His amorous stupidity often exasperated her.
One night she yielded a narrow seat for him on the porch-swing, an openly demanded tête-à-tête, although the cushions on the stone steps and the settles within were warm with gossiping friends. "You're always so mournful when you're with me, Pelham."
"Oh, Mrs. Meade!" She tied his tongue when it came to repartee.
"Oh, Mr. Judson," she mimicked fretfully; then affirmed with decision, "you must meet Jane Lauderdale. She's about your tempo."
His eyes widened apprehensively; Dorothy's caprices were sometimes alarming. "Who's she?"
"The most serious little soul I know ... and the dearest. You'll like her, when you meet her."
"When?"
"Planning to desert me already, sir! I'll have you for a month yet; she's away."
"I'm satisfied; it's your lead;" he dropped with some gracefulness into the parlance of auction bridge.
The time came when she took the lead. The crowd were noisy at the piano one night, when Dorothy turned to him, in the tiny butler's pantry, laying her piled platter on a shelf behind his head. Lifting her chin, she said provokingly, "Don't you want to kiss me, Pelham?"
The suggestion plunged him under a quick disquieting flood of emotion. One of his precious ideals citadeling womanhood crumbled with intuitive rapidity. A warm inner lash flushed his neck and cheeks. Beyond this betrayal, which was of short duration, he showed no sign of this delicious incarnation of his remotely fantasied passion, this focalizing on the solid earth of an ethereal hunger and its satisfaction.
His arms rounded her; he brought his lips down to her level; her own, moist and cool, opened within his. The ecstatic sensation closed his eyes.
She slapped him lightly on the cheek. "That's enough, now, you big boy!"
All that evening he kept his eyes on her, and managed a pilfered caress just before leaving.
Her eyes laughed at him. "Do you know, Pelham, I'm not sure I'll wish you on Jane, after all!"
He began to time his visits to the Meade house so that they found Lyman away. One cool dusk—Lyman was in Philadelphia for the week—he veered carefully to something that was worrying him. "Nell—my sister—swears that the crowd are talking about us, Dorothy."
"Wants to wean you?" She laughed mellowly, the fluffy crown of curled gold dancing, as if sharing the mirth. "They've talked about Lyman for years, now; it hasn't slowed him. I like you far too much, boy dear, to give you up for idle tongues."
"I hate to have them mentionyou." He twitched restlessly. "You know what you're doing to me, Dorothy. I've been straight ... so far. You're setting me on fire. This is a slippery hill to keep straight on; I might skid."
"Meaning?" She achieved two passable smoke rings—the effort after them was her chief motive in smoking—and idly planned a gown, tinted like the furnace-glowing sky, with twined gray smoke-wreaths in couples and trios—grouped figures that blent into one, then idly drifted apart.
"Kissing's only excuse is as a prelude to love's physical finale," he answered straightly. The dusk hid her wry face, as he continued, "Lyman's in the way. You say you still love him."
"Yes...." She paraphrased, with a show of pondering, something she had read in a showy woman's magazine. "He can't help being what he is. None of us can change the material, though we may alter the pattern, or dye the goods.... Much good that would do."
"The lady turned philosopher!" His hand caressed her fluffy short sleeve caressingly. "So ... you won't take me for a lover."
"Hardly," she laughed with sober hunger, grieving at youth's lack of subtlety.
"You're setting me on fire," he repeated with somber relish. "You'll drive me to some other woman, or ... women. You'll lose me either way; you wouldn't want me then; and I——this can't last always."
"I'll run the risk, boy."
The street quieted, as the late cars from the club droned away into the mist-damp distance. As Pelham turned on his lamps for the homeward run, he saw that the great summer triangle had swung from the east to the sunset horizon; Vega's white beauty, dragging near the western hills, was smudged by the unsleeping breath of those squat furnaces and coke ovens, whose pauseless task was to transmute the riven ore into iron sows and pigs—the first step in the alchemy that transformed the skeleton of the mountain into a restless trickle of gold, urging itself into the overfull vaults of his father. Paul slept now, as the son would soon sleep; but those furnaces, and their parched servitors eternally feeding the hungry mouths of fire, did not sleep. Some tortuous filament of thought brought him back to Dorothy, and the flaming furnace that she had helped light within him ... which did not sleep. With all of the scorching rapture which her surface surrender yielded, he wondered if it would not have been better if he had not met her.... There were once three men in another fiery furnace; but they had walked out, unsinged. He knew himself well enough to be sure that he had no salamander blood; was he strong enough to tempt the break from the charring spell? Well, there was time to think of that again.
When he reached the highest crest, Vega still hung over the sullen glow of a furnace throat; but the smudge had grown darker.
The next morning his father, who seemed gifted with the ability to pierce unerringly to whatever weighed on the son's desires, went into the subject with him. "This isn't criticism, Pelham; it's an attempt to help you steer clear of any mess. Particularly with a married woman. It sounds—nasty."
The son was indignant. "There's been nothing improper. I've taken a few Sunday suppers there——"
"Of course, of course." Pelham knew these dry tones. "It doesn't pay. I ought to have talked with you before. It's easy for a young man, particularly with good financial prospects, to get roped in by some woman, married or unmarried.... Sometimes he has to pay well to get out."
"That's ridiculous, about ... about ..."
"It doesn't pay, visiting one woman," Paul continued, in matter-of-fact tones. "Young Little almost had to marry one of the telephone operators at the Stevens Hotel. His father loosened up five thousand to get rid of her. I haven't any money to waste on your foolishness."
There was a silent interval.
"If you must have a woman—I passed through the stage myself, like all young men—don't you fool with the half-decent kind. You'd better go right down to Butler's Avenue, and pay your money down for what you get. There's less chance of diseases—they have medical inspection. And it avoids a serious mix-up."
Pelham's face went white. "I don't need that kind of advice. I've kept straight so far; I intend to keep so, until I'm married. Money couldn't pay me to go there."
The older man exhaled noisily. "Remember what I said."
A swelling white rage choked the boy's voice. "Does—does mother know that you went to—such places?"
Paul turned sharply. "Of course not. There are some things women are supposed to know nothing about."
That was the end of the discussion.
Pelham gradually decreased the frequency of his visits; but he still managed precious afternoons with her in his car, and occasional evenings, which left him irritatingly disturbed. He wanted to see more of her, and knew that he should see less; he was eager even to hear her name mentioned at home, but embarrassed if it was.
"Listen, Nell," he interposed to his sister, when he was helping to draw up the list of guests for a summer fête the girls planned. "You used to be pretty fond of Mrs. Meade."
"Not much! You can't have your Dorothy here."
Pelham was exasperated with the whole lot—always excepting his mother. His long confidences with her had begun when he was a child, and still were a pleasure and a panacea. One of these talks gave aid to his bewilderment about Dorothy, although she was not mentioned. It had started inconsequentially with a discussion of little Ned's conduct, and dipped into many topics. In the course of it, he promised to sound both the brothers on their attitude toward girls, and the annoying problem of sex.
"You can do much more with the boys than I, Pelham. They'll listen to an older brother, where they wouldn't listen to their mother."
Lovingly he patted the smooth flush of her cheek, delighting in the shy wildrose beauty of her face. His fingers crept from this to the straight chestnut folds of her hair, longing to stroke its unbound cascades, and let them curtain his face, as she had done when he was a little boy in bed; as she still sometimes did.
Then he answered her. "I listened to you, mother. It was your words and your wishes that have kept me straight."
"And, please God, they will always keep my own dear son the finest, cleanest, purest man in the world."
Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to Paul, who came immovably first, intervened.
This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old power.
He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp relief the serrated crest of the distant hills.
Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors.
He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where the splashing drops bounced inward.
There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a deafening pattering rattle of thunder.
Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home. I hope it doesn't catch him."
Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its course!
The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house beneath its unrelenting fire.
Pelham switched on the light, and pulled out an unread volume of Stevenson. His fingers loafed over the leaves, as he listened to the persistent drive of the storm.
The rain exhausted its ammunition during the night; a clear truce followed. The bright green cleanliness of leaves, the reburnished brilliance of golden-glow and flaming canna, showed the hill heartened by the hours of storm.
But there was nothing morning-minded in Pelham's soul, as he irked over the day's details at the mines. All that he had to do seemed mechanical, inconsequential; the planning had been done already—his admirable rôle was that of a cog, touching off other cogs to their diverse tasks in the vast mechanism that was disemboweling the mountain,—the mothering mountain, that had once been pal and parent to him. Less than a cog, indeed—for the other cogs held him as alien; he could not share their lives nor their thoughts, nor was he one of the final beneficiaries, no matter what the miners might think.
He knew, too, that his father was becoming as alien to him as these miners held that the son was to them. Pelham was wrapped up in the minutiæ of the mining; and this was a book in which Paul had covered only the first simple chapters. Again, the son's reading at the northern college, and the intangible outlook acquired there, opened vistas that Paul could not share; and in those matters where the two wills came into direct touch, such as marrying "where money was," and relationship with women, they were pole-distant apart. The son, in his youthful restlessness, was at outs with the whole situation; he was bored with it, as he was with the young concerns of his brothers, the chatter of Nell and Sue, and the immeasurable vapidity of Nellie Tolliver, Lane Cullom, Dorothy Meade, the whole group of Adamsville's stale, unprofitable friends, young and old. There was, of course, his mother ... and the mountain; but she was part and parcel of Paul's existence, too; and the mountain seemed strangely uncommunicative and passive, these days, as if waiting for him to make the break, to take an affirmative step needed to quicken his thinking and being.
The insipid promise of the afternoon's fête, for instance—were his days to be an unending vista of such chatter, and trivial preening and strutting of visionless girls and young men? Dorothy offered more than that; yet he was singularly at odds with himself over her. To be burnt by a fire he could not touch: to chain himself, a voluntary Tantalus, before perilous sweets just out of reach—an admirable rôle! It was in his own hands to end it; and since Paul's advice about Butler's Avenue did not condemn the thing that he shrank from in Dorothy's case, he was repelled by the remembrance that he had ever considered ending the purity that Mary had held him to.
After all, his sisters' fête would be better than that.
But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and lemonade!—Good God! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only slowed with the turn into the road to the city.
At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet scraped slowly up the steps; after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out.
"Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the papers.... We'll be down soon."
So she even assumed his presence!
The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally.
"I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr. Judson?"
As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly—those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned naïveté of a child—a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.
The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother—a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness.
The impression of childish naïveté, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.
Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?"
"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.
"Don't you dance?"
"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the country club are rather banal ... even Dorothy's friends."
"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."
"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in, to the point of obsession, don't you think?"
"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or tennis?"
A charming precision was in her answers, as if they had been framed before. "Tennis suits the strenuous adolescent; golf, the bay-windowed corporation head. One is behind me; the other I pray never to become. I don't love corporations," she smiled. The smile covered her preliminary judgment; his questions were banal, almost gauche; but what could one expect of a worshiper of Dorothy?
What did the girl like, anyhow? These were sure-fire topics with all the rest Pelham knew.... Perhaps thePost, on the table nesting her arm. "Are you enjoying the latest Chambers' story? I don't think it's up to 'The Danger Mark'—though, of course, Chambers'——"
"I enjoyed part of the opening—you know, the dry-goods inventory—the lingerie part. It's informative: a Sears-Roebuck for the Broadway shops. But—beyond that!"
"What are you interested in?" Inability to pigeon-hole her among the feminine types he was used to called forth this poverty-stricken directness.
"I'm interested in what you are doing, Mr. Judson, ever since 'Thea mentioned it." Her straightforward eyes lit up for the first time.
"She's done nothing but sing your praises for the last few weeks." He rose in fatuous gracefulness to her opening.
The frank eyes measured him coolly. "What interested me was your work. You have charge of the mining at your father's place, haven't you?"
A bit dazed by the sudden shift, he told his connection with the management.
Her nod of satisfaction puzzled him. "I've always wanted to learn something of the other half of the story; I know the miners' side, from work with the United Charities. And I've been studying reports, until a sheer excess of wrath made me lay them aside."
What odd reading for a girl! "How did you happen to take that up?"
"Mrs. Anderson has me on her Labor Legislation Committee." She smiled gently, the eyelids nearing one another in unconscious grace. "I tried to interest 'Thea in it; one meeting tired her out."
He had a fleeting vision of volatile Nell or finicky Sue reading a mining report. Evidently this Miss Lauderdale was something of a person. Of course, it wasn't exactly a woman's work, unless her charm earned it as a unique prerogative.
A contented smile lengthened his lips. "We treat our miners pretty well, in this state."
"Yes, that is the general impression. I wonder if you've gone into the matter very thoroughly?" She was coolly critical; he felt a bit shriveled under her friendly gaze. "The South is backward, in some things; but it's waking up. You went to Harvard, didn't you?"
"Yale Sheff."
"Oh, that's better. I have a brother prepping at Laurenceville; he'll go to Sheff or Massachusetts Tech."
"Better, you say? Just how?"
"Yale at least talks about democracy." Her phrases were astonishingly direct, her intonations warm and enthusiastic.
"Did you go to college?" Pelham wondered.
She shrugged ever so slightly. "No; a finishing school—Ogontz. Don't mention it, please. Tell me something of your work."
Her leading questions were beginning to reveal his blundering vacuity about labor conditions on the mountain, when Dorothy fluffed out. Her sharp eyes noticed at once his sheepish interest. "Jane's been boring you with a discussion of the labor question, foreign and domestic, I'm sure! I can't convert her. She'll worm everything you know out of you in half an hour, I warn you."
Pelham agreed, a bit chagrined. "Yes.... She was just telling me what I didn't know about my men."
Jane's lips curved open into a smile, friendly and somehow approving. "You'll learn, I think."
Dorothy yawned in intimate boredom, "An apt pupil, no doubt.... I thought this was the day of the great fête, Pelham."
"It is," he smiled. "They are at this moment enjoying lemonade and lettuce sandwiches."
Dorothy looked puzzled; Jane's cheeks crinkled appreciatively.
The older woman turned to the girl with ruffled rudeness. "Stay on for supper, Jeanne?"
The other shook her head. "I must run along. Choir practice to-night," with a mischievous dimple.
"Religious all of a sudden?"
"The rector flourishes in my spiritual presence."
"How is his new reverence?"
Her mouth twisted piquantly. "Mushy.... Nice boy, though. Coming by to-morrow?"
"Between three and four."
"So long.... Good night, Mr. Mine Superintendent."
Pelham convoyed her to the steps, doubly unwilling to let her go, as he reflected on her fresh charm, and the blind alley of the other woman's amorousness. "I enjoyed our talk, Miss Lauderdale. Could the course continue?"
"I'm always glad to have a human being to talk to. I'm staying with the Andersons; the number's in the phone book."
Thoughtfully he returned to the porch, and a cretonned wicker chair, ignoring the message of the partly-occupied couch.
Inquisitive gray eyes watched him. "Do you like her?"
"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."
"Men never do like Jeanne," she assured him, with a complacent rippling gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious. Doesn't like dancing, and all——" waving vaguely in the direction of the club.
"Tell me something about her."
"There isn't much. Jeanne—I love the French twist, don't you?—Jeanne's a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or something as uplifting and tiresome."
"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"
"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,—they go to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no brains." She smiled provocatively.
This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage, that the other girl was by now blocks away.
A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the Anderson house at eight.
"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the balustrade.
The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but the title, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second chapter when she appeared.
"What a remarkable Wells book!"
She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's stuffy inside."
"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a handy envelope back.
For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into his stride naturally—and he was a good walker. Instinctively they turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible invitation.
Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet. The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above, framing two stars brighter than Vega.
"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away' from your aunt——"
"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that bad, though."
"Think of running away to Adamsville!"
"It is an 'H' of a place——" She looked quizzically at him; his smile reassured her. "I believe in that kind of hell. But it's nothing, compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.
He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And a politician?"
"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor, runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can. She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.
"Just why?"
The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo—parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.
She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."
"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.
She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens. "Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home—we were living in Indiana then—packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."
He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest—Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once. I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.
"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.
"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."
"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."
"He figured that I was his son—accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."
She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.
"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly. "Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other extreme, and assume that the child has an individuality from the start?"
"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of embarrassment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.
"Yes.... Very much."
The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder; the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between shining chestnut hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean over and kiss it—harshly—as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently; and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kinship that he met for the first time in the other sex. Why, at times her impressions seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating.... Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonishing was life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this dearest hour that he had yet known!
Jane's thoughts, too, were busier than her words. He was attractive, she had at once decided, when measured beside the superficial trousered creatures, "positively not grasshoppers," that smirked their way through Adamsville society; but he was young, very young, in his ideas—his brain still swimming in the haze of third-hand opinions which his father had inherited from slave-wealthy forbears. Men cherished easy mental ruts grooved by the unprogressive centuries; pioneering paths were only for the few. Pelham Judson looked hopeful; no more. Yet there was a distinguishing, cordial charm in his courtesy; it was not all lip-service. Poor kid! With a father like Paul Judson, and a mother swathed in old prejudices like a Memphian mummy in binding cerements—how could he be expected even to see beyond his fortuitous rut? The brief age of miracles had passed. But he was a nice boy; and with a different mother.... Perhaps she could do a little mothering herself; but she must be careful not to let him take her too seriously; or take her at all, she smiled to herself. She had boasted to Dorothy that her husband must be progressive, or pliable; Pelham seemed neither.
And yet he would not make such a bad appearance. Clean looking, athletic, and the son of a Judson—he would not have to be explained away or apologized for. It would be a positive charity to keep him out of the clutches of the usual Adamsville girl, her brain a fricassee of bridge scores and dancing dates. She smiled lazily as she reflected that he would take to mothering; his curly hair begged to be smoothed and tousled. Well, she would give it a yank or two; it would serve Dorothy right.
While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny; certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea: they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.
There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.
Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park.
The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the book he had commenced. Within the week he received it.
It was thrilling reading—setting at war, in each chapter, his keen mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had produced.
And yet his emotions did not lag far behind his mental acceptance. He saw again, and more clearly, that he had come to a parting of the paths in his thinking and being; the past months had inevitably brought him to this. What did other people think of these matters, if they knew of them at all? What would his father think? Again and again he told himself that Paul must accept these obvious, scintillating conclusions from undeniable premises; but a deeper voice, which yielded a sterner satisfaction, reminded that the economic upset—the socialism—expounded here was in direct opposition to all that his father incarnated. The chasm that had split him from Paul was no new thing; it bedded in childhood antipathies, in petty, intangible causes, in dislike at the elder's uneven rigor of discipline, in a deep-seated resistance against being molded to fit the father's pattern, rather than according to his own leanings.
If his father would come with him, well and good; if not, the son at least would be intellectually honest, and right!
There was no doubt in his mind but that Mary, the essence of motherly understanding, would go with him in these new ways.
He finished the rereading with a sense of physical exhaustion, as if the inner conflicts had shaken his bodily balance. With this was a false sense that these must have always been his thoughts—the things that had seeded and sprouted just below his consciousness. How could he have overlooked them so long? The obvious explanation, that they had not been there, did not occur; and he would have denied it, if it had been called to his attention.
A night's tossing wakefulness induced a different mood. The spirit-tiring reading became unreal and inconclusive; he had strayed off after a marsh-light dancing over the morbid swamps of his emotional imagination. Further reading would purge this from his system.
The librarian obligingly pointed out the rest of the scanty shelf-end of socialist books. Ah, these would correct his wandering! There were Engel's "Origin of the Family," a treatise by Bax that he could not unravel, a rebound "Communist Manifesto," Blatchford's "Merrie England," the first volume of "Capital," in the Swan Sonnenschein edition. Eliminating the Bax book, he began to go conscientiously through the others; the task opened into a joyful journey. The persuasive structure that Wells had erected found buttresses and foundations. There was no longer room for carping or delay—he was convinced; more than that, he was stirred by an inner storm, he heard an evangelical trumpeting such as must have overwhelmed Saul in the blinding reproach along the road to Damascus, he acknowledged a lashing command to spend himself for the splendid achievement of this immense dream, nay, this reality that was even now inevitably growing and strengthening throughout the whole man-sown planet.
He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking.
Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths? In college he had had two courses in classical economy; but the subjects had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day.
He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned.
Wealth—all wealth—was the product of labor. That, and nothing else.
Rent, interest, profit—labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money—gold calved no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest. Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor.
War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clashing imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one.
And here was a vast body of men—he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to get the marvelous figures again—throughout every country in the world, with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws, striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace. And he had stayed out of it so long!
Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had gone; money kings must go.
He had called himself a Democrat: by God, he would be a real one!
Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the Gods"; after rereading it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules—the Heraklaphorbia—this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above the sleeping city—a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.
The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines obtruded themselves in fragmentary fashion:
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me,The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone;I hear the voices of the hill and sea;I talk with them, in language all our own.Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown,Vast shining ones, who fling their melodyTo those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone.Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free,The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown,Chanting their boisterous rebel litany;The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me,The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone;I hear the voices of the hill and sea;I talk with them, in language all our own.
Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown,Vast shining ones, who fling their melodyTo those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone.Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.
Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free,The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown,Chanting their boisterous rebel litany;The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....
And then toward the end,
Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone,Blood-brother to them all eternally.All things are one with me, and we are grownOne in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....
Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone,Blood-brother to them all eternally.All things are one with me, and we are grownOne in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....
This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger for an answer to life's unresting questionings.
Men, women, children—the iron city, the world—staggered blindly on, pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but have it, God's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these things.
The following Friday—it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the third evening with her—he tacked the talk around to this theme that had so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East, where the stars rose.
"You know, Jane, I finished that Wells book ... the one I saw first on your table."
"You liked it?" He could feel a smile in the quiet query.
A playful accusation answered her. "You didn't tell me to read it!"
"I knew you would find it for yourself."
He thought this over. "That was better. Tell me, Jane: are you a socialist?"
"Mm ... yes, of course; all sensible people are."
"A member of the party?"
"I've never joined, though I've heard Kate O'Hare, and some of the local 'comrades' speak. And I went to the Debs meeting last fall."
So she was a socialist—one of the despised, reviled believers in the newer, finer creed! He had guessed it all along; the certainty as to it had played some part in the pleasure at his own mental choice. Out of a joyed heart he announced, "I'm going to join—at once! I met a member of the Adamsville local—a Mr. Duckworth——"
"I've met him,—an architect, isn't he? A dear old type!"
"That's the one. He has my application card."
"My dear boy! You're much too precipitate. You ought to read—and think—a lot first."
When she heard his achievements, she had to confess that what he had read already exceeded her desultory knowledge.
"But what will your father think of you!"
Pelham meditated, and spoke out of a divided mind. "He thinks pretty straight. And he likes Wells. I'm going to talk it over with him."
"Here's to a pleasant session! I envy you your courage, Pelham. What Auntie didn't say to me! Even Mrs. Anderson shrugs at my opinions. She's thoroughly bourgeois—charity, labor laws, factory reforms are as far as she dares contemplate." A little smile curved her cheek bewitchingly, as the brilliance of her large eyes caressed him approvingly. "Anything's bourgeois that we socialists don't like, you know."
She went on, after an intimate moment of pondering. "Let me tell you what we are trying to do, first. Mrs. Anderson's committee wants the state to pass a decent mining law. We're behind the rest of the country now in safeguards for miners; and our limping laws aren't observed. The Board of Trade has endorsed the new law, but the state labor federation has played off. Meet those men.... Most of the union bosses are crooks, you know."
"I know the other side says that——" His tone was incredulous.
"There are crooks in both camps, Pelham. Just watch John Pooley and his gang! And, while you talk to the redoubtable Paul J., see what he thinks about our mining bill."
"It's such a little thing, Jane, with socialism to fight for!"
She nodded her head, with a charming echoey dogmatism. "Big movements go forward by little things.... What's the time?"
The radium face of his watch made his own expression fall. "I'm afraid we must turn back, dear lady.... I'll sound my father, and let you know."
His mother, the next morning, casually began to cross-examine him concerning his sudden friendship for the girl. He had not seen Dorothy, he reflected with a start, for two weeks now; Jane had told him that the Meades were leaving for the summer, perhaps to be gone the next year as well. He hardly minded. Dorothy was a closed alley; she did not think,—and even if he had loved her, he could not have married her. But this girl....
"Jane's splendid, mother. I like her immensely."
"Mother knows her, Pelham. She is undeniably clever. She spoke at the State Federation of Women's Clubs in favor of our joining the National. Clever, but very ... young. There are negro clubs in the National, you know. Don't you remember, dear, I told you how I defeated the resolution?"
"I don't remember your mentioning her."
"She made the speech just after mine. She said, 'I am sure that Mrs. Judson, if she met her negro mammy in heaven, would be glad to see her.' And I answered, 'Yes; when I meet her, I expect to say, "Mammy Sarah, how are you? And how are all your folks?" I wouldn't say, "Well, Mrs. Sarah Barbour, what is your opinion of the present state of the drama, and the influence of Kant and Schelling upon American philosophy?"' It floored her. The resolution was defeated."
"I don't see anything so awful in it."
"But—negro clubs, Pelham!"
He waived the point. "She is clever."
Mary pursed her lips. "Her ideas seem ... radical. That's bad enough, in a man; in a woman, it's inexcusable. It gets her talked about."
"People talk about Jane Addams, and Sara Bernhardt."
"There is a difference. I hope mother's boy won't see too much of such a woman.... You haven't mentioned Nellie Tolliver in some time."
"Nellie's head doesn't hold anything except bridge and the club."
"Mrs. Tolliver is a member of the Highland Study Circle, with me, Pelham. Nellie is a dear, sweet girl. Any woman would be proud to have her for a daughter."
Pelham yawned brutally. "Hollis is coming along, mother.... I'm not bothering about marriage yet."
Conquering a bothersome timidity, he sounded his father upon the proposed law, and his recent reading. Paul saw through the timid questionings at once, and answered cautiously. "It won't do you any harm to read that stuff. We all pass through it. Twenty-five years ago, your mother and I read Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,' and liked it. Of course such things can't be taken too seriously."
At the mention of the mining law, the father snorted. "So that's what that Lauderdale girl has been up to! You'll find, Pelham, that Mrs. Anderson is something of a busybody. As that law is framed now, it would bankrupt every mine operator in the State within a year."
"But the principle of the thing——"
"The principle is admirable. But don't you bother about such generalities. You'd better get your mind down to the problems of the mountain; there's enough to be done here to keep your ingenuity exercised."
Jane's chummy note answered his scrawled report of the conversation. "And you might tell him that T. L. G.—'That Lauderdale Girl'—gives him her regards. He likes the principle, does he? I think we've got Governor Tennant on our side, although he's pretty close to your father's crowd. Once the law is passed, we'll make all the mine operators sit up straight! Until Friday night, then...."
While Paul was dictating, in sharp, short sentences, the answers to the batch of mail marked "Mining," two cards were brought in to him.
"John Pooley,President State Federation of Labor."
"R. E. L. Bivens,Editor,The Adamsville Voice of Labor."
His eyes crinkled into a smile, although the mouth remained a hard fixed line. Pelham must see this pair of blood-suckers at work; that would open the boy's eyes to the dry rot in the practical working out of his labor theorizing.
No, he would see them alone. Perhaps he could get at the son indirectly.
"Send Mr. Kane in."
The company's advertising manager opened the private door as the two labor leaders were adjusting themselves complacently into ample chairs.
"What can I do for you, Pooley?"
"We called to see about the convention special of theVoice, sir. Wouldn't you like a half-page write-up for the company, or yourself? The half is only seventy-five dollars.... It'll go where it'll do lots of good, sir."
Paul directed his gaze to the wheezing, balloon-like figure of the editor. "Has Kane given you enough advertising, Bivens?"
The puffed, greedy face smiled ingratiatingly. "Mr. Kane's been very good to us, sir. At least a quarter of a page weekly."
"How has theVoice of Labormade out?"
"It's made out—that's about all, Mr. Judson. Print paper's gone so high, that only the advertisements has made it go. We expect this special will net a neat sum."
He jingled the Woodmen's emblem at the end of a thick gold chain, thoroughly satisfied with the world. There was an Odd Fellows' button on his coat—fraternal orders strengthened his appeals for the paper.
"Pooley, how do you stand on this mining law down at Jackson?"
The lanky president of the State Federation twisted his lame leg more comfortably under him, and leaned forward, gesticulating diplomatically. "It's both good and bad, Mr. Judson. Some of the boys is very strong for it. But I seen an editorial against it in theTimes-Dispatchlast week. I figured you might not be for it."
Paul cut through the verbal knot. "How will the Federation go?"
The other shook his head. "No telling. There's a few of them Socialists is delegates—they're for anything to stir up trouble; but nobody pays much attention to them. Then there is others. It'll be pretty even."
"How would you feel if I took the front and back pages, Bivens?"
"That would be fine for both of us, sir."
"Coming out editorially against that law?"
He wheezed deferentially. "It has some bad flaws, sir. I figured on a write-up against it."
"Make it strong, and I'll take the two pages."
Bivens consulted with the other representative of labor. His eager eyes shone greedily. "How would you like us to put you down, Mr. Judson, for the main speech of the convention? 'Proper Legal Safeguards in Mining,' or something like that?... You know, the front and back pages is more expensive. Say five hundred for the two."
Paul watched their well-fed, ever-hungry faces with mental nausea. "All right."
"You'll make the speech?"
He nodded. "Don't forget the editorial."
As they rose, he lifted his check book with studied obviousness. "If those Socialists make trouble, find out what they want. If another advertisement will handle them——" He did not end the sentence.
He stared after their retreating figures. The spokesmen of labor! A herd of dumb, worthless brutes, led by pig-eyed greed! Promising material to have any say as to the destinies of a country!... Well, Pelham would learn.
Paul had a busy month of it. The mining was beginning to pay at last. Two hundred more convicts, more than a hundred negro workers, had been added to the force in the third ramp; its output had begun to exceed the other two.
After he had purchased the ore lands lying on both sides of the former holding, he called Sam Ross, Dudley Randolph, and the Birrell-Florence representatives into conference. Randolph was the only one who held out, when a pool was proposed to cover prices and wages.
"I don't have trouble with my men, Judson; I don't want any. I'm with you in theory, but I can't see any advantage to me in that proposition."
Paul then opened his alternate plan. The working out of the details took two weeks, but the result was the incorporation of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company. Paul Judson's salary as managing vice-president was fifty thousand, in addition to what the dividends would bring.
He figured up the value of his stock. Unless it depreciated, he could get out—now—with five million dollars! And this was only the mining rights. He could afford to let Pelham play with a few fool notions, when things broke this way!
On his next conference with the son over progress at the works, well-planned hints gave Pelham the opening to learn of the invitation from John Pooley, and the father's acceptance. "Of course, my opinions don't go as far as yours——"
"I didn't expect that. But thisisgreat news! You'll come out for the new bill, after all?"
"With necessary practical modifications. I'm studying it out now."
Pelham repeated enthusiastically, "It's splendid news!"
At his first opportunity he phoned down to Jane an insistent plea for that afternoon. "You'll have to see me, lady dear; I've something important to tell you."
Was there ever a girl to whom these words, from even a passable lover, or, for that matter, a possible one, did not bring the fluttering fantasy of what woman has been so long taught to consider the one important something that she is to hear? This thought came first to Jane; then, smiling at her overstayed fraction of thinking, she promised the afternoon.
She was on the porch when his wheels slid to a standstill at the curb; he was beside her before she was well out of her chair. "The most amazing thing, Jane!" as urgent fingers levitated her into the seat beside him. "Dad's coming our way!"
Something of his flaring enthusiasm heightened her reply. "You can't be serious! I'd as soon expect Auntie to be a convert!" Her mothering eyes searched his face anxiously. "You aren't teasing me?"
"Indeed not! He's to speak at the state labor convention himself, in favor of proper mining regulations. It's great, Jane! I wouldn't have believed it of him!"
Her mobile lips curved doubtfully. "For your sake, I hope you're right, Pelham. But—how can he? Why, boy, he's on the other side—he must be! How could he line up with our ideas, when it would take money out of his own pocket? Miracles don't happen, I'm afraid. I wish——" She sighed. There was something to admire, almost love, in his hearty zeal over the amazing convert; he was so boyish, so peltingly trustful!
"I'm for it, remember. And I'm his son." Her unsympathetic unbelief widened his gaze.
Her fingers brushed his arm in a fleet unspoken caress. "You're a good boy, Pelham. I haven't gotten over my wonder at you. But—you're pulling against him, in all of this, remember."
"He's decent." Real pain spoke here; his own doubts of the father gave an obstinate tinge to his reception of her objections.
A cynical sureness hardened the eyes for a moment. "Nobody's decent, when his pocket-book's affected." A merry laugh parted her lips. "How unfeeling you must find me! Let's pray I'm entirely wrong. Why not get a look at his speech, before he delivers it?" Incredulous, hope-against-hope eagerness flickered in her face.
This Pelham at once agreed to do. There was some ground for Jane's hesitancy, he reflected; most men, given Paul's position, would have been permanently intractable. But his father, after all, was different.
He could hardly let her go back for supper, although she had promised. A dizzying intemperance drove on his tongue. "I wish I could keep you, now that I have you here," and his eyes dwelt upon her alluring shapeliness; her gaze was intently busied with the panorama of uninspired villas. "You don't know what knowing you has meant to me, Jane. I was in the dumps over the whole business...."
"It's mutual, Pelham. The iron city has chiefly solid iron headpieces, I think. You were a rare find."
He chuckled. "You make the thing too intellectual, at that. I assure you that I wouldn't offer to elope with a suffrage tract, or a skirted treatise on socialism. My offer holds good, if you're willing." Playfully he increased the speed.
"Lauderdale isn't Barkis," she temporized. "Have you known me four weeks, or five?"
"So romance perishes, as the lady grows arithmetical! Love can't be weighed on the iceman's scales."
"Nor can mental dynamite blast it out, Mr. Miner. Modern marriage isn't a thing to venture lightly. Love's blindness was once thought a blessing——"
"It's often a mercy," he slipped in.
"To-day's surgery is curing the blindness. It's all right to mate as birds do, if people could part as easily. But when a heart must be pledged, not only to honeymoon days, but to the petty irks, and the tedious astronomical study of the skyhigh cost of living——It needs reflection."
"You might give me a croûton of comfort. The especial heart I sit beside isn't pledged elsewhere, I hope?"
"Now, really——"
"That's not asking too much."
"It is," the lips pursed grimly. "It's pledged, alas, to the Uplift of the Underdog, the Castigation of the Capitalist Canine, the Manufacture of the Millennium, the Fashioning of the Future's Fascinating Feminism——"
"Enough, enough! But to no single heart," in pleading insistence.
"Nor to no married one neither," she laughed.
"Content, i' faith! Now you may go home to single blessedness and that supper you thoughtlessly promised to grace." But Pelham wondered, more than once, whether the girl's last light retort had hidden a dig at his friendship with Dorothy. Well, Jane had said less than he deserved, at that.
The convention came closer and closer; and still Paul had not had time to prepare the speech, when the son made his requests. The work at the third ramp, and the planning of an opening on the newly purchased crests beyond, kept Pelham's hands exceptionally busy, so that he did not find much time to wonder at his failure to see the expected address.
Three days before the convention, Jane met him with a worried face. "Something's rotten in the environs of the iron Copenhagen, Pelham. I learned about it from comrade Hernandez. One of the few socialist delegates, a Birrell-Florence miner named Jensen—I don't think you've met him—has been offered a direct bribe to oppose the mining bill. Somebody's busy, that's sure."
"That does sound discouraging. Let's go over your mining reports, so that I can get the facts straight. I ought to understand the situation, at least."
They went over the figures together. He began to visualize what the class struggle meant, here in the quiet, placid South. There had been four large mine explosions in the state the year before, the one at Flagg Mines killing a hundred and ninety-two——"And all of it useless, Pelham! The simplest mine safeguards——"
"The owners can't know of them!"
She shut her lips. "They cost something. Every cent cuts down profits. It's cheaper to kill men."
"It's horrible!" In dejected impotence he clenched his hands. The unemotional rows of figures began to acquire a breathing significance. His vivid imagination pictured mangled forms, the bursting hell of explosions, the isolated horror of lonely accident and death, the pallid faces of starving mothers and babies, staining the broad margins of the cheap white paper.
She looked up from the pamphlets, her brows creased. Pelham smothered an impulse to kiss away the slight gravure of worry. "The West, bad as it is in some things, at least has modern laws and safeguards." An unmeant accusation drove in her tones. "The creaky old laws here are not even followed! When was the last inspection of your mines?"
"More than a month ago. The inspector wasn't very thorough, I noticed. They were pronounced safe."
"It ought to be done weekly, at least, beside a daily inspection by your forces. Gas can collect in the coal mines, flaws and cracks in the roofing anywhere—only close inspection will do.... And, then, think of the wages paid here! Can a man live—decently, I mean, so that he can send his children to school, and all, on what you pay? And Judge Florence gets seventy-five thousand salary—outside of his dividends."
"My father gets fifty."
"It's compulsory starvation and death for the ones who really produce the wealth.... We'll see what the convention does."
Pelham missed the opening sessions; but Jane gave him reports of the meetings she witnessed, supplemented by what Hernandez and Jensen told him. It was a heated gathering. Big John Pooley was accused outright of dishonest accounting, by one violent structural iron worker. The oily eloquence of Robert E. Lee Bivens smoothed this over. Each of the administration officials—"the boodle gang," as the noisy radical minority called them—was flayed; the editor of theVoice of Laborreceived an especial lashing from Jensen, who charged him with deliberately selling out labor's paper to the corporations.
The machinery rolled smoothly. All protests were tombed in safely packed committees.
At last came the final night, with Paul's speech, and consideration of the mining bill afterward, as the only unfinished business.
Pooley, using his gavel vigorously, secured general quiet. He spoke of the honor paid by having as their distinguished visitor the wide-awake vice-president of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company. "Every act in his life marks Paul Judson as a friend of labor. Many of you do not know that he holds a union card—the printers elected him to honorary membership more than a year ago. He is one of us. His problems are our problems. He is turning the splendid force of his intellect to a solution of the labor question which will help employer and employee alike. A gentleman of sterling integrity, a leader among leaders——" The fulsome eulogy continued for a quarter of an hour.
Jane, who sat beside Pelham, sniffed audibly at most of the speech. He had asked his mother to go with them; but she had been too busy planning a dance at the country club, which Paul was giving for Sue, to take the evening off. He would have Jane to look after, his mother reminded him.
The boy was irritated at his companion's attitude. The glamor of the situation, with his father as the recognized champion of labor, fitted smoothly into his own rebellious dreams. With this support, he could achieve his rosiest plannings.
Paul rose to speak, alert, dignified, commanding.
He paid tribute to the audience, and to the hosts of labor they represented. They were particularly fortunate, he said, in their leadership; under the sane, conservative guidance of such men they were sure to reflect credit on the city, the state, the entire South.
"I believe in you. I believe in the work you are doing. You are the brawn and the backbone of our free white Anglo-Saxon democracy, the flower of the world's peoples. And the backbone"—he smiled embracingly—"is as necessary as the head; the brawn is as essential as the brain.
"There are some—socialists, anarchists, or whatever you choose to call them—who are working for a body without a head, brawn without a brain. You can find such bodies in the morgue. The decapitated socialist state is a corpse."
There was a burst of applause at this. Pelham went chill all over, as he realized how unpopular socialism would be made to appear. And—his father speaking!
"We have passed, as a people, out of the black gloom, our heritage from a red war of brother against brother, into the golden sunshine of a new day, a day of prosperity and plenty, an hour of progress and enlightenment. While the rest of the world is torn with war, peace is upon us; our products, sold to the warring world, assure an unprecedented prosperity to us. Beware lest the evil counselor, the plausible deceiver, the wily plotter creep in, and our ears lend attention to his seductive tones! This is no time for the disorganizer. We, as well as you, are fighting for the best things of life—peace, freedom, and the welfare of every one, capitalist and laborer alike, and a whole-souled, complete understanding and brotherhood between all of us!"
The applause was noisily demonstrative. One delegate, who had attended too many sub-conventions in various bars, started down the aisle to shake the hand of "brother Judson." The vigorous pilotage of two ushers steered him into the safer harbor of the street.
After the interruption, Paul turned to his topic. "I favor state mining regulation—and the stricter the better, always conserving the full liberty of the individual to make his free contract. That present joke at Jackson—that so-called mining law, which would bankrupt every mine owner, and drive into unemployment and starvation every mine employee in the state—I know that none of you can be so blind to your own interest as to favor it.
"I hope that you will go on record as favoring a sane, reasonable law—one protecting your employer's profit, so that your wages will be safe."
He branched into a technical discussion of the flaws of the law, emphasizing what labor would lose in every case if the proposed changes were made. There were growls of dissent from some quarters—even Pelham, sick at heart, hissed one of his statements; but the applause overwhelmed the disagreement. Benignant John Pooley, seated at the speaker's right, led the handclapping at every pause.
"It's up to you," Paul's tones sharpened, grew crisper. "You have it in your power to go on record against it, or for it. If against it, you assure a continuation of the present helpful and hopeful laws—not perfect, by any means, but laws which will be constantly bettered by an intelligent legislature, representative of the whole people. Or you can favor it—and thereby favor, instead of prosperity and progress, bankruptcy for the owners, spiritual bankruptcy for its supporters, and, worse than all, a wide-spread business depression, which will force capital elsewhere, slow down and stop the wheels of industry, drive the storekeepers out of business, and drag your own wives and families into want, poverty, ultimate degradation and death.
"The smoke from those mining settlements and furnace stacks upon the mountain above our iron city is the symbol of life—life for all of us. It is the pillar of smoke by day, the cloud of fire by night. This bill"—and he pointed an imperative finger first at the chairman, and then over the audience—"this bill will clear the sky of that smoke, and leave those mines and furnaces to rot and rust into scrap-iron. Take your choice. I believe that you cannot fail to take the wise, the sane, the brotherly, the prosperous way, for all of us, for Adamsville and the nation."
Before he could settle into his chair, and while the applause thundered at its fullest, Jensen was on his feet, shouting a demand that the chair recognize him. Pooley blandly motioned him again and again into his seat. The applause persisted.
"A question, Mr. Chairman! A question, Mr. Chairman!"
The president could ignore him no longer. "Delegate Jensen."