“Papa, you shan’t talk that way!”
“Oh, but you must get used to it! He has one woman down in the tent-colony, I hear, and you’ll be the next. And Kate here—”
So far Hal had not said a word; but he thought it was time to speak now. “Mr. Arthur,” he said, “I realize that I made a mistake in coming to your home—”
“Yes, sir, you did indeed, sir!”
“So I think now, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask to be excused.”
“Very well, sir! Go back to your assassins and free-lovers—your Socialists after a fashion!”
Hal had turned, and started to the door; but he heard Jessie rushing after him, and she flung her arms about him, shrieking, “No, no! You shan’t go!” And she turned upon her father. “How dare you say such things? How dare you insult your daughter?” She whirled upon the horrified crowd of servants. “Get out! Get out!” And she waved her hand with a gesture that made the group fairly reel.
There are times when discreet servants understand that the ladies of the household take precedence over the gentlemen, and this was one of the times. Yung and Thomas and Jones, Kate and Jane and Ellen, the gardener’s boy and the footman, the chauffeur and the upstairs girl—they backed precipitately out of the room, and the last of them decorously closed the door.
Meantime Jessie was rushing on, a little virago, possessed by sudden unguessed demons. “How dare you say such things? I think you are horrid! I think you are wicked! I’ll never speak to you again! You shan’t drive Hal away—or if you do, I’ll go with him! I’ll go down to the coal-country with him, I’ll join in the strike with him, I’ll go to jail with him, you’ll never see me again!”
The head of the banking-house of Robert Arthur and Sons quailed before this terrific blast. What was the world coming to, if a respectable father of a family could not lose his temper without his children being possessed by unguessed demons? He stood for a minute or two, pumping his hands up and down, puffing his cheeks and gasping like a cat-fish in the bottom of a boat; then he flung out his arms in a gesture of abandonment. “All right! All right! Have your own way! I wash my hands of the two of you! Go away with him if you wish—let him make you into a free-lover and an assassin!” And with this last cry of an elder and perishing generation, Mr. Arthur turned and rushed out of the room.
[24]
Jessie Arthur stood weeping in Hal’s arms. Of course it took but a minute for the storm of her rage to pass, and then she was horrified at what she had done; she had never even thought a disrespectful thought about her father before—and now she had told him he was horrid! Did not Hal see the misery he was causing her, bringing all this dissension and distress into her life? How was she to stand it—all her relatives scolding her—brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles and aunts!
“Sweetheart,” he answered, “I see your trouble, but what can I do? I have a duty—”
“You have a duty to me!” she cried. “I need you, Hal!”
“Dearest, you don’t need me as the strikers do. If you only knew what is happening to them!” And again he began to recite the cruel story: Mrs. Bobek with her poor, half-frozen little baby; Old Mike with his mutilated arm; the jails with their half-crazed inmates. Jessie had never heard of such horrors in her life, and she gazed at him aghast, the tears running down her cheeks.
“Jessie,” he said, “you want me to help you; but why can’t you help me?”
“What could I do, Hal?”
“You might come down there and support those people.” Seeing her look of dismay, he added, “You threatened to, just now.”
“Yes, I know. But I couldn’t really, Hal!”
“Why not?”
“Girls don’t do such things.”
“Some girls don’t,” he answered.
“What could I accomplish?” she asked, catching the note of bitterness in his voice.
“You might comfort people who are in distress; you might be the means of making others hear what was happening. The newspapers, you see—” Then suddenly he stopped, thinking what the newspapers would do if a daughter of the banking-house of Robert Arthur and Sons were to join the coal-strikers!
And she saw why he had stopped. “Mamma and Papa would go crazy!”
“I didn’t suppose Mamma and Papa would enjoy it, Jessie.”
“They would lock me up, Hal—if they knew I was even thinking of such a thing!”
“There’s a way you can prevent that, sweetheart. We can go and get married; then people would expect you to come with me.”
Such things have been done in the world’s history, but to look at Jessie’s face you would not have thought so. “Hal!” she whispered. “Papa would never see me again!”
“Papas have threatened that,” he said—“and changed their minds later on.”
He was looking at her. She wore a costly house-dress, exquisite, fragile, with colors chosen to match her eyes and hair. A maid had tended her soft hands, arranged the last strand of her golden-brown hair. Her little slippers were of cream silk, and would probably not be worn a dozen times before they were cast away. Hal, seeing them, had a sudden vision of the thick red mud at the Horton tent-colony!
Perhaps if he were to urge her, she would take the plunge. And it was a temptation, for he loved her, and when he was with her his senses were intoxicated. But his reason said no. If she came, it must be of her own impulse; it must not be with the idea, conscious or unconscious, that she could draw him back into the old life. Hal’s mind had become clear on that point. He would not go back; he had enlisted for the war.
Then too, there was a doubt about his sweetheart, gnawing like a worm in his heart. How could she show so little effective response to the thing that was dear to him? Was there something lacking in her? He made the excuse that she was so young, but he had to admit that she was not so very young; she was nineteen—and surely that is old enough for a woman to discover that the jewels she wears are the crystallized agony of other people. Seeing that she did not discover it, he pointed it out to her, many times and in many ways. He waited for her to show that she cared about it; but all she showed was that she cared about him!
There was something Jessie was now trying to say to him; blushing and hesitating, not meeting his eyes. That dreadful story—that thing her father had referred to—
“What about it?” he asked, coldly. He would not help her on that matter.
“I want you to tell me, Hal!”
“I am not going to discuss scandals, Jessie. All I have to say is that the tale they are telling about me is false. You will have to believe that.”
“I believe it, Hal. But then—we have to think how things look to other people. Isn’t that girl at the tent-colony?”
“She is at the tent-colony—because her young brother is lying there with his foot maimed by a bullet. Would you have her anywhere else under the circumstances?”
“No—I suppose not.” Then, after a pause, “Is she in love with you, Hal?”
“I don’t know, Jessie,” he answered. He had no right to tell her about Mary Burke’s affairs, and he would not take the chance of her relatives asking her questions.
He went away from the interview, leaving her unsatisfied and miserable. She would take his word that there was nothing dishonorable in the affair; but she was sure that Mary Burke wanted Hal—how could any woman fail to want Hal? And among those “dreadful people”, as she called them, anything might happen!
[25]
Hal went for consolation to his friend Adelaide Wyatt. Adelaide had proposed a resolution in the Tuesday Afternoon Club, calling for an investigation of coal-strike outrages, and she told how she was being “cut” on account of this bold action. The ladies of Western City “society” were ablaze with anger against the strikers, who were interfering with the business of their men-folk.
“Mrs. John Curtis came to see me,” said Adelaide.
“Ah?” said Hal. This was the lady he had appealed to in Percy Harrigan’s ca
r.
“She came on a delicate errand,” added the other. “She wanted to know if I was aware of the report that you had tricked me into employing your mistress in my home.”
“By God!” cried Hal. “You don’t mean it!”
“Didn’t I warn you of it?”
“What did you say to her?”
“I defended you, of course, but I’m not sure if I convinced her. She may think you’re deceiving me—or she may even think I’m abetting you.”
Hal had come to Adelaide with a wonderful scheme. He wanted her to visit the strike-country. She could help the strikers enormously, for the reporters would flock to her, and would print anything she said. But Adelaide made him see how impossible his project was. She was a woman living apart from her husband; in a few days Mrs. Curtis would be hearing a report that Hal had two mistresses instead of one in the tent-colony!
Yes, that was their way of fighting. If you lifted your voice in opposition to their greed and oppression, they crept upon you in the dark and shot you through with a poisoned arrow. And because you knew this, you kept silence, you shut yourself up in your own private affairs, and let your life be ruled by fear.
“I wonder why it is,” said Hal. “There seems to be so much of that nasty element in our Western City politics.”
Adelaide answered—it was one of the curious and unforeseen consequences of woman suffrage, or rather of woman suffrage granted too early, without the women having had to work for it, and develop intelligence and public spirit. “Men don’t pay much attention to scandals,” she said, “but when you’re dealing with women voters, there’s nothing pays so well as a nasty story.”
She went on to explain that the “interests” which ruled in the city had a regular factory for that sort of campaign material. There was a certain Dr. Anna Carlton, who had what was supposed to be a medical-office, but who received a regular salary, with an expense account, out of which she paid spies and agents to seek out all manner of scandals in the lives of persons whom it was desired to threaten—politicians who would not vote as ordered, journalists who dared to be independent, labor leaders who called strikes. If there was no scandal in existence, the doctor would make one; fitting it in so carefully to the known facts of the person’s character and circumstances that it could with difficulty be denied. She would start this story through a score of underground channels, and in a few days it would be everywhere whispered and believed.
Later on, Hal saw much of this bureau’s operations. When magazine-writers came from the East to investigate and write up this strike, there was a scandal got ready for each of them within a week of his arrival. As Dr. Carlton could not find out much about these people, and was pushed for time, she was forced to pair off men and women indiscriminately, without any regard to their tastes. This got to be a joke among the victims; but even as one laughed over the joke, one thought of all the good, earnest people who took it all for gospel, and were thereby led to withhold their help from the strikers in their pitiful distress!
No, Adelaide could not visit the tent-colony. But there was another plan in Hal’s mind—and before he told of it he went to the doors of the drawing-room, and looked outside, and then closed them carefully. “Suppose,” said he, “there were something you could do in secret?”
“What, Hal?”
“When I went down to that strike, I had my mind made up that I would not countenance violence. But now—well, I see the soldiers closing in on us, and I’ve had to revise my program. I don’t mean to stand by and see those tent-colonies wiped out!”
“But you can’t fight the state militia!”
“We’re going to have to fight them, Adelaide!”
“But Hal, that’s absurd! You’d stand no chance!”
“I’m not so sure. We outnumber them ten to one—”
“But the arms, Hal! The ammunition!”
“That’s what I’m talking to you about!” There was a pause; then Hal continued, “You saw in the papers yesterday that General Wrightman has issued an order forbidding gun-stores anywhere in the state to sell arms for the strike-field.”
“Yes, I saw that.”
“Well, then, if we’re going to buy on a big scale, it will have to be outside the state. And we must have somebody we can trust, and whom the enemy would not suspect.”
Adelaide sat with her eyes fixed on Hal; at last she answered, quietly, “All right; when you need me for that, let me know!”
[26]
In New York and Chicago and other big cities to the East, it was becoming quite a fad for the sons and daughters of the idle rich to get themselves arrested in strike troubles. And in Western City they strove diligently to keep up with Eastern fashions. As Hal walked down the street, the members of the “younger set” whom he encountered were keen with curiosity. They “kidded” him, of course; it was a lark to greet the son of Edward S. Warner as an ex-convict and jail-bird; but then they wanted to know everything that had happened, and what it had felt like; they imagined themselves acquiring this wild and perilous kind of distinction. These members of the “younger set” went hunting in the mountains and clamored up perilous peaks; they drove racing-cars and broke the necks of themselves and others; they rode wild horses, and fought professional boxers, and ran away with chorus-girls; but here was something brand-new, the ne-plus-ultra of fashionability—to beard an old military walrus with white mustaches, and to be locked up in jail, and come to town next day and see your name on the front page of both morning papers!
There were older people, of course; and the old are conservative by nature, and cannot understand the need of youth for new sensations. A couple of ladies who met Hal on the street showed their good breeding by making no mention whatever of the shame he had brought upon his family; while others mentioned it in tones of grave reproof—old Dr. Penniman, for example, whose duty in life it was to discuss other people’s conduct and morals, and who had an especial right to discuss Hal Warner’s, because the young man was a member of his congregation, and had disgraced the hallowed name of St. George’s.
Dr. Penniman knew all about the strike—he had read the details of it every day in the newspapers. There were fierce foreign criminals, with anarchistic ideas in their heads and daggers and bombs in their hands; there were gallant sons of good families, preserving the supremacy of the law and of the flag at deadly peril to their lives; and here was Hal Warner, showing what became of young men who no longer come to church regularly, but take up with modern infidelity and sedition. There was a fierce argument on the street—until Dr. Penniman noticed that people were staring at him, and remembered his dignity and hurried away, leaving Hal swearing at the bourgeois world and its prejudices.
More than anything else it was the newspapers! Twice a day people read these class-owned sheets, and it was as if they breathed poisoned gas. These papers had made a vulgar sensation, a scandal, out of Hal’s arrest; they had suppressed his statement, his explanation—and that, of course, was as if they had cut out the brains of his action!
Suddenly, as Hal walked on, brooding, he lifted his eyes, and before him towered a great building of brown stone, with a sign across the top of it: “The Western City Herald”. Underneath this sign was a second line of words—big, so that you could not miss them, graven in stone, so that they would last forever:
“Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling-place!”
Hal had seen these words many times before, but never in his present mood, with his present knowledge. They came to him as something new and startling, incredible. He read them over and over—staring like a countryman who comes to town for the first time in his life, and is moved to awe by the great sights of the city. Suddenly an impulse laid hold of Hal Warner, and he went across the street and entered the elevator of the building.
“Office of the Publisher”, read the sign on one of a long row of doors; and Hal walked in, and handed his card to a clerk, and the clerk disappeared, and came back and sai
d, “This way please”—all quite suddenly, before Hal had time to realize the consequences of this mad impulse which had seized him. He went along an inner corridor, past several doors with names on them, until the clerk opened one with the name, “Mr. Anthony Lacking”.
It was a big room, with big windows which looked out over the roof-tops of the city. Between the windows was a big desk, and at this desk sat a big man. He had been a fighting man in the early days, this “Tony” Lacking—he had come to town as a “tin-horn” gambler, and started a paper in a place where everybody had scandals, and he had shoved his way among them, black-mailing, brazening, blustering in huge headlines black and red. First he had plundered individuals, then he had plundered corporations—until at last he had discovered the final destiny of the great newspaper, which is to assist the corporations in their plundering of the public. So now this ex-gambler had a big building and an odor of prosperity, and was all for law and order and the sacred rights of privilege. But he was still the same “Tony” Lacking to all the city—a florid face and a florid mustache, a diamond on his finger, and a voice that had been made in the mountains. “Hello, Kid!” said he, when he saw Hal.
The other was not disconcerted, for though he had never happened to meet Mr. Lacking, he knew him by sight, and had heard the voice of the mountains. He took the greeting as it was meant, in good fellowship, and remarked, “Justice has accepted your invitation, Mr. Lacking.”
The other looked at him. “What the devil?” said he.
“I hope you won’t fail to recognize her!” And without being invited Hal went and took a chair beside Mr. Lacking’s desk. “Justice comes to make an appeal for Mrs. Bobek, a Slav woman, whose baby is dying.” And Hal continued, simply and earnestly, with the story of this poor mother and her “joy-ride”. Then, “Justice comes to make an appeal for Mike Sikoria, Mr. Lacking.” And Hal told the story of the old Slovak—not merely how he had had his arm crippled for trying to get his mail, but how he had wandered about in the coal-camps of the state, being robbed and mistreated—
The Coal War Page 22