CHAPTER III
You might be a town 500 miles from the Atlantic coast and 3500 miles from the fighting line, but, nevertheless, you would have felt, in October of 1914, as Sabinsport did, a very genuine concern about your ability to get through the winter without hunger and cold. The jar of Germany’s first blow at Western Europe was felt in Sabinsport twenty-four hours after it was dealt. When the stock exchanges of the cities closed, credit shut up in every town of the country. The first instinctive thought of every man and woman who had debts to pay or projects to carry out was, “Where will I get the money?” The instant thought of every bank was to protect its funds—no panic—no run—but caution. Sabinsport began to “sit tight” in money matters on August 5th—and she sat tighter every day—and with reason. Orders in her mills and factories were canceled. Men went on half time. The purchasing power of the majority fell off. Men began to figure the chances of the length of the war in order to decide what they as individuals could do until they would be able again to get orders and so have work to offer; when they would be able to get a job and so pay the grocer; when they must stop credit to the retail buyer because the wholesaler had cut off their credit—these were the thoughts that occupied the mind of Sabinsport much more generally than the European war and its causes. There was a strong feeling that it would be a short war—another 1870—take Paris and the business would be over, Sabinsport believed; and, though there was real satisfaction over the turning back of the Germans at the Marne, there was a sigh, for they knew the anxiety they felt was to continue and increase.
“You see,” Ralph said to Dick, “they’re only concerned about themselves and what the war will do to them.”
“Don’t you think it’s a matter of concern to Sabinsport whether the mills are open or shut this winter, whether we have half or full time?” asked Dick.
“It isn’t the working man they think of; it’s themselves,” Ralph insisted.
“And I suppose the only one the working man thinks of is himself. We must each figure it for himself, Ralph, or become public charges. It strikes me this concern is quite a proper matter for men who are not as lucky as you and I are. We have our income; no thanks, however, to anything either of us ever did. Our fathers were men of thrift and foresight, and the war will hardly disturb us. But there are few in Sabinsport like us. I should say it was as much the duty of Sabinsport business men to concern themselves about orders as it is the business of Paris to put in munitions. No work and you’ll soon have no town.”
“It is a rich town,” challenged Ralph. “There’s lot of money here—they could keep things going if they would.”
“Rich when there are orders to fill, and only then. Don’t be unreasonable. You know this town lives by work.”
“Reuben Cowder and Jake Mulligan have $500,000 a year income if they have a cent; do you suppose they earn it?”
“Well, they won’t have a hundredth part of that, Ralph, if the mills and mines are closed this year. You certainly are not supposing that the money they circulate here is piled up in a chest in the banks. It comes from the sale of coal and barbed wire and iron plates and bars and hosiery and sewer pipe, and stops when they are no longer made. Let the shut-down continue, and who is going to use the street railways and the electric lights that Mulligan and Cowder and half High Town draw dividends from? Who is going to support the shops, buy the farmers’ produce? Sabinsport is rich only when her properties are active. You know that. There are few men in the country who make every dollar work all the time as Mulligan and Cowder do, and if the work stops, their incomes stop. Their activity is the biggest factor in the life of the place, and every business man knows it.”
But Ralph broke in with a bitter harangue. Sabinsport, he declared, thought only of herself, her comfort, her pleasures. She had no real interest in human betterment, no concern that the men and women who did the work of her industries were well or happy. If her business men worried about having no work to give now it was simply because, as Dick himself admitted, that they would have no income if the fires were out. Did they concern themselves about the worker when things were going well? Not for a moment. Did they study a proper division of the returns of labor? Not on your life, they studied how to get the lion’s share. Ralph’s ordinary dissatisfaction with affairs in Sabinsport was intensified by his disgust at the incredible turn things had taken in his world and by his helplessness to change them or to escape them. He might rail at the war in theArgus, but nobody listened. He might beg and implore that they put their house in order instead of keeping their eyes turned overseas, but it was so useless that even he sensed it was silly. Sabinsport was concerned only with figuring where she was going to get bed and board for 15,000 people through the coming winter.
The first relief from threatening idleness and bankruptcy that came was an order for barbed wire for England. Reuben Cowder had gone East and brought it back. It looked easy enough to Ralph, but Cowder himself had put in two as hard and anxious weeks as he had ever known, landing the contract. The “big ones” were after all there was and they got most of it. Moderate-sized, independent plants, like the Sabinsport wire mill, had to compete with companies which as yet were only names—but they were names backed by the great bankers that controlled the orders. Companies long ago launched by financiers for making rubber shoes or tin cans or vacuum cleaners—anything and everything except what was needed for war—landed huge contracts, and the orders waited while they converted and manned the plants and sold at high prices stock that had long lain untouched in the tens or twenties or thirties. This was happening when men like Cowder, ready at once to go to work, begged and threatened to get what they felt was their share.
The news that the wire mill would open at once on full time ran up and down the street on quick feet, and such rejoicing as it brought! Women who had ceased to go to the butcher’s went confidently in. “Jim goes to work to-morrow, can you trust me for a boiling piece?” and the butcher, as pleased as his customer, said, “Sure,” cut it with a whistle and threw in a few ounces. Over on the South Side where there had been grumblings and quarreling for nights, there was singing and laughing. The women cleaned houses that, in their despair, they’d let grow sloven, and the men brought in the water and played games with the children. Oh, the promise of wire to make stirred all Sabinsport with hope. Dick, going over to the live South Side Club, found a larger group than usual and a livelier curiosity about the war. They could think of it, now that they were not forced to think so much and so sullenly of where the next meal was coming from.
A few weeks later a new reason for hope came to Sabinsport. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was going to convert the linoleum factory “around the point.” It was to be a big concern, give work to a thousand girls besides the men. The wages were to be “grand,” the girls in the ten-cent store heard, and more than one of them on six dollars a week said, “Me for the munitions if it’s more money.”
The rumor was not idle, for early in December the building began. Sabinsport would not go hungry in the winter of 1914-15. The war that had raised the specter had taken it away.
“And because the war has made us easy in our pockets again, we are all for the war,” sneered Ralph.
“Are we?” said Dick. “I doubt it. So far as I can see, we are puppets of the war as is all the rest of the world.”
“We could refuse to make its infernal food. We could hold ourselves above its blood money. Reuben Cowder doesn’t care how he makes money if he makes it.”
“And by that argument the men and women in the mills and to be in the new mill don’t care as long as they make it,” retorted Ralph.
“We’re hardening our hearts,”—and to save Sabinsport’s soul, as he claimed, Ralph began a lively campaign against the making and exporting of munitions to other nations. It was a new idea to Sabinsport. To make what the world would buy, of the quality it would take, was simply common sense to her mind. She had nothing in her code of industrial ethics which put a limitation on any kind of manufacturing except beer and whiskey. Sabinsport had never had a brewery or a distillery. It would have hurt her conscience to have had one. Indeed the only time she had ever out and out fought and beaten the combination of Mulligan and Cowder was when they attempted to establish a brewery. The opposition had been so general and it had been of such a kind that the men had withdrawn. “It isn’t worth fighting to a finish,” Cowder had told Jake. “We’ll have bigger game one of these days, and we don’t want the town to be against us.”
But Sabinsport had seen without a flicker of conscience the cheapest of cheap hose, the kind that ravels at a first wearing, turned out by the tens of thousands. Somebody had once remarked that the firm must use the fact that its hose could be guaranteed to break the first time worn, with buyers. “The more sold the larger the commission,” laughed Sabinsport. It didn’t hurt her conscience that there was truth in the remark. It didn’t disturb her conscience now as a town that the mills were turning out hundreds and hundreds of spools of a crueller barbed wire than they had ever before seen. It didn’t disturb it that around the point a great-scale conversion of the never-very-successful linoleum factory into some kind of a shell factory was going on.
But if not conscience stricken, Sabinsport was interested in the discussion. It stirred deeper than Ralph in his disgust with the situation had dreamed. Letters to hisPro Bono Publicocolumn flowed in daily. From the mill came a violent arraignment of capital for making the war in order to make munitions. It was from the leading Socialist of the labor group, an excellent fellow who talked well but difficult to argue with, both Ralph and Dick had found. There was nothing to argue about the ruining of the world, in John Starrett’s judgment. His system would remove all evils. His task was the simple one of affirmation. All evils come from capitalism—do away with capitalism, institute socialism, and the machine will run itself. TheArguswas right in disapproving of munition making by a neutral country, said John Starrett, but so long as theArgusfailed to see that it was the iniquitous system it supported which was to blame, etc., etc.
The one always-to-be-counted-on pulpit radical in the town seized the chance for opposition and preached eloquent and moving sermons on the horrors of wars, the gist of which he weekly sent, neatly typewritten, to Ralph for the P. B. P., as it was called in the office. His argument was that this wicked thing could not go on if all men everywhere would refuse to work on guns and shells and powder, that it was the duty of a great neutral country like the United States to head the movement, and why should not Sabinsport start it? She would go down in history as the leader in the most beneficent reform of modern times. The Rev. Mr. Pepper worked himself into a noble enthusiasm over this idea, and spent time and money his family really needed for food and clothes in writing and mailing letters to a long list of well-known radically inclined men and women in various parts of the country, begging them to join the Anti-Munition Making League. Ralph published the digests of the Pepper sermons, printed free his long circulars and listened to his argument, and Sabinsport read and smiled and went ahead with her work.
The two or three pacifists in the Woman’s Club seized on the Reverend Pepper’s idea with avidity. It was so simple, so sure—stop making munitions everywhere, and war would have to stop. But the Woman’s Club, although in the main sympathetic, handled the matter gingerly. In the first place, the Rev. Mr. Pepper had always been “visionary,” so the men said. Then, too, they had the relief work of the town to consider. Stop munition making, close the wire mill, and what were the workmen to do? It wasn’t right. Somebody would make munitions, why not Sabinsport? Of course, if the League did succeed and other towns went in, they would be for it; but they thought they better wait. In this policy of caution, it is useless to deny that there was an element of self-interest. The husbands of not a few of the ladies had stock in the wire mill and in the works “around the Point.”
The hottest opposition that Ralph met in his anti-munition campaign was from the War Board, as he and Dick had come to call it. This War Board had evolved from a group which for years had met regularly after supper in the men’s lounging room of the Paradise Hotel. Both Ralph and Dick considered it far and away the most entertaining center of public opinion in the town, for it offered a mixture of shrewdness and misinformation, of sense and cynicism, which were as illuminating as they were diverting—a mixture which spread, diluted and disintegrated, of course, into every nook and cranny of the town.
The War Board was made up of socially inclined guests and a group of citizens whose number varied with the character, the importance and the heat of public questions. Dick, who, since he first arrived in the town, had taken his dinners at the Paradise, found that the war was having the same drawing power as the choice of a mayor, a governor, or a president. Almost every night more or less men dropped in to discuss the progress of the campaigns and wrangle over the problems raised for this country.
A member of the War Board that never missed an evening was Captain William Blackman, as he appeared on the roster of Civil War veterans; “Cap” or “Captain Billy” as he was known at the Paradise—“Captain If” as he came to be known a long time before we went into the war.
Captain Billy was seventy-two years old. He walked with a limp, the result of a wound received two days before the evacuation of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. His comfortable income was derived not from a pension which he had always spurned—he hadgivenhis services—but from a wholesale grocery business established in Sabinsport after a long and plucky struggle and on which he still kept a vigilant eye. Neither limp nor grocery had ever taken from Captain Billy’s military air or dimmed his interest in the battles of the Potomac, in many of which he had taken part.
Captain Billy frequented the Paradise pretty regularly at election time, for he was a Republican of the adamantine sort and felt it his duty to use every chance to impress on people the unfathomable folly of allowing a Democrat to hold any sort of office. But it was when there was a war anywhere on the earth that Captain Billy never missed a night. He never had any doubt about which side he was on, about the character and ability of generals or what they ought to do. He never for an instant hesitated over Belgium’s case, or doubted the guilt of Germany. Much as he hated England—Civil War experience on top of a revolutionary inheritance—he defended loudly her going in, thought it the decentest thing in her history. It took Captain Billy at least three months to grasp the idea that we should have taken a hand at the start, but in this he was in no way behind the most eminent advocates of that theory. Like all of them at the start he accepted with sound instinct the doctrine of neutrality. Before Christmas, however, Captain Billy was hard at the Administration. “If we had done our duty in the beginning,” was his regular introduction to all arguments—hence the name which was soon fixed on him of “Captain If.”
Mr. Jo Commons was as steady an attendant of the War Board as Uncle Billy, and in every way his antithesis. He had for years been the leading cynic and scoffer of Sabinsport. You could depend upon him to find the weak spot in anybody’s argument, the hypocrisy in any generous action. According to Mr. Jo Commons there was no such thing as sound or noble sentiment. All human thought and feeling he held to be worm-eaten by self-interest, and he spent his leisure, of which he had much, for he was a bachelor with a law practice which he had studiously kept on a leisure basis, in unearthing reasons for mistrusting the undertakings of his fellowmen. The war gave him a wonderful chance. His was the first voice raised in Sabinsport in defense of the invasion of Belgium. His defense of Germany and his contempt for England were Shavian in their skill.
If Captain Billy contributed certainty, idealism and emotion to the Board, and Mr. Jo Commons doubt, realism and cynicism, a traveling salesman, Brutus Knox by name, kept it in suspicion and gossip. Brutus was a stout, jolly, clean-shaven, immaculate seller of “notions and machinery,” and under this elastic head he handled a motley lot of stuff in a district where the Paradise was the most comfortable hotel; and it was his habit to “make it” for Sundays if possible.
Brutus was a master-hand at gossip. He liked it all, and told it all—gay and sad, true and false, sacred and obscene. He was always welcome at the Paradise, but never more so than since the war began, for he brought back weekly from Pullman smoking rooms, hotel lobbies and business lunches a bag of “inside information” which kept the War Board sitting until midnight and sent it home swollen with importance.
The War Board prided itself on being neutral—this in spite of the fact that nearly every one that attended had the most definite opinions about all parties in the conflict and that no one hesitated to express them with picturesque, often profane, violence. Almost to a man the War Board looked on the invasion of Belgium as rotten business. King Albert became its first hero. His picture—a clear and beautiful print from an illustrated Sunday supplement—was pinned up the third week of August. It came down only once—to be framed, and it was to be noted that on all holidays “Albert,” as they called him, always had a wreath. The general verdict was that he was “American”—“looks like one”—“acts like one”—“been over here”—“no effete king about him.” After the Marne, Joffre joined Albert on the lobby wall, and the two of them hung there alone—for nearly two years.
The War Board treated Ralph’s ideas on munition making with almost unanimous ridicule. Indeed the only help he had at this body in defending his position came from a new friend, one who had begun occasionally to attend the sessions at the Paradise just after the war broke out. This was Otto Littman, the only son of Rupert Littman, the president of the Farmers’ Bank, one of Sabinsport’s most beloved citizens. Rupert Littman had been only ten years old when he and his father, a revolutionist of 1848, obliged to fly for his life, had settled in Sabinsport. The history of father and son was as familiar from that day to this as that of the Sabins, and Cowders and Mulligans and McCullons. Otto, however, was not so well known. He had been much away—four years in college, six in Germany studying banking and business methods, only eighteen months at home, and in these eighteen months he had not been able to adjust himself to the town. The town felt that he sneered at her a little, which was true, felt himself “above her,” which was true. Rupert Littman, dear heart, had been very much concerned that Otto did not “take” to Sabinsport, and he had confided to Dick once that he feared he had made a mistake in sending him back to Germany so long.
With the coming of the war Otto had begun to circulate more freely in Sabinsport. He had quite frankly undertaken to make the town “understand Germany,” as he called it, and as Ralph had shown from the start his belief in neutrality and now his hatred of munition-making and exporting, Otto began to talk freely. According to Otto, it was England that had forced the war. “I like your consistency,” he told Ralph. “It is the only attitude for Americans, but so few are intelligent enough to understand this case. Pure sentiment, this guff about Belgium. It is sad that people should get hurt in war. Read what the emperor says of his own grief at the disaster Belgium has brought on herself. Why should she resist? No reason save that France and England bribed her to it. They were both ready to attack GermanyviaBelgium. I know that. I can get you the proofs. What could Germany do when she knew that and knew Belgium had sold herself? Oh, you innocent Americans! It is always a little hurt or hunger that sets you crusading. You never look deeper. I’m glad to know a man that has more sense.”
Otto kept Ralph stirred over England’s seizures and examination of our ships and mail. “You see,” he said, “talk about freedom of the seas—there is none. She can do as she will with the shipping of the world. What can the United States do if the day comes that England wants to drive her from the sea as she has tried to drive Germany—bottle us up. I tell you, Gardner, if we don’t join Germany in her fight for liberty, England will ruin us. England is the enemy of this country as she is the enemy of Germany. She can’t tolerate greatness. She fears it. She has expected to keep Germany shut in; she can’t tolerate our having a single colony. It’s your duty to America’s future to do your utmost to explain to Sabinsport what England’s inner purpose is.
“Take what is happening to-day. She’s forcing us to unneutral acts by her arrogance. She’s preventing us from carrying out our right to sell to all nations—stopping our trade—destroying our goods. She has the power, and that’s enough for her. There is no way to meet this but an embargo on munitions. If England won’t let us sell to all lands, as is our right, we shouldn’t sell to anybody.” Ralph was entirely with him. That course would put an end to Cowder’s pollution of Sabinsport’s soul.
Now, Cowder and Mulligan were clever men. They knew, as Dick had frequently warned Ralph, that attaining your objective depends largely on your skill in maneuvering; that if you are going to hold your main line, you must sometimes give up long held positions. They had spiked small guns of Ralph’s several times in the course of their fight in handling the mines and factories of Sabinsport by withdrawals from the points which he was besieging. There was accident compensation. After the accident at the “Emma” they had won the favor of labor leaders and the liberal-minded throughout the State by working out and putting into effect a compensation plan much broader than any reform agency had yet suggested. It was a shock to Ralph to see them honored.
Then there was the case of the coöperative stores. After much grumbling, they had consented to let Jack try it out at the mines; and, having consented, they both had stirred themselves to make it a success. Mulligan particularly had spent much time among the miners, the men who had grown up with him, and who at the start no more liked the change than he did—explaining why they did it, how it was to be done, and how it might cut down their expenses if it was a success.
It put Ralph into a corner. You couldn’t abuse men for doing the things you had abused them for not doing. You could hint that they were “insincere,” but that was a little cheap—looked like sour grapes. It held up his campaign, which, for rapid promotion, had to have a villain, a steady, reliable villain that couldn’t be educated, that wouldn’t budge from his exploitation and greed. To have the villain come around to any part of your program was as bad as having a hero with feet of clay.
Cowder and Mulligan, watching the progress of the anti-munition campaign in the factory, decided something must be done. “I say,” Jake told his friend, “that we put it up to the boys. TheArgusis always howling about their not having anything to say about the way the mills are run; let’s give ’em a chance. You know out at the mines that boy of mine has been having what he calls ‘Mine Meetings.’ He built a little clubhouse out there a year or so ago, and one night a week he goes out, and everybody that works in the mine can come in and they discuss things. There ain’t anything about the mine that Jack don’t let them talk about. I thought he was crazy when he started it, but ever since the accident I’ve kept my hands off, as you know. The funny part is that it seems to help things, and Jack claims he gets all sorts of good ideas. He says he is going to have these men running the mines, and I don’t know but he will. I don’t see where we will come in, but I promised to give him a free hand. I don’t see, Cowder, why we shouldn’t try something like that now. Call the boys in the wire mill together some noon. Put it up to ’em. Let ’em vote whether they want to make wire or not. I’d like to see what theArguswould say if we tried that.”
Reuben shook his head. “I’ll think about it, Jake, and we’ll talk it over again to-morrow.”
There were few people in Sabinsport who credited Reuben Cowder with having a sense of humor, but deep down in his stern, suppressed nature there was considerable, and it came to the top now. To call a shop meeting appealed to him as effective repartee. I am quite sure, however, that if he had not been convinced that the men would vote to go on with the work, he would not have risked it. What he did want to do was to prove to Ralph and the shop agitators, whoever they might be, that ninety-five per cent. of the laboring body in the wire mill would not strike against making wire to sell to the Allies. They might strike for other reasons, but not for that. He was willing to try them out.
And so it happened, one morning in January, that the men coming to work found in conspicuous places around the yards and through the mills, a notice calling for a floor meeting at one o’clock the next day (you will note that Cowder and Mulligan were not taking the time for the gathering out of the men’s noon hour), to discuss a question which concerned both the executive and laboring ends of the mill, preparatory to taking a vote.
There was not an inkling in the broadside of what the question to be discussed was; and when one o’clock of the day set came there was not a man of all the 1800 in the wire mill that could be spared from his post, who did not appear on the floor of the main building of the plant. They were a sight for sculptors and painters, gathered there around the great machines in the dusky light which filled the immense building—labor in all of its virile strength, men from a dozen nations, in greasy, daubed garb lifted their strong, set faces to Jake Mulligan, who, from a cage dropped to a proper level by a great crane, addressed them.
He put it direct. “Boys,” he said, “you know as well as I do that there’s a lot of talk going up and down this mill about the wickedness of making things for war. Now, I never did, and never will, ask a man to do a thing that is against his conscience; and Mr. Cowder and I have concluded that we would like to know whether this is just talk or whether there is some of you fellows that really are doing something that you think is wrong. We have decided to take a vote on it, to find out how many of you think we ought to give up this contract.
“Of course you know—or you ought to know—that giving it up means shutting down the mill. There are no contracts for barbed wire to be had at present, except for war. I don’t say that we will shut down even if you vote against it, but what we will do is to give you boys a chance to get another job somewhere else and we will get a new set of men. Or, if the most of you want to go on with the jobs that you are in, and a few of you really feel hurt about this thing, we will do the very best we can to find you something else to do. I don’t say we will give you as good wages as we are giving you here. You know there is nothing else around this country that is paying like this mill, can’t afford to.
“We want this to be a square vote. To-morrow night, when you leave the plant, the same time you punch the time clock, you are to put a ballot in a box at the gate. Nobody will know how you vote. The only thing we want is that everybody votes. It seems to me that’s fair. That’s all. Now you may go back to work.”
The men, taken by utter surprise by the proposition, separated almost in silence. The crane dropped the cage containing Mulligan and Cowder to the floor, and the two walked out, saying, “Hello, Bill!” “Hello, John!” as they went along, as naturally as if nothing unusual had taken place.
There was a great buzz in Sabinsport that afternoon and the next day over this revolutionary procedure. At the banks and in the offices, Cowder and Mulligan were roundly condemned—not that there was much fear of how the men would vote. Business cynicism was strong in those circles. They felt sure that the wire-workers were like themselves, not going to give up a good thing for what they called an impractical ideal. What they did object to was the precedent. “You get this started,” they told the pair, “and what does it mean for all of us? We cannot run our own business any longer. Putting things up to day laborers! I tell you it’s a dangerous thing you have started in Sabinsport.”
The maneuver had all the disquieting effect on Ralph that Cowder and Mulligan had anticipated. He felt very doubtful of the result, but he spent himself in an eloquent harangue to vote against the nefarious business into which capitalism had thrust them. Among the men the same kind of mistrust of the procedure that prevailed in financial and managing circles cropped out. The procedure was too new for them; and the suspicion that there was a trick somewhere which they did not see, ran up and down the shop. “Don’t give up the job. They are trying to put something over on you.” They did not give up the job. When the votes were counted, it was found that exactly ninety-eight per cent, were in favor of continuing the making of wire for war purposes.
But, even if the management had, as Jake claimed, “put one over” on theArgusand its sympathizers, it had also given Ralph a text—an appealing text, too. “How? How?” said Ralph, “could you expect men whose bread and butter depend on day labor and who are told that the only labor to be had in this town where they live and have their families is making munitions of war, to give it up? What can they do?” And Ralph went far at that opportune moment to argue with his Socialist friend, John Starrett. His arguing was not heeded. For Sabinsport the matter was settled—ninety-eight per cent, of the wire workers had decided for going on with the work. Ralph found himself again outwitted. He realized that he must get another line of attack.
Zest and a bit of mystery was added to the discussion in the spring of 1915 by an incident which set the town to gossiping, but of which few ever knew all the facts—Dick, and Ralph through him, being among the few. It began by a rumor that Reuben Cowder had thrown a man out of his office! There was a suspicion that Otto Littman was the man, butthatfew believed—“It couldn’t be!” Something had happened, however, and Cowder went about for days in one of the black moods which men knew only too well. He held a long conference with Rupert Littman, Otto went to New York for a time. It was said that there had been trouble over a munition contract.
One evening shortly after the rumor started, Dick was startled by a call from Cowder, the first he had ever received. That the man was deeply stirred was clear.
“I’ve got to talk to somebody, Ingraham, and there’s nobody in this town but you I’d trust. It’s against my habit to talk, you know that, and maybe I’m a fool to do it; but there’s something going on in Sabinsport I don’t like. I can’t get my fingers on it. Maybe I’m suspicious—maybe I ain’t fair. Rupert Littman says I’m not, and he’s an honest man and as good an American as I am. I’m not neutral. I don’t pretend to be, though I don’t talk much. You know we’ve begun to run around the Point. Turned out our first shells last week—good clean job. Inspector said he’d seen none better.
“Well, you know Otto holds quite a block of stock in the plant. I was surprised when he took it, but thought it was a good idea, and his father was tickled to death—told everybody he saw how Otto was going to settle down here now—had found out where his country was at last. Otto always seemed to take a lot of interest in the plant, got me two or three of the best workmen I ever saw and a wonder for the laboratory. Of course he knew where I got the contract—England. Of course he ought to have known I’d see the whole damned thing in the river before I’d sell a pound to Germany. He knows my girl’s in Serbia.
“Well, in spite of that he came into my office the other day with a friend of his—never been here before—and wanted to make a contract big enough to tie up that plant for three years—and who do you suppose they said it was for? Sweden! ‘But, suppose you ain’t able to ship to Sweden?’ I asked. ‘Never mind,’ they said—‘the contract holds—you’re sure of the money.’
“‘Otto,’ I said, ‘you’re lying—your friend is lying. You can’t make a contract with me.’
“‘And that’s what you call being neutral?’ his friend said, with a look I didn’t like.
“‘I never said I was neutral,’ I said. I guess I swore some. ‘I ain’t neutral. I want to see the French in the streets of Berlin and every damned Hohenzollern on earth earning his living at hard labor, that’s how neutral I am.’
“Well, sir, Otto went white as death and he jumped at me as if he was going to hit me—and, well, I took him by the collar and threw him out and his friend after him.
“Now, one of the reasons I am telling you this is because I want you to keep your eyes open. Otto has a lot of influence over that young fool that runs theArgus. I must say I like that boy in spite of his fire-eating. He’ll learn and he can write—but he’s all muddled on the war, and I believe it’s Otto that’s keeping him so stirred up against England and so friendly to Germany. Why, it’s vanity and ignorance that ails him, and he’ll see it one of these days all of a sudden—but you watch him, Mr. Ingraham, and watch Otto.”
The man stopped and sat for a long time in silence, his head dropped. When he looked up his mouth was twitching. “Otto Littman is the son of one of the best men that ever lived. He’s a friend of my girl. The only boy here she ever let go out to see her. She has seen him in Europe. I guess they write sometimes. And I have quarreled with him. I have warned his own father against him. It is an awful thing to do, but, so help me, God, I can’t do anything else. My girl’s over there, Ingraham; I don’t know as I’ll ever see her again. Maybe you don’t know about her. Maybe you’ve heard people here sneer at her—call her horsey and fast, but I tell you if there’s a thoroughbred on earth it’s Nancy. She was born out there at the farm, and her mother died when she came.” The hard face worked convulsively and the hands gripped the arms of his chair until the brown skin showed white over the knuckles.
“She grew up out there. I had as fine a woman as I could find—educated—horse sense—to look after her, but we never could do much with Nancy. She wouldn’t go to school but she’d read more books than all the girls in Sabinsport before she was sixteen and spoke French and German like a native. She hated the town and she loved dogs and horses, and, by George, how she understood ’em. I never saw anything like it. Of course, I let her have all she wanted, and before I knew what I was getting into she was breeding ’em—had a stable, kennels, began to go East to horse shows, dog shows; go anywhere she heard of a good animal. Regular passion—didn’t think of anything else. Funny to see her—so slight and fine and free-moving, talking to jockeys and breeders and bookmen—never seeing them—only the horses. ’Twan’t long before horsemen began to listen to her, and she began to enter her own and then I lost her from here. Mrs. Peters is always with her, but Nancy is all right. Just naturally don’t know anything but the best men or horses. Has an instinct for points. She is always saying she’ll come back some day and stay. I wanted to build in town for her but she won’t have it. Farm’s home to her. But I don’t expect ever to see her again, Ingraham.
“It was like her to throw herself in this thing. Never could stand it to see anything suffer—hated anything she thought was unjust.
“I tell you she rules me. Remember once you complimented me for leaving the old Paradise just as it came down to the town, building in the big addition as a kind of background, to set off the original? That was Nancy—would have it so—sent an architect here that she had coached herself. And you remember four years ago when I turned front on compensation—time of the big accident in the ‘Emma’? Well, that was Nancy—got my orders from her. Queer thing how she keeps track of things here—reads theArgusevery day, no matter where she is. She was all crumpled up over the ‘Emma,’ naturally enough—and when theArgusbegan on compensation she wrote me a better argument than ever Gardner put up and told me she’d never take another dollar from me if I didn’t support it. What could I do? I knew she meant it.
“She was visiting in London when the war came. Patsy McCullon saw her there—like her to go to Serbia. She said the Belgians were near and bound to get help, but everybody seemed to have forgotten Serbia. She went in October. I’ve had only a few letters—all cheerful—wouldn’t do anything else—she’s putting in all her income and it’s a pretty good one. Nancy’s rich as a girl ought to be, from her granddad and mother. I don’t believe she’ll ever come out. They’re bound to run over the country. Nancy will stick till she drops. God, Ingraham, it’s hard to lose her.
“It’s her being there makes me suspicious, maybe—Littman says so—laughed at the idea that Otto was working for anybody but America. But I don’t know, Ingraham—I don’t know. I ought not to have thrown him out, maybe, but I didn’t like it. Sweden! That means Germany, and Otto Littman knows it, or—it means tying up the plant if they can’t ship.
“Another thing I’m telling you this for—it ain’t natural the feeling in the town against selling munitions to the Allies should be so strong as it is. It would have died out long ago if somebody from outside wasn’t stirring it up. There are more pacifists around town than is normal, more in the factory and even in the wire plant. Don’t seem to go deep enough to make ’em give up their jobs—just talk, and there must be somebody behind it. I’m making allowance for those that’s honestly against it, those that think not believing in war will make a difference. Couldn’t stop an earthquake that way, and that’s what this war is, Ingraham—earthquake—convulsion. Guess men have ’em—burst their bonds like the earth its crust. Guess we won’t end them until we put more give into the bonds—make ’em more elastic. That’s the way I see it. Hope you won’t mind my disturbing you. Had to get it off my mind.”
Dick had listened in amazed silence through the talk. He reached out his hand, deeply moved. “Disturb me, Mr. Cowder? I think your confidence an honor, and I don’t think your suspicion idle. On the contrary, I agree with you that the feeling against munition making here isn’t normal, but I take it that we must expect propaganda. I don’t like the secrecy of it, if it is propaganda. As for Littman, I often talk with him. He’s quite openly for Germany. He has lived there as a student, you know. He has caught the faith that consumes Germany and is driving her now—her faith that her destiny is to rule the earth by virtue of her superior ability, knowledge, strength. It’s not easy for young men of Otto’s type to resist. Whether he is being used as a tool consciously or unconsciously, I cannot say. It would be quite in keeping with Germany’s practice to stir up trouble here with England if she could. She naturally wants to take our minds off Belgium—to build back fires. I am not sure but the feeling growing in the country against Mexico—the fear of Japan—is largely German propaganda. And Otto may be helping it on, not out of disloyalty to the United States but because his German advisers—if he has them—have made him believe that the country is threatened in these directions. It was Otto, you remember, who brought that lecturer here a few weeks ago to warn us about a Mexican-Japanese alliance. It might have happened naturally enough, to be sure. But if pro-German citizens are introducing such lecturers into quiet towns like ours, all over the land, I should feel it was distinctly a disloyal act. I don’t know that they are, though it’s sure the lecture we heard and the maps we saw had been used before—frequently I should say.”
“I don’t think it worried anybody,” said Cowder, dryly.
“I rather think it would be difficult to make Sabinsport nervous over a Mexican-Japanese attack,” laughed Dick. “It was evident the audience regarded it as a fairy tale.”
“It’s nothing else as far as I can see.”
“There you are,” said Dick. “I think we can afford to wait awhile. After all, Otto and his friend would not be guilty of treason in making a contract with you for munitions for Germany. You have the same right to sell to her as to England. I’m glad you won’t do it—but you would be breaking no law—you would be strictly within neutral rights.”
Cowder glowered at him. “I’m no damned reformer,” he said, “but I never yet helped a burglar to tools or a murderer to a gun.”
“Good,” said Dick, “and believe me, I’ll keep an eye on Otto for you. He may be helping Germany now, but I shall be very much surprised if the time comes when we go into the war if he doesn’t fall in line—unless he goes too far now.”
“You believe we will go in?”
“Surely—some day.”
“You don’t believe the time has come?”
“No—no. I can’t say I do.”
Cowder sighed. “I don’t know what to think, Ingraham. I wish to God I could make up my mind. I’d feel easier if we were in, but I don’t see any use dragging in a country that don’t see it. Why, Sabinsport is living on the war and don’t know it. Don’t see that you can’t live in this country to-day except on the war. But she does take an interest. Ever notice that South Side Alley over next the wire mill, where the kids play. Got trenches there that wouldn’t be bad in Flanders. Wonderful how things spread in the world. Good night, Ingraham, and thank you.”
Long after the man was gone Dick sat watching his fire. What a grief the man carried! To have a daughter like that and in Serbia; to believe he would never see her and yet to go on day in and day out—“Nancy Cowder”—nice name and she knew Lady Betty. Serbia! What was the latest news from Serbia?—he’d seen something in the LondonTimeslately about the English nurses there. He’d look it up. What part of Serbia? He hadn’t asked. He would—maybe he had been there. Not much chance if she was in the way of the Bulgars. Still, women like Nancy Cowder somehow imposed themselves. She’d not be afraid of all the armies and all the kings. “So slight and fine and free-moving,” that was her father’s description—“talking to jockeys and breeders and bookmen and not seeing them, only the horse.” “Thoroughbred—that girl.” What a different impression he had formed of her from Sabinsport gossip! He had not realized it before but he had in his mind a strapping big girl with a stride like a man’s, a girl with clear gray eyes and a hearty laugh.
He rose and looked over theTimesfor the article from Serbia. To think that a girl could give her life and he must sit here quiet by his fire. He laughed aloud in bitter self-contempt.
The next day when Dick paid his usual late afternoon visit to theArgusoffice, he went over the talk he had had with Cowder, giving in detail the report of the quarrel with Otto and his own version. To his surprise, Ralph said nothing in defense of Otto.
“He isn’t neutral. He is for Germany, just as Patsy and you are for the Allies. Nobody in Sabinsport is really neutral as far as I can make out. This town is almost solidly against Germany, and you know it. The opposition is to our having anything to do with the infernal business. Sabinsport doesn’t believe in war or doesn’t believe in this war for us, and that’s where I am—now. I’m for the people. We’re trying to keep neutral and trying to see both sides. But I’m sick of it—beastly business—think of Cowder and Littman quarreling. Another war casualty,” he said, bitterly, “suspicion, broken friendships—a world thrown back and all its hopes of making it a place fit for men to live in destroyed. Everything we’ve been trying to do the last twenty years gone to pot. There won’t be a law protecting labor left in the country if this goes on. Who’s going to think about hours and wages and safety and social insurance with that thing going on over there? Who cares any more in Sabinsport whether it’s right or wrong to let two men gobble up the franchises? Who asks, now that we are beginning to make money and have good prospects of continuing as long as there’s a war, whether it’s right to turn a town into a mill for destruction? I’m sick of it, Dick. It’s ruining things for us all. I’m so sore I can’t bear to go anywhere any more, and if I do I always have a row with somebody. Went to Tom Sabins’ last night and Patsy was there. We both tried to patch it up, but somebody said something about the freedom of the seas and I said I couldn’t see why a German embargo was any more reprehensible than an English one, and Patsy went up like a rocket and said I wasn’t human—had no sympathy—that if I’d seen Belgium as she did—she’s just Belgium mad. Of course, like a fool, I said that there was always plenty of a suffering near at hand, and people of real human sympathy, not mere emotionalism, could see it. I was a brute. I know Patsy is right. She left the room, and I didn’t see her again, and Tom said she cried.
“And you, Dick—the war’s got you. You needn’t think I don’t realize how it’s hurting you to have to stay here. I know you’d give your life to go. Nothing makes me so sore as to see you standing up so gamely to your sentence, and all the time I can’t see how you feel like you do. I can’t get it as a thing for me, Dick. It isn’t that I am all obstinate—won’t see it—as you think. I can’t see why it’s up to us to go crazy because a good part of the world is crazy, but, honest to God, Dick, I’m beginning to wish I could. I can’t follow Otto—nor Patsy, nor the Socialists at the mill—I don’t seem to agree with anybody—and what I want is to be with you—”
“And Patsy,” smiled Dick.
“I wonder,” said Ralph inadvertently, “if Patsy has heard from that Henry Laurence she wrote so much about?”
“She hears from Mrs. Laurence, but not at all from Henry, I think, Ralph. Why?—”
“Oh, nothing,” he said, suddenly cheerful, then added, sagely, “Such an experience as they went through together would naturally draw two young people together.”