Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

X

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 melody
To 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 grown
One 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...."

XI

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 the _Voice_, 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 the _Voice of Labor_ made out?"

"It's made out--that's about all, Mr. Judson. Print paper's gone so high, that only the adver_tise_ments 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 the _Times-Dispatch_ last 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 this _is_ great 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 crouton 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 the _Voice of Labor_ received 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."

"Will the speaker answer a question?"

Paul, suave and collected, smilingly consented.

"Isn't it a fact that"--Jensen's voice choked in his throat, in his mad eagerness to make his point--"that the mine safeguards here are behind every state in the union? That the men are paid less, and suffer more accidents? How can there be harmony between capital and labor? Don't we both want the same thing?" His words crowded over each other; his growing incoherence was unintelligible to most of the audience. He waved a pamphlet at the speaker. "I have in my hand the latest federal mining report----"

"Aw, hire a hall, Swedey!" an ugly-faced satellite of Pooley's cut in.

The audience laughed, releasing tense feelings.

"I will do my best to answer the questions," Paul began. He picked up a paper from the desk before him. "I have here the report referred to. It is a fact that the monetary wage here is slightly lower than in most states. But the purchasing price of money is almost twice that in some Western states."

There was some applause at this.

Paul went on. "As to safeguards, that bill takes away your chief safeguard--your job."

He sat down. The jubilant audience calloused their hands noisily.

The district delegate of the miners, Jack Bowden, rose gracefully. "Isn't it also a fact, Mr. Judson, that the Birrell-Florence mines have recently installed safety devices not required by the law?"

Paul did not know it, but he bowed agreeably. "So I have understood."

Pelham writhed. Even after his father's manifestly unfair speech, he had expected intellectual honesty from him. He had dodged both parts of Jensen's question. Surface brilliancy--but the questions were still unanswered. The intense disappointment in his father wracked him with physical pain.

As she felt Pelham's body commence to rise, Jane's hand clenched his arm. "Don't do it; it will only make a scene. Let's leave."

Ignoring the pleading grasp, he rose unsteadily. Against the walls of his chest his heart pounded irregularly; he feared for a flashed instant that it would burst its way out, and he would fall dead. Gripping the seat ahead more tightly, he found his voice. "Mr. Speaker----"

Paul looked at him, for the moment surprised and displeased. The cautious smile reappeared faintly.

"About this question of wages. Isn't it a fact that, the smaller the dividends, the larger the wages? Both come from the same fund, the wealth produced; doesn't the prosperity of one cut against the prosperity of the other? So that, for labor to get its full product, profit must be abolished, and cooperation introduced?"

There was a gasp of surprise from the few in the audience who recognized the pale figure as the speaker's son. A scattering rattle of applause shook parts of the crowd.

Paul moistened his lips, and explained: "The questioner asks, will not labor's prosperity come when profit has been abolished, and cooperation substituted. There is something to be said for that as an air-spun theory. It has never worked in practice. We--all of us--must feed on our daily bread, not on economic theories," he finished with crisp decisiveness.

There was a generous hand at this.

Pelham's quiet words to Jane whistled between clenched teeth. "All untrue, all unfair. A thing cannot be good in theory and bad in practice. Something is wrong with a theory, if it does not take into account all facts, all reality. He can't even think honestly!"

She squeezed his hand in the darkness.

In dazed agony he sat--his father had left unperceived by the stage exit--while the delegates, their discussion carefully guided by the administration machine, voted, three to one, against the mining law on which he and Jane had built such hopeful fancies.

The summer stars hung muddily above the western horizon when he ran his car into the garage, and slipped quietly up to his room.

The rest of the Cottage was dark.

XII

Pelham avoided his father the next week. The son came late to breakfasts, his father did not return for luncheon, and in the evenings Pelham dropped by one of the clubs for dinner.

He simply could not face the parent. They had passed, several times, on the place; they had spoken politely. But Pelham felt that this was only a courteous truce. Their ways of thinking were irreconcilable; what he regarded as his father's intellectual dishonesty, plus his own open opposition at the federation meeting, brought the conflict to a head at last.

His father was pledged, soul and brain, to things as they were. He was deaf to the call of progress, blind to what was imminent in the world around him, Pelham's emotionalized thinking told him. Paul was a Democrat, as grandfather Judson had been; he would remain one, even though he must see that the tariff issue was an outworn ruse, and that the states' rights question had been wiped out bloodily fifty years before. He was a capitalist; he would remain one, as long as a sleepily tolerant public opinion permitted this criminality in its midst.

Yes, criminality! Property was theft; Pelham was glad to find, in his new favorite, "Erewhon," an insistent echo of Proudhon's declaration. The lands, the waters, and their products shaped by labor's hands, must belong to labor, to the people; no whitewashing by legal titles could make the robbery justifiable. Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. And his father was irretrievably part and parcel of it.

Pelham took it up with his mother, in one forlorn attempt to win her backing. She checked sharply his criticism of Paul. "He is your father, Pelham. He is older, knows more, than you. I cannot listen to you."

A sense of shame prevented the son's turning to Jane. He saw her once or twice; but she had been so right, he so wrong, about his father, that he could not feel at ease with her, until the sting of the disappointment wore off. Pelham was ashamed to go to her; he went, instead, to the clubs.

Dorothy was away; but he made out. On the night of Sue's dance, he delayed until almost midnight, in order to avoid his parents. He had worked late that afternoon, and had walked afterwards through the new portion of Hewintown that lay on both sides of the railroad track. The drabness, the noisome poverty, even in new shacks, depressed him immeasurably; his disgust at the utter inartistry had long been dulled.

As he paused at the bottom of the steps to the dancing floor, the shocking contrast unsteadied him. There, where the workers lived, all was bleak want; here, where the drones celebrated, all was plenteous riot.

The curving lines of dazzling gowns, where Lane Cullom led an elaborate figure--the shimmer of jewels, the gross powdered bosoms of the chaperones, the smug smartness of the men--what a pitiable travesty of pleasure! Festooned flowers, deferential service, barbaric, subtly lascivious music--this waste would have fed those workers for years! These were not brilliant nor creative people--merely average humanity, whom the spin of the unfair wheel had swung to the top, to fling broadcast the stolen blood-toll of underpaid, underfed, underwise grubbers.

An overdressed, overperfumed matron brushed down the steps, and gushingly pushed her simpering daughter at him. An indecent exposure, as of a woman whose charms were on sale--his mind leapt to a miner's widow, holding by the hand her anemic, sunken-eyed daughter, who had stopped him and begged for work that afternoon--any work, to keep life in her daughter's body. And this waste!

Shaking off the depressed mood, he submerged his moralizing nature, and lashed himself into a hearty share in the pleasure-making. The unhealthy intoxication caught and held him; he danced and philandered with an abandon foreign to his nature. He felt that his part in the revel dirtied him. Once started, he hurled himself almost hysterically into the soiling gayety.

He had told Tom Hewin he might be late the next morning, despite the rush caused by wartime orders; it was after four when he went to bed. A troubled dream bridged his passage from sleep to waking.

He dreamt that he was flying--a common beginning of his dreams. He had powerful, sullen red wings, that beat against the gusty waves of wind, and swirled him up and forward out of the misty valley shadows toward the lean black peak of a solitary hill. Here a figure cowered--for a moment he fancied it was Jane. It turned frightened eyes up to his--no, it was his mother. He crept into her embrace.

All at once he was aware of an approaching darkness flying between him and the twinkling valley lights at an unbelievable depth below. The darkness took form as a vast black flyer mounting toward him. He unwound his mother's arms from his neck. Dimly he knew that it was a time of war, and those twinkling lights were the eyes of vast munition factories, packed with explosives.

In a slanting drop he shot toward the black figure. He did not see the face; but he knew it for his father. Lower and lower he and the black figure circled, until the night activity below could almost be made out. He avoided two beating rushes of the black wings. He grappled with the enemy.

He felt his arms pressing outward the fierce talons that sought to grasp him, his hands straining against the pulsing throat. Back, back, back he pressed--then with a mighty effort released, and flung the other, wheeling like a thrown stick, straight into the factory of death below.

Desperately his wings beat upward. A wide-tongued flash of fire bit into the night, there was a crash as if the earth burst apart.

Still half asleep, he sat up in bed. The roar rang in his ears. The house shook; fragments of window pane tinkled on the floor.

Out of bed he jumped, avoiding the broken glass, still uncertain what was dream, what reality.

Somewhere outside he heard a negro's frightened scream, and the sound of running steps.

He pulled on a shirt and a pair of working trousers, and knotted his shoe-strings. As he ran down the hall, Hollis, his tones shaking, was speaking to the doctor on the wire.

On reaching the back porch, a peculiar smell struck his nostrils--just a suggestion of a heavy odor that he knew at once. The dead fumes of dynamite--could they be blasting that close to the house? An overcharge, perhaps?

Over the sink his mother bent, washing the blood from the arm of the cook, Diana. "What's the matter, mother?"

She turned an alarmed face to his. "The glass cut her arm--nothing serious. Hollis is phoning the doctor." As he came closer, she whispered, "Artery."

"Can I help?"

She looked white and worried. "You'd better go to the mine, Pelham. It's an explosion, I think."

"Which way?"

"Sounded very close--that first ramp, perhaps----"

He went for the car; it would be quicker, and it might be needed.

As he cut through the gap, on the road just under the summit in front, parallel to the old dummy line, he noticed that the gap workings, and the second ramp, were deserted. The road turned sharply to the north, circling the long squat storehouse. He slowed mechanically, as a quick side squint caught the group on the steps: McArdle, the clerk, his anemic face, under the sparse scrub of beard, flushed from his emotional exertion, hectoring the dozen frightened negroes in front of him.

"What's wrong, Mac?"

The white man cursed the panicky negroes, the explosion, his job which kept him tied to the building.... "I can't get 'em to go back, Mr. Judson, the----" He was off again.

"Leave the store, come on with me----" He snapped open the door of the car.

"Got to watch the phone. The hospitals are sending doctors----"

"It's that bad?"

Pelham turned on the power again, and turned up the front of the hill. The air was clear here of the sickly odor that had reached the house--the wind swept this slope clear of the reminder of what lay beyond. Just before the ramp buildings showed beyond the trees, it came to him again--the stabbing, strangling odor of exploded dynamite. The tendency to nausea twisted his face into grotesque inhumanity; he held his breath as well as he could, and shoved on.

Now he had a view of the head of the ramp, and the shacks on both sides. His first impression was that it looked strangely usual: same houses, same isolated scrags of trees, all the familiar slopes and rises. A cloudy, half-hysterical belief fought within him that nothing had happened; surely exploding death and stifling horrors had not torn this kindly hill, these humble workers!