympathy--and saw what power on a white horse can make of a mediocre man!
But Grant was not interested in power on a white horse, nor was he interested in the woman who marched with him. His face kept turning to the crowd from South Harvey that straggled beside him outside of the line of horsemen about him. Now and then Grant caught the eyes of a leader or of a friend and to such a one he would speak some earnest word of cheer or give some belated order or message. Only once did Laura divert him from the stragglers along the way. It was when Ahab Wright ducked his head and drew down his office window in the second story of the Wright & Perry building. "At least," said Laura, "it's a lesson worth learning in human nature. I'll know how much a smile is worth after this or the mere nod of a head. Not that I need it to sustain me, Grant," she went on seriously, "so far as I'm concerned, but I can feel how it would be to--well, to some one who needed it."
Under the murmur of the crowd, Laura continued: "I know exactly with what emotion pretty little Mrs. Joe Calvin will hear of this episode."
"What?" queried Grant absently. His attention left her again, for the men from South Harvey at whom he was directing volts of courage from his blazing eyes.
"Well--she'll be scared to death for fear mother and I will cut her socially for it! She's dying to get into the inner circle, and she'll abuse little Joe for this--which," smiled Laura, "will be my revenge, and will be badly needed by little Joe." But she was talking to deaf ears.
A street car halted them before Brotherton's store for a minute. Grant looked anxiously in the door way, and saw only Miss Calvin, who turned away her head, after smiling at her brother.
"I wonder where George can be?" asked Grant.
"Don't you know?" replied Laura, looking wonderingly at him. "There's a little boy at their house!"
The crowd was hooting and cheering and the procession was just ready to turn into the court house corner, when Grant felt Laura's quick hand clasp. Grant was staring at Kenyon, white and wild-eyed, standing near them on the curb.
"Yes," he said in a low voice, "I see the poor kid."
"No--no," she cried, "look down the block--see that electric! There comes father, bringing mother back from the depot--Oh, Grant--I don't mind for me, I don't mind much for father--but mother--won't some one turn them up that street! Oh, Grant--Grant, look!"
Less than one hundred feet before them the electric runabout was beginning to wobble unsteadily. The guiding hand was trembling and nervous. Mrs. Nesbit, leaning forward with horror in her face, was clutching at her husband's arm, forgetful of the danger she was running. The old Doctor's eyes were wide and staring. He bore unsteadily down upon the procession, and a few feet from the head of the line, he jumped from the machine. He was an old man, and every year of his seventy-five years dragged at his legs, and clutched his shaking arms.
"Joe Calvin--you devil," he screamed, and drew back his cane, "let her go--let her go."
The crowd stood mute. A blow from the cane cracked on the young legs as the Doctor cried:
"Oh, you coward--" and again lifted his cane. Joe Calvin tried to back the prancing horse away. The blow hit the horse on the face, and it reared, and for a second, while the crowd looked away in horror, lunged above the helpless old man. Then, losing balance, the great white horse fell upon the Doctor; but as the hoofs grazed his face, Kenyon Adams had the old man round the waist and flung him aside. But Kenyon went down under the horse. Calvin turned his horse; some one picked up the fainting youth, and he was beside Mrs. Nesbit in the car a moment later, a limp, unconscious thing. Grant and Laura ran to the car. Dr. Nesbit stood dazed and impotent--an old man whose glory was of yesterday--a weak old man, scorned and helpless. He turned away trembling with a nervous palsy, and when he reached the side of the machine, his daughter, trying to hide her manacled hand, kissed him and said soothingly:
"It's all right, father--young Joe's vexed at something I said down in the Valley; he'll get over it in an hour. Then I'll come home."
"And," gasped Mrs. Nesbit, "he--that whippersnapper," she gulped, "dared--to lay hands on you; to--"
Laura shook her head, to stop her mother from speaking of the handcuff,--"to make you walk through Market Street--while," but she could get no further. The crowd surrounded them. And in the midst of the jostling and milling, the Doctor's instinct rose stronger than his rage. He was fumbling for his medicine case, and trying to find something for Kenyon. The old hands were at the young pulse, and he said unsteadily:
"He'll be around in a few minutes."
Some one in the crowd offered a big automobile. The Doctor got in, waved to his daughter, and followed Mrs. Nesbit up the hill.
"You young upstart," he cried, shaking his fist at Calvin as the car turned around, "I'll be down in ten minutes and see to you!" The provost marshal turned his white steed and began gathering up his procession and his prisoners. But the spell was broken. The mind of the crowd took in an idea. It was that a shameful thing was happening to a woman. So it hissed young Joe Calvin. Such is the gratitude of republics.
In the court house, the provost marshal, sitting behind an imposing desk, decided that he would hold Mrs. Van Dorn under $100 bond to keep the peace and release her upon her own recognizance.
"Well," she replied, "Little Joe, I'll sign no peace bond, and if it wasn't for my parents--I'd make you lock me up."
Her hand was free as she spoke. "As it is--I'm going back to South Harvey. I'll be there until this strike is settled; you'll have no trouble in finding me." She hurried home. As she approached the house, she saw in the yard and on the veranda, groups of sympathetic neighbors. In the hall way were others. Laura hurried into the Doctor's little office just as he was setting Kenyon's broken leg and had begun to bind the splints upon it. Kenyon lay unconscious. Mrs. Nesbit and Lila hovered over him, each with her hands full of surgical bandages, and cotton and medicine. Mrs. Nesbit's face was drawn and anxious.
"Oh, mamma--mamma--I'm so sorry--so sorry--you had to see." The proud woman looked up from her work and sniffed:
"That whippersnapper--that--that--" she did not finish. The Doctor drew his daughter to him and kissed her. "Oh, my poor little girl--they wouldn't have done that ten years ago--"
"Father," interrupted the daughter, "is Kenyon all right?"
"Just one little bone broken in his leg. He'll be out from under the ether in a second. But I'll--Oh, I'll make that Calvin outfit sweat; I'll--"
"Oh, no, you won't, father--little Joe doesn't know any better. Mamma can just forget to invite his wife to our next party--which I won't let her do--not even that--but it would avenge my wrongs a thousand times over."
Lila had Kenyon's hand, and Mrs. Nesbit was rubbing his brow, when he opened his eyes and smiled. Laura and the Doctor, knowing their wife and mother, had left her and Lila together with the awakening lover. His eyes first caught Mrs. Nesbit's who bent over him and whispered:
"Oh, my brave, brave boy--my noble--chivalrous son--"
Kenyon smiled and his great black eyes looked into the elder woman's as he clutched Lila's hand.
"Lila," he said feebly, "where is it--run and get it."
"Oh, it's up in my room, grandma--wait a minute--it's up in my room." She scurried out of the door and came dancing down the stairs in a moment with a jewel on her finger. The grandmother's eyes were wet, and she bent over and kissed the young, full lips into which life was flowing back so beautifully.
"Now--me!" cried Lila, and as she, too, bent down she felt the great, strong arms of her grandmother enfolding her in a mighty hug. There, in due course, the Doctor and Laura found them. A smile, the first that had wreathed his wrinkled face for an hour, twitched over the loose skin about his old lips and eyes.
"The Lord," he piped, "moves in a mysterious way--my dear--and if Laura had to go to jail to bring it--the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away--blessed be--"
"Well, Kenyon," the grandmother interrupted the Doctor, stooping to put her fingers lovingly upon his brow, "we owe everything to you; it was fine and courageous of you, son!"
And with the word "son" the Doctor knew and Laura knew, and Lila first of all knew that Bedelia Nesbit had surrendered. And Kenyon read it in Lila's eyes. Then they all fell to telling Kenyon what a grand youth he was and how he had saved the Doctor's life, and it ended as those things do, most undramatically, in a chorus of what I saids, and you saids to me, and I thought, and you did, and he should have done, until the party wore itself out and thought of Lila, sitting by her lover, holding his hands. And then what with a pantomime of eyes from Laura and the Doctor to Mrs. Nesbit, and what with an empty room in a big house, with voices far--exceedingly far--obviously far away, it ended with them as all journeys through this weary world end, and must end if the world wags on.
XLVIII. WHEREIN WE ERECT A HOUSE BUILT UPON A ROCK
That evening in the late twilight, two women stood at the wicket of a cell in the jail and while back of the women, at the end of a corridor, stood a curious group of reporters and idlers and guards, inside the wicket a tall, middle-aged man with stiff, curly, reddish hair and a homely, hard, forbidding face stood behind the bars. The young woman put her hand with the new ring on it through the wicket.
"It's Kenyon's ring--Kenyon's," smiled Lila, and to his questioning look at her mother, the daughter answered: "Yes, grandma knows. And what is more, grandpa told us both--Kenyon and me--what was bothering grandma--and it's all--all--right!"
The happy eyes of Laura Van Dorn caught the eyes of Grant as they gazed at her from some distant landscape of his turbulent soul. She could not hold his eyes, nor bring them to a serious consideration of the occasion. His heart seemed to be on other things. So the woman said: "God is good, Grant." She watched her daughter and cast a glance at the shining ring. Grant Adams heard and saw, but while he comprehended definitely enough, what he saw and heard seemed remote and he repeated:
"God is good--infinitely good, Laura!" His eyes lighted up. "Do you know this is the first strike in the world--I believe, indeed the first enterprise in the world started and conducted upon the fundamental theory that we are all gods. Nothing but the divine spark in those men would hold them as they are held in faith and hope and fellowship. Look at them," he lifted his face as one seeing Heavenly legions, "ten thousand souls, men and women and children, cheated for years of their rights, and when they ask for them in peace, beaten and clubbed and killed, and still they do not raise their hands in violence! Oh, I tell you, they are getting ready--the time must be near." He shook his head in exultation and waved his iron claw.
Laura said gently, "Yes, Grant, but the day always is near. Whenever two or three are gathered--"
"Oh, yes--yes," he returned, brushing her aside, "I know that. And it has come to me lately that the day of the democracy is a spiritual and not a material order. It must be a rising level of souls in the world, and the mere dawn of the day will last through centuries. But it will be nonetheless beautiful because it shall come slowly. The great thing is to know that we are all--the wops and dagoes and the hombres and the guinnies--all gods! to know that in all of us burns that divine spark which environment can fan or stifle--that divine spark which makes us one with the infinite!" He threw his face upward as one who saw a vision and cried: "And America--our America that they think is so sordid, so crass, so debauched with materialism--what fools they are to think it! From all over the world for three hundred years men and women have been hurrying to this country who above everything else on earth were charged with aspiration. They were lowly people who came, but they had high visions; this whole land is a crucible of aspirations. We are the most sentimental people on earth. No other land is like it, and some day--oh, I know God is charging this battery full of His divine purpose for some great marvel. Some time America will rise and show her face and the world will know us as we are!"
The girl, with eyes fascinated by her engagement ring, scarcely understood what the man was saying. She was too happy to consider problems of the divine immanence. There was a little mundane talk of Kenyon and of the Nesbits and then the women went away.
An hour later an old man sitting in the dusk with a pencil in his left hand, was startled to see these two women descending upon him, to tell him the news. He kissed them both with his withered lips, and rubbed the soft cheek of the maiden against his old gray beard.
And when they were gone, he picked up the pencil again, and sat dumbly waiting, while in his heart he called eagerly across the worlds: "Mary--Mary, are you there? Do you know? Oh, Mary, Mary!"
The funeral of the young men killed in the shaft house brought a day of deepening emotion to Harvey. Flags were at half mast and Market Street was draped in crape. The stores closed at the tolling of bells which announced the hour of the funeral services. Two hundred automobiles followed the soldiers who escorted the bodies to the cemetery, and when the bugle blew taps, tears stood in thousands of eyes.
The moaning of the great-throated regimental band, the shrilling of the fife and the booming of the drum; the blare of the bugle that sounded taps stirred the chords of hate, and the town came back from burying its dead a vessel of wrath. In vain had John Dexter in his sermon over Fred Kollander tried to turn the town from its bitterness by preaching from the text, "Ye are members one of another," and trying to point the way to charity. The town would have no charity.
The tragedy of the shaft house and the imprisonment of Grant Adams had staged for the day all over the nation in the first pages of the newspapers an interesting drama. Such a man as Grant Adams was a figure whose jail sentence under military law for defending the rights of a free press, free speech, free assemblage and trial by jury, was good for a first page position in every newspaper in the country--whatever bias its editorial columns might take against him and his cause. Millions of eyes turned to look at the drama. But there were hundreds among the millions who saw the drama in the newspapers and who decided they would like to see it in reality. Being foot loose, they came. So when the funeral procession was hurrying back into Harvey and the policemen and soldiers were dispersing to their posts, they fell upon half a dozen travel-stained strangers in the court house yard addressing the loafers there. Promptly the strangers were haled before the provost marshal, and promptly landed in jail. But other strangers appeared on the streets from time to time as the freight trains came clanging through town, and by sundown a score of young men were in the town lockup. They were happy-go-lucky young blades; rather badly in need of a bath and a barber, but they sang lustily in the calaboose and ate heartily and with much experience of prison fare. One read his paperbound Tolstoy; another poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town knew that a plague was upon them.
Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke the sound of hurrying feet--always the feet of the young men. For Youth goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade. So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over, there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with archaic ideas of morality--ideas perhaps of property and morals that were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust, and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden, golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger, played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found their danger in fighting for free speech, and free assemblage. They were tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war comes.
And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Constitution of the United States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of diversion for the police, the more did the wooden head of Market Street throb with rage and the more did the people imagine a vain thing.
And when seventy of them had crowded the jail, and their leaders blandly announced that they would eat the taxes all out of the county treasury before they stopped the fight for free speech, Market Street awoke. Eating taxes was something that Market Street could understand. So the police began clubbing the strangers. The pilgrims were meeting Danger, their lost comrade, and youth's blood ran wild at the meeting and there were riots in Market Street. A lodging house in the railroad yards in South Harvey was raided one night--when the strike was ten days old, and as it was a railroadmen's sleeping place, and a number of trainmen were staying there to whom the doctrines of peace and non-resistance did not look very attractive under a policeman's ax-handle--a policeman was killed.
Then the Law and Order League was formed. Storekeepers, clerks, real estate men, young lawyers, the heart of that section of the white-shirted population whom Grant Adams called the "poor plutes," joined this League. And deaf John Kollander was its leader. Partly because of his bereavement men let him lead, but chiefly because his life's creed seemed to be vindicated by events, men turned to him. The bloodshed on Market Street, the murder of a policeman and the dynamiting of the shaft house with their sons inside, had aroused a degree of passion that unbalanced men, and John Kollander's wrath was public opinion dramatized. The police gave the Law and Order League full swing, and John Kollander was the first chief in the city. Prisoners arrested for speaking without a permit were turned over to the Law and Order League at night, and taken in the city auto-truck to the far limits of the city, and there--a mile from the residential section, in the high weeds that fringed the town and confined the country, the Law and Order League lined up under John Kollander and with clubs and whips and sticks, compelled the prisoners to run a gauntlet to the highroad that leads from Harvey. Men were stripped, and compelled to lean over and kiss an American flag--spread upon the ground, while they were kicked and beaten before they could rise. This was to punish men for carrying a red flag of socialism, and John Kollander decreed that every loyal citizen of Harvey should wear a flag. To omit the flag was to arouse suspicion; to wear a red necktie was to invite arrest. It was a merry day for blithe devotees of Danger; and they were taking their full of her in Harvey.
The Law and Order League was one of those strange madnesses to which any community may fall a victim. Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright--with Jasper Adams a nimble echo, church men, fathers, husbands, solid business men, were its leaders.
They endorsed and participated in brutalities, cowardly cruelties at which in their saner moments they could only shudder in horror. But they made Jared Thurston chairman of the publicity committee and the Times, morning after morning, fanned the passions of the people higher and higher. "Skin the Rats," was the caption of his editorial the morning after a young fellow was tarred and feathered and beaten until he lost consciousness and was left in the highway. The editorial under this heading declared that anarchy had lifted its hydra head; that Grant Adams preaching peace in the Valley was preparing to let in the jungle, and that the bums who were flooding the city jail were Adams's tools, who soon would begin dynamiting and burning the town, when it suited his purpose, while his holier-than-thou dupes in the Valley were conducting their goody-goody strike.
Plots of dynamiting were discovered. Hardly a day passed for nearly a week that the big black headlines of the Times did not tell of dynamite found in obviously conspicuous places--in the court house, in the Sands opera house, in the schoolhouses, in the city hall. So Harvey grew class conscious, property conscious, and the town went stark mad. It was the gibbering fear of those who make property of privilege, and privilege of property, afraid of losing both.
But for a week and a day the motive power of the strike was Grant Adams's indomitable will. Hour after hour, day after day he paced his iron floor, and dreamed his dream of the conquest of the world through fellowship. And by the power of his faith and by the example of his imprisonment for his faith, he held his comrades in the gardens, kept the strikers on the picket lines and sustained the courage of the delegates in Belgian Hall, who met inside a wall of blue-coated policemen. The mind of the Valley had reached a place where sympathy for Grant Adams and devotion to him, imprisoned as their leader, was stronger than his influence would have been outside. So during the week and a day, the waves of hate and the winds of adverse circumstance beat upon the house of faith, which he had builded slowly through other years in the Valley, and it stood unshaken.
Chapter XLIX
HOW MORTY SANDS TURNED AWAY SADLY AND JUDGE VAN DORN UNCOVERED A SECRET
Grant Adams sat in his cell, with the jail smell of stone and iron and damp in his nostrils. As he read the copy of Tolstoy's "The Resurrection," which his cell-mate had left in his hurried departure the night before, Grant moved unconsciously to get into the thin direct rays of the only sunlight--the early morning sunlight, that fell into his cage during the long summer day. The morning Times lay on the floor where Grant had dropped it after reading the account of what had happened to his cell-mate when the police had turned him over to the Law and Order League, at midnight. To be sure, the account made a great hero of John Kollander and praised the patriotism of the mob that had tortured the poor fellow. But the fact of his torture, the fact that he had been tarred and feathered, and turned out naked on the golf links of the country club, was heralded by the Times as a warning to others who came to Harvey to preach Socialism, and flaunt the red flag. Grant felt that the jailer's kindness in giving him the morning paper so early in the day, was probably inspired by a desire to frighten him rather than to inform him of the night's events.
Gradually he felt the last warmth of the morning sun creep away and he heard a new step beside the jailer's velvet footfall in the corridor, and heard the jailer fumbling with his keys and heard him say: "That's the Adams cell there in the corner," and an instant later Morty Sands stood at the door, and the jailer let him in as Grant said:
"Well, Morty--come right in and make yourself at home."
He was not the dashing young blade who for thirty years had been the Beau Brummel of George Brotherton's establishment; but a rather weazened little man whose mind illumined a face that still clung to sportive youth, while premature age was claiming his body.
He cleared his throat as he sat on the bunk, and after dropping Grant's hand and glancing at the book title, said: "Great, isn't it? Where'd you get it?"
"The brother they ran out last night. They came after him so suddenly that he didn't have time to pack," answered Grant.
"Well, he didn't need it, Grant," replied Morty. "I just left him. I got him last night after the mob finished with him, and took him home to our garage, and worked with him all night fixing him up. Grant, it's hell. The things they did to that fellow--unspeakable, and fiendish." Morty cleared his throat again, paused to gather courage and went on. "And he heard something that made him believe they were coming for you to-night."
The edge of a smile touched the seamed face, and Grant replied: "Well--maybe so. You never can tell. Besides old John Kollander, who are the leaders of this Law and Order mob, Morty?"
"Well," replied the little man, "John Kollander is the responsible head, but Kyle Perry is master of ceremonies--the stuttering, old coot; and Ahab gives them the use of the police, and Joe Calvin backs up both of them. However," sighed Morty, "the whole town is with them. It's stark mad, Grant--Harvey has gone crazy. These tramps filling the jails and eating up taxes--and the Times throwing scares into the merchants with the report that unless the strike is broken, the smelters and glassworks and cement works will move from the district--it's awful! My idea of hell, Grant, is a place where every man owns a little property and thinks he is just about to lose it."
The young-old man was excited, and his eyes glistened, but his speech brought on a fit of coughing. He lifted his face anxiously and began: "Grant,--I'm with you in this fight." He paused for breath. "It's a man's scrap, Grant--a man's fight as sure as you're born." Grant sprang to his feet and threw back his head, as he began pacing the narrow cell. As he threw out his arms, his claw clicked on the steel bars of the cell, and Morty Sands felt the sudden contracting of the cell walls about the men as Grant cried--
"That's what it is, Morty--it's a man's fight--a man's fight for men. The industrial system to-day is rotting out manhood--and womanhood too--rotting out humanity because capitalism makes unfair divisions of the profits of industry, giving the workers a share that keeps them in a man-rotting environment, and we're going to break up the system--the whole infernal profit system--the blight of capitalism upon the world." Grant brought down his hand on Morty's frail shoulder in a kind of frenzy. "Oh, it's coming--the Democracy of Labor is coming in the earth, bringing peace and hope--hope that is the 'last gift of the gods to men'--Oh, it's coming! it's coming." His eyes were blazing and his voice high pitched. He caught Morty's eyes and seemed to shut off all other consciousness from him but that of the idea which obsessed him.
Morty Sands felt gratefully the spell of the strong mind upon him. Twice he started to speak, and twice stopped. Then Grant said: "Out with it, Morty--what's on your chest?"
"Well,--this thing," he tapped his throat, "is going to get me, Grant, unless--well, it's a last hope; but I thought," he spoke in short, hesitating phrases, then he started again. "Grant, Grant," he cried, "you have it, this thing they call vitality. You are all vitality, bodily, mentally, spiritually. Why have I been denied always, everything that you have! Millions of good men and bad men and indifferent men are overflowing with power, and I--I--why, why can't I--what shall I do to get it? How can I feel and speak and live as you? Tell me." He gazed into the strong, hard visage looking down upon him, and cried weakly: "Grant--for God's sake, help me. Tell me--what shall I do to--Oh, I want to live--I want to live, Grant, can't you help me!"
He stopped, exhausted. Grant looked at him keenly, and asked gently,
"Had another hemorrhage this morning--didn't you?"
Morty looked over his clothes to detect the stain of blood, and nodded. "Oh, just a little one. Up all night working with Folsom, but it didn't amount to anything."
Grant sat beside the broken man, and taking his white hand in his big, paw-like hand:
"Morty--Morty--my dear, gentle friend; your trouble is not your body, but your soul. You read these great books, and they fascinate your mind. But they don't grip your soul; you see these brutal injustices, and they cut your heart; but they don't reach your will." The strong hand felt the fluttering pressure of the pale hand in its grasp. Morty looked down, and seemed about to speak.
"Morty," Grant resumed, "it's your money--your soul-choking money. You've never had a deep, vital, will-moving conviction in your life. You haven't needed this money. Morty, Morty," he cried, "what you need is to get out of your dry-rot of a life; let the Holy Ghost in your soul wake up to the glory of serving. Face life barehanded, consecrate your talents--you have enough--to this man's fight for men. Throw away your miserable back-breaking money. Give it to the poor if you feel like it; it won't help them particularly." He shook his head so vigorously that his vigor seemed like anger, and hammered with his claw on the iron bunk. "Money," he cried and repeated the word, "money not earned in self-respect never helps any one. But to get rid of the damned stuff will revive you; will give you a new interest in life--will change your whole physical body, and then--if you live one hour in the big soul-bursting joy of service you will live forever. But if you die--die as you are, Morty--you'll die forever. Come." Grant reached out his arms to Morty and fixed his luminous eyes upon his friend, "Come, come with me," he pleaded. "That will cure your soul--and it doesn't matter about your body."
Morty's face lighted, and he smiled sympathetically; but the light faded. He dropped his gaze to the floor and sighed. Then he shook his head sadly. "It won't work, Grant--it won't work. I'm not built that way. It won't work."
His fine sensitive mouth trembled, and he drew a deep breath that ended in a hard dry cough. Then he rose, held out his hand and said:
"Now you watch out, Grant--they'll get you yet. I tell you it's awful--that's the exact word--the way hate has driven this town mad." He shook the cage door, and the jailer came from around a corner, and unlocked the door, and in a moment Morty was walking slowly away with his eyes on the cold steel of the cell-room floor.
When his visitor was gone, Grant Adams went back to his book. At the end of an hour he went to the slit in his cell, which served as window, and looked on a damp courtyard that gave him a narrow slice of Market Street and the Federal court house in the distance. Men and women walking in and out of the little stereoscopic view he had of the street, seemed to the prisoner people in a play, or in another world. They were remote from him. At the gestures they made, the gaits they fell into, the errands they were going upon, the spring that obviously moved them, he gazed as one who sees a dull pantomime. During the middle of the morning, as he looked, he saw Judge Van Dorn's big, black motor car roll up to the curb before the Federal court house and unload the spare, dried-up, clothes-padded figure of the Judge, who flicked out of Grant's eyeshot. A hundred other figures passed, and Ahab Wright, with his white side-whiskers bristling testily, came bustling across the stereopticon screen and turned to the court house and was gone. Young Joe Calvin, dismounting from his white horse, came for a second into the picture, and soon after the elder Calvin came trotting along beside Kyle Perry with his heavy-footed gait, and the two turned as the Judge had turned--evidently into the court house, where the Judge had his office.
Grant took up his book. After noon the jailer came with Henry Fenn, who, as Adams' attorney, visited him daily. But the jailer stood by while the lawyer talked to the prisoner through the bars. Henry Fenn wore a troubled face and Grant saw at once that his friend was worried. So Grant began:
"So you've heard my cell-mate's message--eh, Henry? Well, don't worry. Tell the boys down in the Valley, whatever they do--to keep off Market Street and out of Harvey to-night."
The listening jailer looked sharply at Fenn. It was apparent the jailer expected Fenn to protest. But Fenn turned his radiant smile on the jailer and said: "The smelter men say they could go through this steel as if it was pasteboard in ten minutes--if you'd say the word." Fenn grinned at the prisoner as he added: "If you want the boys, all the tin soldiers and fake cops in the State can't stop them. But I've told them to stay away--to stay in their fields, to keep the peace; that it is your wish."
"Henry," replied Grant, "tell the boys this for me. We've won this fight now. They can't build a fire, strike a pick, or turn a wheel if the boys stick--and stick in peace. I'm satisfied that this story of what they will do to me to-night, while I don't question the poor chap who sent the word--is a plan to scare the boys into a riot to save me and thus to break our peace strike."
He walked nervously up and down his cell, clicking the bars with his claw as he passed the door. "Tell the boys this. Tell them to go to bed to-night early; beware of false rumors, and at all hazards keep out of Harvey. I'm absolutely safe. I'm not in the least afraid--and, Henry, Henry," cried Grant, as he saw doubt and anxiety in his friend's face, "what if it's true; what if they do come and get me? They can't hurt me. They can only hurt themselves. Violence always reacts. Every blow I get will help the boys--I know this--I tell you--"
"And I tell you, young man," interrupted Fenn, "that right now one dead leader with a short arm is worth more to the employers than a ton of moral force! And Laura and George and Nate and the Doctor and I have been skirmishing around all day, and we have filed a petition for your release on a habeas corpus in the Federal court--on the ground that your imprisonment under martial law without a jury trial is unconstitutional."
"In the Federal court before Van Dorn?" asked Grant, incredulously.
"Before Van Dorn. The State courts are paralyzed by young Joe Calvin's militia!" returned Fenn, adding: "We filed our petition this morning. So, whether you like it or not, you appear at three-thirty o'clock this afternoon before Van Dorn."
Grant smiled and after a moment spoke: "Well, if I was as scared as you people, I'd--look here. Henry, don't lose your nerve, man--they can't hurt me. Nothing on this earth can hurt me, don't you see, man--why go to Van Dorn?"
Fenn answered: "After all, Tom's a good lawyer in a life job and he doesn't want to be responsible for a decision against you that will make him a joke among lawyers all over the country when he is reversed by appeal." Grant shook his dubious head.
"Well, it's worth trying," returned Fenn.
At three o'clock Joseph Calvin, representing the employers, notified Henry Fenn that Judge Van Dorn had been called out of town unexpectedly and would not be able to hear the Adams' petition at the appointed time. That was all. No other time was set. But at half-past five George Brotherton saw a messenger boy going about, summoning men to a meeting. Then Brotherton found that the Law and Order League was sending for its members to meet in the Federal courtroom at half-past eight. He learned also that Judge Van Dorn would return on the eight o'clock train and expected to hear the Adams' petition that night. So Brotherton knew the object of the meeting. In ten minutes Doctor Nesbit, Henry Fenn and Nathan Perry were in the Brotherton store.
"It means," said Fenn, "that the mob is going after Grant to-night and that Tom knows it."
"Why?" asked the thin, sharp voice of Nathan Perry.
"Otherwise he would have let the case go over until morning."
"Why?" again cut in Perry.
"Because for the mob to attack a man praying for release under habeas corpus in a federal court might mean contempt of court that the federal government might investigate. So Tom's going to wash his hands of the matter before the mob acts to-night."
"Why?" again Perry demanded.
"Well," continued Fenn, "every day they wait means accumulated victory for the strikers. So after Tom refuses to release Grant, the mob will take him."
"Well, say--let's go to the Valley with this story. We can get five thousand men here by eight o'clock," cried Brotherton.
"And precipitate a riot, George," put in the Doctor softly, "which is one of the things they desire. In the riot the murder of Grant could be easily handled and I don't believe they will do more than try to scare him otherwise."
"Why?" again queried Nathan Perry, towering thin and nervous above the seated council.
"Well," piped the Doctor, with his chin on his cane, "he's too big a figure nationally for murder--"
"Well, then--what do you propose, gentlemen?" asked Perry who, being the youngest man in the council, was impatient.
Fenn rose, his back to the ornamental logs piled decoratively in the fireplace, and answered:
"To sound the clarion means riot and bloodshed--and failure for the cause."
"To let things drift," put in Brotherton, "puts Grant in danger."
"Of what?" asked the Doctor.
"Well, of indignities unspeakable and cruel torture," returned Brotherton.
"I'm sure that's all, George. But can't we--we four stop that?" said Fenn. "Can't we stand off the mob? A mob's a coward."
"It's the least we can do," said Perry.
"And all you can do, Nate," added the Doctor, with the weariness of age in his voice and in his counsel.
But when the group separated and the Doctor purred up the hill in his electric, his heart was sore within him and he spoke to the wife of his bosom of the burden that was on his heart. Then, after a dinner scarcely tasted, the Doctor hurried down town to meet with the men at Brotherton's.
As Mrs. Nesbit saw the electric dip under the hill, her first impulse was to call up her daughter on the telephone, who was at Foley that evening. For be it remembered Mrs. Nesbit in the days of her prime was dubbed "the General" by George Brotherton, and when she saw the care and hovering fear in the pink, old face of the man she loved, she was not the woman to sit and rock. She had to act and, because she feared she would be stopped, she did not pick up the telephone receiver. She went to the library, where Kenyon Adams with his broken leg in splints was sitting while Lila read to him. She stood looking at the lovers for a moment.
"Children," she said, "Grant Adams is in great danger. We must help him."
To their startled questions, she answered: "He is asking your father, Lila, to release him from the prison to-night. If he is not released, a mob will take Grant as they took that poor fool last night and--" She stopped, turned toward them a perturbed and fear-wrinkled face. Then she said quickly: "I don't know that I owe Grant Adams anything but--you children do--" She did not complete her sentence, but burst out: "I don't care for Tom Van Dorn's court, his grand folderol and mummery of the law. He's going to send a man to death to-night because his masters demand it. And we must stop it--you and Lila and I, Kenyon."
Kenyon reached out, tried to rise and failed, but grasped her strong, effective hand, as he cried: "What can we do--what can I do?"
She went into the Doctor's office and brought out two old crutches.
"Take these," she said, "then I'll help you down the porch steps--and you go to your mother! That's what you can do. Maybe she can stop him--she has done a number of other worse things with him."
She literally lifted the tottering youth down the veranda steps and a few moments later his crutches were rattling upon the stone steps that rose in front of the proud house of Van Dorn. Margaret had seen him coming and met him before he rang the bell.
She looked the dreadful wonder in her mind and as he took her hand to steady himself, he spoke while she was helping him to sit.
"You are my mother," he said simply. "I know it now." He felt her hand tighten on his arm. She bent over him and with finger on lips, whispered: "Hush, hush, the maid is in there--what is it, Kenyon?"
"I want you to save Grant."
She still stood over him, looking at him with her glazed eyes shot with the evidence of a strong emotion.
"Kenyon, Kenyon--my boy--my son!" she whispered, then said greedily: "Let me say it again--my son!" She whispered the word "son" for a moment, stooping over him, touching his forehead gently with her fingers. Then she cried under her breath: "What about that man--your--Grant? What have I to do with him?"
He reached for her hands beseechingly and said: "We are asking your husband, the Judge, to let him out of jail to-night, for if the Judge doesn't release Grant--they are going to mob him and maybe kill him! Oh, won't you save him? You can. I know you can. The Judge will let him out if you demand it."
"My son, my son!" the woman answered as she looked vacantly at him. "You are my son, my very own, aren't you?"
She stooped to look into his eyes and cried: "Oh, you're mine"--her trembling fingers ran over his face. "My eyes, my hair. You have my voice--O God--why haven't they found it out?" Then she began whispering over again the words, "My son."
A clock chimed the half-hour. It checked her. "He'll be back in half an hour," she said, rising; then--"So they're going to mob Grant, are they? And he sent you here asking me for mercy!"
Kenyon shook his head in protest and cried: "No, no, no. He doesn't even know--"
She looked at the young man and became convinced that he was telling the truth; but she was sure that Laura Van Dorn had sent him. It was her habit of mind to see the ulterior motive. So the passion of motherhood flaring up after years of suppression quickly died down. It could not dominate her in her late forties, even for the time, nor even with the power which held her during the night of the riot in South Harvey, when she was in her thirties. The passion of motherhood with Margaret Van Dorn was largely a memory, but hate was a lively and material emotion.
She fondled her son in the simulation of a passion that she did not feel--and when in his eagerness he tried vainly to tie her to a promise to help his father, she would only reply:
"Kenyon, oh, my son, my beautiful son--you know I'd give my life for you--"
The son looked into the dead, brassy eyes of his mother, saw her drooping mouth, with the brown lips that had not been stained that day; observed the slumping muscles of her over-massaged face, and felt with a shudder the caress of her fingers--and he knew in his heart that she was deceiving him. A moment after she had spoken the automobile going to the station for the Judge backed out of the garage and turned into the street.
"You must go now," she cried, clinging to him. "Oh, son--son--my only son--come to me, come to your mother sometimes for her love. He is coming now in a few minutes on the eight o'clock train. You must not let him see you here."
She helped Kenyon to rise. He stumbled across the floor to the steps and she helped him gently down to the lawn. She stood play-acting for him a moment in whisper and pantomime, then she turned and hurried indoors and met the inquisitive maid servant with:
"Just that Kenyon Adams--the musician--awfully dear boy, but he wanted me to interfere with the Judge for that worthless brother, Grant. The Nesbits sent him. You know the Nesbit woman is crazy about that anarchist. Oh, Nadine, did Chalmers see Kenyon? You know Chalmers just blabs everything to the Judge."
Nadine indicated that Chalmers had recognized Kenyon as he crawled up the veranda steps and Mrs. Van Dorn replied: "Very well, I'll be ready for him." And half an hour later, when the Judge drove up, his wife met him as he was putting his valise in his room:
"Dahling," she said as she closed the door, "that Kenyon Adams was over here, appealing to me for his brother, Grant."
"Well?" asked the Judge contemptuously.
"You have him where we want him now, dahling," she answered. "If you refuse him his freedom, the mob will get him. And oh, oh, oh," she cried passionately, "I hope they'll hang him, hang him, higher'n Haman. That will take the tuck out of the old Nesbit cat and that other, his--his sweetheart, to have her daughter marrying the brother of a man who was hanged! That'll bring them down."
A flash across the Judge's face told the woman where her emotion was leading her. It angered her.
"So that holds you, does it? That binds the hands of the Judge, does it? This wonderful daughter, who snubs him on the street--she mustn't marry the brother of a man who was hanged!" Margaret laughed, and the Judged glowered in rage until the scar stood white upon his purple brow.
"Dahling," she leered, "remember our little discussion of Kenyon Adams's parentage that night! Maybe our dear little girl is going to marry the son, the son," she repeated wickedly, "of a man who was hanged!"
He stepped toward her crying: "For God's sake, quit! Quit!"
"Oh, I hope he'll hang. I hope he'll hang and you've got to hang him! You've got to hang him!" she mocked exultingly.
The man turned in rage. He feared the powerful, physical creature before him. He had never dared to strike her. He wormed past her and ran slinking down the hall and out of the door--out from the temple of love, which he had builded--somewhat upon sand perhaps, but still the temple of love. A rather sad place it was, withal, in which to rest the weary bones of the hunter home from the hills, after a lifelong ride to hounds in the primrose hunt.
He stood for a moment upon the steps of the veranda, while his heart pumped the bile of hate through him; and suddenly hearing a soft footfall, he turned his head quickly, and saw Lila--his daughter. As he turned toward her in the twilight it struck him like a blow in the face that she in some way symbolized all that he had always longed for--his unattainable ideal; for she seemed young--immortally young, and sweet. The grace of maidenhood shone from her and she turned an eager but infinitely wistful face up to his, and for a second the picture of the slim, white-clad figure, enveloping and radiating the gentle eagerness of a beautiful soul, came to him like the disturbing memory of some vague, lost dream and confused him. While she spoke he groped back to the moment blindly and heard her say:
"Oh, you will help me now, this once, this once when I beg it; you will help me?" As she spoke she clutched his arm. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Father, don't let them murder him--don't, oh, please, father--for me, won't you save him for me--won't you let him out of jail now?"
"Lila, child," the Judge held out his hand unsteadily, "it's not what I want to do; it's the law that I must follow. Why, I can't do--"
"If Mr. Ahab Wright was in jail as Grant is and the workmen had the State government, what would the law say?" she answered. Then she gripped his hands and cried: "Oh, father, father, have mercy, have mercy! We love him so and it will kill Kenyon. Grant has been like a father to Kenyon; he has been--"
"Tell me this, Lila," the Judge stopped her; he held her hands in his cold, hard palms. "Who is Kenyon--who is his father--do you know?"
"Yes, I know," the daughter replied quietly.
"Tell me, then. I ought to know," he demanded.
"There is just one right by which you can ask," she began. "But if you refuse me this--by what other right can you ask? Oh, daddy, daddy," she sobbed. "In my dreams I call you that. Did you ever hear that name, daddy, daddy--I want you--for my sake, to save this man, daddy."
The Judge heard the words that for years had sounded in his heart. They cut deep into his being. But they found no quick.
"Well, daughter," he answered, "as a father--as a father who will help you all he can--I ask, then, who is Kenyon Adams's father?"
"Grant," answered the girl simply.
"Then you are going to marry an illegitimate--"
"I shall marry a noble, pure-souled man, father."
"But, Lila--Lila," he rasped, "who is his mother?"
Then she shrank away from him. She shook her head sadly, and withdrew her hands from his forcibly as she cried:
"O father--father--daddy, have you no heart--no heart at all?" She looked beseechingly up into his face and before he could reply, she seemed to decide upon some further plea. "Father, it is sacred--very sacred to me, a beautiful memory that I carry of you, when I think of the word 'Daddy.' I have never, never, not even to mother, nor to Kenyon spoken of it. But I see you young, and straight and tall and very handsome. You have on light gray clothes and a red flower on your coat, and I am in your arms hugging you, and then you put me down, and I stand crying 'Daddy, daddy,' after you, when you are called away somewhere. Oh, then--then, oh, I know that then--I don't know where you went nor anything, but then, then when I snuggled up to you, surely you would have heard me if I had asked you what I am asking now."
The daughter paused, but the father did not answer at once. He looked away from her across the years. In the silence Lila was aware that in the doorway back of her father, Margaret Van Dorn stood listening. Her husband did not know that she was there.
"Lila," he began, "you have told me that Kenyon's father is Grant Adams, why do you shield his mother?"
The daughter stood looking intently into the brazen eyes of her father, trying to find some way into his heart. "Father, Grant Adams is before your court. He is the father of the man whom I shall marry. You have a right to know all there is to know about Grant Adams." She shook her head decisively. "But Kenyon's mother, that has nothing to do with what I am asking you!" She paused, then cried passionately: "Kenyon's mother--oh, father, that's some poor woman's secret, which has no bearing on this case. If you had any right on earth to know, I should tell you; but you have no right."
"Now, Lila," answered her father petulantly--"look here--why do you get entangled with those Adamses? They are a low lot. Girl, a Van Dorn has no business stooping to marry an Adams. Miserable mongrel blood is that Adams blood child. Why the Van Dorns--" but Lila's pleading, wistful voice went on:
"In all my life, father, I have asked you only this one thing, and this is just, you know how just it is--that you keep my future husband's father from a cruel, shameful death. And--now--" her voice was quivering, near the breaking point, and she cried: "And now, now you bring in blood and family. What are they in an hour like this! Oh, father--father, would my daddy--the fine, strong, loving daddy of my dreams do this? Would he--would he--oh, daddy--daddy--daddy!" she cried, beseechingly.
Perhaps he could see in her face the consciousness that some one was behind him, for he turned and saw his wife standing in the doorway. As he saw her, there rose in him the familiar devil she always aroused, which in the first years wore the mask of love, but dropped that mask for the sneer of hate. It was the devil's own voice that spoke, quietly, suavely, and with a hardness that chilled his daughter's heart. "Lila, perhaps the secret of Kenyon's mother is no affair of mine, but neither is Grant Adams's fate after I turn him back to the jailer, an affair of mine. But you make Grant's affair mine; well, then--I make this secret an affair of mine. If you want me to release Grant Adams--well, then, I insist." The gray features of his wife stopped him; but he smiled and waved his hand grandly at the miserable woman, as he went on: "You see my wife has bragged to me once or twice that she knows who Kenyon's mother is, Lila, and now--"
The daughter put her hands to her face and turned away, sick with the horror of the scene. Her heart revolted against the vile intrigue her father was proposing. She turned and faced him, clasping her hands in her anguish, lifted her burning face for a moment and stared piteously at him, as she sobbed: "O dear, dear God--is this my father?" and shaking with shame and horror she turned away.
Chapter L
JUDGE VAN DORN SINGS SOME MERRY SONGS AND THEY TAKE GRANT ADAMS BEHIND A WHITE DOOR
After arguments of counsel, after citation of cases, after the applause of Market Street at some incidental obiter dicta of Judge Van Dorn's about the rights of property, after the court had put on its tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, which the court had brought home from its recent trip to Chicago to witness the renomination of President Taft, after the court, peering through its brown-framed spectacles, was fumbling over its typewritten opinion from the typewriter of the offices of Calvin & Calvin, written during the afternoon by the court's legal alter ego, after the court had cleared its throat to proceed with the reading of the answer to the petition in habeas corpus of Grant Adams, the court, through its owlish glasses, saw the eyes of the petitioner Adams fixed, as the court believed, malignantly on the court.
"Adams," barked the court, "stand up!" With his black slouch hat in his hand, the petitioner Adams rose. It was a hot night and he wiped his brow with a red handkerchief twisted about his steel claw.
"Adams," began the court, laying down the typewritten manuscript, "I suppose you think you are a martyr."
The court paused. Grant Adams made no reply. The court insisted:
"Well, speak up. Aren't you a martyr?"
"No," meeting the eye of the court, "I want to get out and get to work too keenly to be a martyr."
"To get to work," sneered the court. "You mean to keep others from going to work. Now, Adams, isn't it true that you are trying to steal the property of this district from its legal owners by riot and set yourself up as the head of your Democracy of Labor, to fatten on the folly of the working men?" The court did not pause for a reply, but continued: "Now, Adams, there is no merit to the contentions of your counsel in this hearing, but, even if there was mere technical weight to his arguments, the moral issues involved, the vast importance of this ease to the general welfare of this Republic, would compel this court to take judicial notice of the logic of its decision in your favor. For it would release anarchy, backed by legal authority, and strike down the arm of the State in protecting property and suppressing crime."
The court paused, and, taking its heavy spectacles in its fingers, twirled them before asking: "Adams, do you think you are a God? What is this rot you're talking about the Prince of Peace? What do you mean by saying nothing can hurt you? If you know nothing can hurt you, why do you let your attorney plead the baby act and declare that, if you are not released to-night, a mob will wait on you? If you are a God, why don't you help yourself--quell the mob, overcome the devil?"
The crowd laughed and the court perfunctorily rapped for order. The laugh was frankincense and myrrh to the court. So the court clearly showed its appreciation of its own fine sarcasm as it rapped for order and continued insolently: "See here, Adams, if you aren't crazy, what are you trying to do? What do you expect to get out of all this glib talk about the power of spiritual forces and the peaceful revolution and the power greater than bullets and your fanatical ranting about the Holy Ghost in the dupes you are inciting to murder? Come now, maybe you are crazy? Maybe if you'd talk and not stand there like a loon--"
Again the crowd roared and again the court suppressed its chuckle and again order was restored. "Maybe if you'd not stand there grouching, you'd prove to the court that you are crazy, and on the grounds of insanity the court might grant your prayer. Come, now, Adams, speak up; go the whole length. Give us your creed!"
"Well," began Adams, "since you want--"
"Don't you know how to address a court?" The court bellowed.
"To say 'Your honor' would be a formality which even your friends would laugh at," replied Grant quietly. The crowd hissed; the court turned purple. Grant Adams stood rigid, with white face and quivering muscles. His jaws knotted and his fist clenched. Yet when he spoke he held his voice down. In it was no evidence of his tension. Facing for the first few moments of his speech the little group of his friends--Dr. Nesbit, George Brotherton, Captain Morton, Nathan Perry and Amos Adams--who sat at the lawyers' table with Henry Fenn, Grant Adams plunged abruptly into his creed: "I believe that in every human adult consciousness there is a spark of altruism, a divine fire, which marks the fatherhood of God and proves the brotherhood of man. Environment fans that spark or stifles it. Its growth is evidenced in human institutions, in scales and grades of civilization. Christ was a glowing flame of this fire." The court gave a knowing wink to Ahab Wright, who grinned at the court's keen sense of humor. Adams saw the wink, but proceeded: "That is what He means when He says: 'I am the resurrection and the life,' for only as men and nations, races and civilization by their institutions fan that spark to fire, will they live, will they conquer the forces of death ever within them."
Thus far Grant Adams had been speaking slowly, addressing himself more to his friends and the court stenographer than the crowd. Now he faced the crowd defiantly as he let his voice rise and cried: "This is no material world. Humanity is God trying to express Himself in terms of justice--with the sad handicap of time and space ever holding the Eternal Spirit in check. We are all Gods."
Again Market Street, which worshiped the god material, hissed. Grant turned to the men in the benches a mad, ecstatic face and throwing his crippled arm high above his head, cried aloud:
"O men of Harvey, men with whom I have lived and labored, I would give my life if you could understand me; if you could know in your hearts how passionately I yearn to get into your souls the knowledge that only as you give you will have, only as you love these men of the mines and mills, only as you are brothers to these ginks and wops and guinnies, will prosperity come to Harvey. 'I am the resurrection and the life' should ring through your souls; for when brotherhood, expressed in law and customs, gives these men their rightful share in the products of their labor, our resurrected society will begin to live." He stopped dead still for a moment, gazing, almost glaring, into the eyes of the crowd. Ahab Wright dropped his gaze. But John Kollander, who heard nothing, glared angrily back. Then leaning forward and throwing out his claw as if to grapple them, Grant Adams, let out his great voice in a cry that startled Market Street into a shudder as he spoke. "Come, come, come with us and live, oh, men of Market Street, you who are dead and damned! Come with us and live. 'I am the way and the life.'" He checked his rising voice, then said: "Come, let us go forward together, for only then will God, striving for justice in humanity, restore your dead and atrophied souls. Have faith that as you give you will have; as you love, will you live." His manner changed again. The court was growing restless. Grant's voice was low pitched, but it showed a heavy tension of emotion. He stretched his hand as one pleading: "Oh, come with us. Come with us--your brothers. We are one body, why should we have different aims? We are ten thousand here, you are many more. Perhaps we are only dreaming a mad dream, but if you come with us we shall all awake from our dream into a glorious reality."
Market Street laughed. John Kollander bawled: "He's an anarchist--a socialist!" Grant looked at the deaf old man in his blue coat and brass buttons adorned with many little flags, to advertise his patriotism. Taking a cue from John Kollander, Grant cried: "I am moving with the current of Heavenly love, I am a part of that love that is washing into this planet from the infinite source of life beyond our ken. I am moved, I know not how. I am inspired to act, I know not whence. I go I know not where--only I have faith, faith that fears nothing, faith that tells me that insomuch as I act in love, I am a part of the Great Purpose moving the universe, immortal, all powerful, vital, the incarnation of Happiness! I am trying--trying--ah, God, how I am trying, to bring into the world all the love that my soul will carry. I am--"
"That's enough," snapped the court; and turning to Joseph Calvin, Judge Van Dorn said: "That man's crazy. This court has no jurisdiction over the insane. His family can bring a proceeding in habeas corpus before the probate court of the county on the ground of the prisoner's insanity. But I have no right to take judicial notice of his insanity." The Judge folded up his opinion, twirled his heavy glasses a moment, blinked wisely and said: "Gentlemen, this is no case for me. This is a crazy man. I wash my hands of the whole business!"
He rose, put away his glasses deliberately, and was stepping from his dais, when up rose big George Brotherton and cried:
"Say, Tom Van Dorn--if you want this man murdered, say so. If you want him saved, say so. Don't polly-fox around here, dodging the issue. You know the truth of the matter as well as--"
The court smiled tolerantly at the impetuous fellow, who was clearly in contempt of court. The crowd waited breathlessly.
"Well, George," said the suave Judge with condescension in his tone as he strutted into the group of lawyers and reporters about him, "if you know so much about this case, what is the truth?" The crowd roared its approval. "But hire a hall, George--don't bother me with it. It's out of my jurisdiction."
So saying, he elbowed his way out of the room into his office and soon was in his automobile, driving toward the Country Club. He had agreed to be out of reach by telephone during the evening and that part of the agreement he decided to keep.
After the Judge left the room Market Street rose and filed out, leaving Grant standing among the little group of his friends. The sheriff stood near by, chatting with the jailer and as Brotherton came up to bid Grant good-night, Brotherton felt a piece of paper slip into his hands, when he shook hands with Grant. "Don't let it leave your pocket until you see me again," said Grant in a monotone, that no one noticed.
The group--Dr. Nesbit, Nathan Perry, George Brotherton and Captain Morton--stood dazed and discouraged about Grant. No one knew exactly what note to strike--whether of anger or of warning or of cheer. It was Captain Morton who broke the silence.
"'Y gory, man--free speech is all right, and I'm going to stay with you, boy, and fight it out; but, Grant, things do look mighty shaky here, and I wonder if it's worth it--for that class of people, eh?"
From the Captain, Nathan Perry took his cue. "I should say, Grant, that they'll make trouble to-night. Shouldn't we call out the boys from the Valley, and--"
Grant cut in:
"Men, I know what you fear," he said. "You are afraid they will kill me. Why, they can't kill me! All that I am that is worth living is immortal. What difference does it make about this body?" His face was still lighted with the glow it wore while he was addressing the court. "Ten thousand people in the Valley have my faith. And now I know that even this strike is not important. The coming Democracy of Labor is a spiritual caste. And it has been planted in millions of minds. It can never die. It too is immortal. What have guns and ropes and steel bars to do with a vision like this?" He threw back his head, his blue eyes blazed and he all but chanted his defiance of material things: "What can they do to me, to my faith, to us, to these Valley people, to the millions in the world who see what we see, who know what we know and strive for what we cherish? Don't talk to me about death--there is no death for God's truth. As for this miserable body here--" He gazed at his friends for a moment, shook his head sadly and walked to the jailer.
For an hour after the sheriff took Grant to his cell as the town went home and presumably to bed, George Brotherton with Henry Fenn and Nathan Perry, rolled his car around the court house square in the still, hot June night. The Doctor stood by his electric runabout, for half an hour or more. Then, the Doctor feeling that a false alarm had been spread, whirred up the hill. The younger men stayed on Market Street. They left it long after midnight, deserted and still.
As the watching party broke up, a telephone message from the offices of Calvin & Calvin winged its way to Sands Park, and from the shades there came silently a great company of automobiles with hooded lights. One separated from the others and shot down into the Valley of the Wahoo. The others went into Market Street.
At three o'clock the work there was done. The office of the Harvey Tribune was wrecked, and in one automobile rode Amos Adams, a prisoner, while before him, surrounded by a squad of policemen, rode Grant Adams, bound and gagged.
Around the policemen the mob gathered, and at the city limits the policemen abandoned Grant and Amos. Their instructions were to take the two men out of town. The policemen knew the mob. It was not Market Street. It was the thing that Market Street had made with its greed. The ignorance of the town, the scum of the town--men, white and black, whom Market Street, in thoughtless greed the world over, had robbed as children of their birthright; men whose chief joy was in cruelty and who lusted for horror. The mob was the earth-bound demon of Market Street. Only John Kollander in his brass buttons and blue soldier clothes and stuttering Kyle Perry and one or two others of the town's respectability were with the mob that took Grant Adams and his father after the policemen released the father and son at the city limits. The respectables directed; the scum and the scruff of the town followed, yelping not unlike a pack of hungry dogs.
John Kollander led the way to the country club grounds. There was a wide stretch of rolling land, quiet, remote from passing intruders, safe; and there great elm trees cast their protecting shade, even in the starlight, over such deeds as men might wish to do in darkness.
It was nearly four o'clock and the clouds, banked high in the west, were flaming with heat lightning.
On the wide veranda of the country club alone, with a siphon and a fancy, square, black bottle, sat Judge Thomas Van Dorn. He was in his shirt sleeves. His wilted collar, grimy and bedraggled, lay on the floor beside him. He was laughing at something not visible to the waiter, who sat drowsing in the door of the dining room, waiting for the Judge either to go to sleep or to leave the club in his car. The Judge had been singing to himself and laughing quietly at his own ribaldry for nearly an hour. The heat had smothered the poker game in the basement and except for the Judge and the waiter the club house was deserted. The Judge hit the table with the black bottle and babbled:
"Dog bit a rye straw, Dog bit a riddle-O! Dog bit a little boy Playing on a fiddle-O!"
Then he laughed and said to the sleepy waiter: "Didn't know I could sing, did you, Gustave!"
The waiter grinned. The Judge did not hear a footstep behind him. The waiter looked up and saw Kyle Perry.
"Oh, I know a maid And she's not afraid To face--
"Why, hello Kyle, you old stuttering scoundrel--have one on me--cleanses the teeth--sweetens the breath and makes hair grow on your belly!"
He laughed and when Kyle broke in:
"S-s-say, T-T-Tom, the f-f-fellows are all over in the g-g-golf l-l-links."
"The hell they are, Kyle," laughed the Judge. "Tell 'em to come over and have a cold one on me--Gustave, you go--"
"B-b-but they d-don't want a drink. The p-p-poker b-b-bunch said you were here and th-th-they s-s-sent m-m-me to--"
"S-s-s-sure they d-d-did, Kyle," interrupted Van Dorn. "They sent you to read the Declaration of Independence to-morrow and wanted you to begin now and get a g-g-good st-st-start!" He broke into song:
"Oh, there was an old man from Dundee Who got on a hell of a spree, Oh, he wound up the clock, With--
"Say, Kyle," the Judge looked up foolishly, "you didn't know that I was a cantatrice." He laughed and repeated the last word slowly three times and then giggled.
"Still sober. I tell Mrs. Van Dorn that when I can say cantatrice or specification," he repeated that word slowly, "I'm fit to hold court."
"Oh, the keyhole in the door-- The keyhole in the door--"
he bellowed.
"Now, l-l-listen, T-T-Tom," insisted Perry. "I t-t-tell you the bunch has g-g-got Grant Adams and the old man out there in the g-g-golf l-links and they heard you were h-h-here and they s-s-sent me to tell you they were g-g-going to g-g-give him all the d-d-degrees and they w-w-want to t-t-tie a s-s-sign on him when they t-t-turn him loose and h-h-head him for Om-m-ma-h-ha--"
"B-b-better h-h-h-head him for h-h-hell," mocked the Judge.
"Well, they've g-got an iron b-b-band they've b-b-bound on h-h-him and they've got a b-b-board and some t-t-tar and they w-w-want a m-motto."
The Judge reached for his fountain pen in his white vest and when the waiter had brought a sheet of paper, he scribbled while he sang sleepily:
"Oh, there was a man and he could do, He could do--he could do;
"Here," he pushed the paper to Perry, who saw the words:
"Get on to the Prince of Peace, Big Boss of the Democracy of Labor."
"That's k-k-kind of t-t-tame, don't y-y-you think?" said Kyle.
"That's all right, Kyle--anyway, what I've written goes:
"Oh, there was an old woman in Guiana."
He sang and waved Kyle proudly away. And in another hour the waiter had put him to bed.
* * * * *
It was nearly dawn when George Brotherton had told his story to Laura. They sat in the little, close, varnish-smelling room to which he called her.
She had come through rain from Harvey. As she came into the dreary, shabby, little room in South Harvey, with its artificial palms and artificial wreaths--cheap, commercial habiliments of ostentatious mourning, Laura Van Dorn thought how cruel it was that he should be there, in a public place at the end, with only the heavy hands of paid attendants to do the last earthly services for him--whose whole life was a symbol of love.
But her heart was stricken, deeply, poignantly stricken by the great peace she found behind the white door. Yet thus the dust touches our souls' profoundest depths--always with her memory of that great peace, comes the memory of the odor of varnish and carbolic acid and the drawn, spent face of George Brotherton, as he stood before her when she closed the door. He gazed at her piteously, a wreck of a man, storm-battered and haggard. His big hands were shaking with a palsy of terrible grief. His moon face was inanimate, and vagrant emotions from his heart flicked across his features in quivers of anguish. His thin hair was tousled and his clothes were soiled and disheveled.
"I thought you ought to know, Laura--at once," he said, after she had closed the white door behind her and sat numb and dumb before him. "Nate and Henry and I got there about four o'clock. Well, there they were--by the big elm tree--on the golf course. His father was there and he told me coming back that when they wanted Grant to do anything--they would string up Amos--poor old Amos! They made Grant stoop over and kiss the flag, while they kicked him; and they made him pull that machine gun around the lake. The fools brought it up from the camp in South Harvey." Brotherton's face quivered, but his tears were gone. He continued: "They strung poor old Amos up four times, Laura--four times, he says." Brotherton looked wearily into the street. "Well, as we came down the hill in our car, we could see Grant. He was nearly naked--about as he is now. We came tearing down the hill, our siren screaming and Nate and me yelling and waving our guns. At the first scream of our siren, there was an awful roar and a flash. Some one," Brotherton paused and turned his haggard eyes toward Laura--"it was deaf John Kollander, he turned the lever and fired that machine gun. Oh, Laura, God, it was awful. I saw Grant wilt down. I saw--"
The man broke into tears, but bit his lips and continued: "Oh, they ran like snakes then--like snakes--like snakes, and we came crashing down to the tree and in a moment the last machine had piked--but I know 'em, every man-jack!" he cried. "There was the old man, tied hand and foot, three yards from the tree, and there, half leaning, half sitting by the tree, the boy, the big, red-headed, broken and crippled boy--was panting his life out." Brotherton caught her inquiring eyes. "It was all gone, Laura," he said softly, "all gone. He was the boy, the shy, gentle boy that we used to know--and always have loved. All this other that the years have brought was wiped from his eyes. They were so tender and--" He could go no further. She nodded her understanding. He finally continued: "The first thing he said to me was, 'It's all right, George.' He was tied, they had pulled the claw off and his poor stumped arm was showing and he was bleeding--oh, Laura."
Brotherton fumbled in his pocket and handed an envelope to her.
"'George,' he panted, as I tried to make him comfortable--'have Nate look after father.' And when Nate had gone he whispered between gasps, 'that letter there in the court room--' He had to stop a moment, then he whispered again, 'is for her, for Laura.' He tried to smile, but the blood kept bubbling up. We lifted him into an easier position, but nothing helped much. He realized that and when we quit he said:
"'Now then, George, promise me this--they're not to blame. John Kollander isn't to blame. It was funny; Kyle Perry saw him as I did, and Kyle--' he almost laughed, Laura.
"'Kyle,' he repeated, 'tried to yell at old John, but got so excited stuttering, he couldn't! I'm sure the fellows didn't intend--' he was getting weak; 'this,' he said.
"'Promise me and make--others; you won't tell. I know father--he won't. They're not--it's--society. Just that,' he said. 'This was society!' He had to stop. I felt his hand squeeze. 'I'm--so--happy,' he said one word at a time, gripping my hand tighter and tighter till it ached." Brotherton put out his great hand, and looked at it impersonally, as one introducing a stranger for witness. Then Brotherton lifted his eyes to Laura's and took up his story:
"'That's hers,' he said; 'the letter,' and then 'my messages--happy.'"
The woman pressed her letter to her lips and looked at the white door. She rose and, holding her letter to her bosom, closed her eyes and stood with a hand on the knob. She dropped her hand and turned from the white door. The dawn was graying in the ugly street. But on the clouds the glow of sunrise blushed in promise. She walked slowly toward the street. She gazed for a moment at the glorious sky of dawn.
When her eyes met her friend's, she cried:
"Give me your hand--that hand!"
She seized it, gazed hungrily at it a second, then kissed it passionately. She looked back at the white door, and shook with sobs as she cried:
"Oh, you don't think he's there--there in the night--behind the door? We know--oh, we do know he's out here--out here in the dawn."
Chapter LI
IN WHICH WE END AS WE BEGAN AND ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER
The great strike in the Wahoo Valley now is only an episode in the history of this struggle of labor for its rights. The episode is receding year by year further and more dimly into the past and is one of the long, half-forgotten skirmishes wherein labor is learning the truth that only in so far as labor dares to lean on peace and efficiency can labor move upward in the scale of life. The larger life with its wider hope, requires the deeper fellowship of men. The winning or losing of the strike in the Wahoo meant little in terms of winning or losing; but because the men kept the peace, kept it to the very end, the strike meant much in terms of progress. For what they gained was permanent; based on their own strength, not on the weakness of those who would deny them.
But the workers in the mines and mills of the Wahoo Valley, who have gone to and from their gardens, planting and cultivating and harvesting their crops for many changing seasons, hold the legend of the strong man, maimed and scarred, who led them in that first struggle with themselves, to hold themselves worthy of their dreams. In a hundred little shacks in the gardens, and in dingy rooms in the tenements may be found even to-day newspaper clippings pinned to the wall with his picture on them, all curled up and yellow with years. Before a wash-stand, above a bed or pasted over the kitchen stove, soiled and begrimed, these clippings recall the story of the man who gave his life to prove his creed. So the fellowship he brought into the world lives on.
And the fellowship that came into the world as Grant Adams went out of it, touched a wider circle than the group with whom he lived and labored. The sad sincerity with which he worked proved to Market Street that the man was consecrated to a noble purpose, and Market Street's heart learned a lesson. Indeed the lives of that long procession of working men who have given themselves so freely--where life was all they had to give--for the freedom of their fellows from the bondage of the times, the lives of these men have found their highest value in making the Market Street eternal, realize its own shame. So Grant Adams lay down in the company of his peers that Market Street might understand in his death what his fellows really hoped for. He was a seed that is sown and falls upon good ground. For Market Street after all is not a stony place; seeds sown there bring forth great harvests. And while the harvest of Grant Adams's life is not at hand; the millennium is not here; the seed is quickening in the earth. And great things are moving in the world.
* * * * *
Of course, there came a time in Harvey, even in the house of Nesbit, when there was marrying and giving in marriage. It was on a winter's night when the house inside the deep, dark Moorish verandas, celebrating Mrs. Nesbit's last bout with the spirit of architecture, glowed with a jewel of light.
And in due course they appeared, Rev. Dr. John Dexter leading the way, followed by a thin, dark-skinned young man with eyes to match and a rather slight, shortish girl, blond and pink with happy trimmings and real pearls on her eyelashes. The children jabbered, and the women wept and the men wiped their eyes, and it was altogether a gay occasion. Just as the young people were ready to look the world squarely in the face, George Brotherton, thinking he heard some one moving outside in the deep, dark veranda, flicked on the porch light, and through the windows he saw--and the merry company could not help seeing two faces--two wan, unhappy faces, staring hungrily in at the bridal pair. They stood at different corners of the house and did not seem to know of one another's presence until the light revealed them. Only an instant did their faces flash into the light, as John Dexter was reading from the Bible a part of the service that he loved to put in, "and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." The faces vanished, there was a scurrying across the cement floor of the veranda and two figures met on the lawn in shame and anger.
But they in the house did not know of the meeting. For everybody was kissing everybody else, and the peppermint candy in little Grant Brotherton's mouth tasted on a score of lips in three minutes, and a finger dab of candy on Jasper Adams's shirt front made the world akin.
After the guests had gone, three old men lingered by the smoldering logs. "Well, now, Doc Jim," asked Amos, "why shouldn't I? Haven't I paid taxes in Greeley County for nearly fifty years? Didn't I make the campaign for that home in the nineties, when they called it the poor house--most people call it that now. I only stay there when I am lonesome and I go out in a taxi-cab at the county's expense like a gentleman to his estate. And I guess it is my estate. I was talking to Lincoln about it the other night, and he says he approves. Ruskin says I am living my religion like a diamond in the rock."
To the Captain's protest he answered, "Oh, yes, I know that--but that would be charity. My pencils and shoestrings and collar buttons and coat hangers keep me in spending money. I couldn't take charity even from you men. And Jasper's money," the gray poll wagged, and he cried, "Oh, no--not Ahab Wright's and Kyle Perry's--not that money. Kenyon is forever slipping me fifty. But I don't need it. John Dexter keeps a room always ready for me, and I like it at the Dexters' almost as much as I do at the county home. So I don't really need Kenyon's money, however much joy he takes in giving it. And I raise the devil's own fuss to keep him from doing it."
The Doctor puffed, and the Captain in his regal garments paraded the long room, with his hands locked under his coattails.
"But, Amos," cried the Captain, "under the law, no man wearing that button," and the Captain looked at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion, proudly adorning the shiny coat, "no soldier under the law, has to go out there. They've got to keep you here in town, and besides you're entitled to a whopping lot of pension money for all these unclaimed years."
The white old head shook and the pursed old lips smiled, as the thin little voice replied, "Not yet, Ezra--not yet--I don't need the pension yet. And as for the Home--it's not lonesome there. A lot of 'em are bedfast and stricken and I get a certain amount of fun--chirping 'em up on cloudy days. They like to hear from Emerson and John A. Logan, and Sitting Bull and Huxley and their comrades. So I guess I'm being more or less useful." He stroked his scraggy beard and looked at the fire. "And then," he added, "she always seems nearer where there is sorrow. Grant, too, is that way, though neither of 'em really has come."
The Captain finding that his money was ashes in his hands, and not liking the thought and meditation of death, changed the subject, and when the evening was old, Amos Adams called a taxi-cab, and at the county's expense rode home.
At the end of a hard winter day, descending tardily into the early spring, they missed him at the farm. No one knew whether he had gone to visit the Dexters, as was his weekly wont, or whether he was staying with Captain Morton in town, where he sometimes spent Saturday night after the Grand Army meeting.
The next day the sun came out and melted the untimely snow banks. And some country boys playing by a limestone ledge in a wide upland meadow above the Wahoo, far from the smoke of town, came upon the body of an old man. Beside him was strewn a meager peddler's kit. On his knees was a tablet of paper; in his left hand was a pencil tightly gripped. On the tablet in a fine, even hand were the words: "I am here, Amos," and his old eyes, stark and wide, were drooped, perhaps to look at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion that shone on his shrunken chest and told of a great dream of a nation come true, or perhaps in the dead, stark eyes was another vision in another world.
And so as in the beginning, there was blue sky and sunshine and prairie grass at the end.
Chapter LII
NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A Q E D OR A HIC FABULA DOCET
"And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!" And this fable teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of progress that God has been working in this America of ours during these splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.
And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent--rich, crass, material, beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the god of gross and palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American spirit--the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the seas, had bid them fight kings and principalities and powers, had forced them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it "the homestead of the free"; the spirit that had called them by the millions to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.
This spirit met the god of things as they are, and for a generation grappled in a mighty struggle.
And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that God had departed from it.
Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans to go forth and fight in the Great War--not for themselves, not for their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world. And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how God's truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own was won.
So it came to pass that the richness of the continent was poured out for an ideal, that the genius of those who had seemed to be serving only Mammon was devoted passionately to a principle, and that the blood of those who came in seeming greed to America was shed gloriously in the high emprise which called America to this new world crusade. Moses in the burning bush speaking with God, Saul on the road to Damascus, never came closer to the force outside ourselves which makes for righteousness,--the force that has guided humanity upward through the ages,--than America has come in this hour of her high resolve. And yet for fifty years she has come into this holy ground steadily, and unswervingly; indeed, for a hundred years, for three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to the red fields of France, America has come a long and perilous way--yet always sure, and never faltering.
To have lived in the generation now passing, to have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the hearts of the people, to have watched the steady triumph in our American life of the spirit of justice, of fellowship over the spirit of greed, to have seen the Holy Ghost rise in the life of a whole nation, was a blessed privilege. And if this tale has reflected from the shallow paper hearts of those phantoms flitting through its pages some glimpse of their joy in their pilgrimage, the story has played its part. If the fable of Grant Adams's triumphant failure does not dramatize in some way the victory of the American spirit--the Puritan conscience--in our generation, then, alas, this parable has fallen short of its aim. But most of all, if the story has not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the scornful, and to deny the reality of God's purpose in this world, even though it is denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so desolate as it is in the heart of a fool.
THE END
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