The Coal War

by Upton Sinclair

  Instantly Jessie flew into a panic. That was Estelle Edmonds, and she would tell people she had seen Jessie and Hal, and the news would come to Jessie’s father! Oh, what miserable luck! Jessie seized the lever of the electric. She must catch Estelle and pledge her to secrecy!

  “You’d better let me out first,” said Hal, quickly.

  “Oh, but I want to talk to you some more!”

  “Yes, but meantime we’ll meet other people. You can’t drive me out there on the main avenue!” He started to get out.

  “But Hal, I can’t part from you like this. I can’t! I can’t!” And she wrung her hands in excitement and distress. “I’ve got to think it over!”

  “All right,” said Hal, “think it over, and write me your decision.” And he stepped out of the limousine. “Hurry up, or you won’t catch her.”

  Jessie gazed after the disappearing car, and then, in anguish, at her lover. “Oh, please wait for me here! I must see you some more! I’ve so much to say!”

  An instinct told Hal that it was better to make his escape while he could. What was the use of suffering to no purpose? What was the use of talking on and on, and getting nowhere? This very episode was proof where Jessie’s real interests lay—in the world of obedience and propriety. “No,” he said, “others would surely see us. Go on, and tell Estelle, and write me what you have to say.”

  “But you’ll wait to hear from me, Hal? You won’t do anything irrevocable! Promise me that—promise me!”

  To which he answered, “If anything irrevocable is done, it will be by General Wrightman and his soldiers.”

  So Jessie was reassured. She was not nearly so much afraid of General Wrightman and his soldiers as she was of a wild rose in a mining-camp! Hal stepped back, and she started the electric, disappearing down the driveway at a pace which promised trouble with the first traffic-policeman on the way.

  [6]

  From this interview Hal went to get the latest reports on the history of contemporary Christian martyrdom. Having been denied opportunity to convert the congregation wholesale, the Reverend Wilmerding had begun insidious efforts at private proselytizing. He had persuaded a number of ladies of St. George’s to read his incendiary pamphlet, and had had secret conferences with them, attended by no one knew what dark proceedings; he had even gone so far as to persuade one of them to turn a church sewing-circle at her home into an opportunity for him to unsettle the minds and disturb the home-life of some twenty innocent and hitherto blameless females. These underhanded procedures having come to the ear of Dr. Penniman, there were further clashes between them—clashes so open and shocking that Wilmerding could no longer conceal them from Hal.

  Poor Uncle Will! The very foundations of his soul-life were crumbling beneath him. He had loved Dr. Penniman as a child loves a father, he had reverenced him as a deputy of heavenly powers. And here, because his assistant presumed to differ from him on political and economic questions, Dr. Penniman was proceeding to suspect that assistant of the basest and most inconceivable motives! Motives, not merely of insubordination and presumption, but of common jealousy, of vain-glory, of greed for attention—things of which the Reverend Wilmerding was no more capable than he was capable of sitting on a broomstick and flying to Walpurgisnacht. But his rector had attributed these things to him, in tones of shrill rage; so that Wilmerding had stood with tears of shame and grief in his eyes.

  Hal, who had gone deeper into these questions than his friend, endeavored to give him comfort. He must realize that Dr. Penniman could not take the class-war as a purely political and economic question; Dr. Penniman had definitely enlisted himself and his church on one side—his social reputation, his intellectual prestige, his very moral sanctions. He had built his church on the prevailing system—made it a place of privilege, a school of comfort to the rich; he had had rich men appointed to the positions of trust in it, so that they stood before the world as the church itself. And now in his old age it was to be changed overnight—and at the behest of a humble assistant whom Dr. Penniman had trained up!

  Hal had given his friend books to read, expositions of a heresy which masqueraded as “Christian Socialism”; and Wilmerding had absorbed these, and had made the mistake of quoting them to Dr. Penniman—being so far unbalanced as not to realize how their very titles must terrify a respectable rector: “The Call of the Carpenter”, “The Carpenter and the Rich Man”, “Christianity and the Social Crisis”!

  What a subtle and cunning fiend was Satan! When he wished to rend and destroy a stately religious institution, to terrify and scatter a fashionable congregation—did he burst through the floor of the edifice with a glare of flame and an odor of brimstone and sulphur? Not he! He took upon himself the form of a serpent of cunning and plausible new thought, and crept thus into the minds of members of that fashionable congregation, setting them to seething with strange ideas—with motives, not merely of insubordination and presumption, but of common jealousy, of vainglory, of greed for attention! So in a short while, the stately religious institution was become as it were a nest of scorpions, stinging one another; a place of ugly hates, base suspicions, cowardly fears. So that on Sunday mornings the words of the Litany ascended to heaven like a wail of despair: “From envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness, we beseech thee to deliver us, good Lord!”

  [7]

  Next Hal went to the “Gazette” office, to see Keating and Pringle. The former had got word from Perry White of another conference of the secret organization of the coal-operators, in which a balance-sheet had been submitted, showing that efforts to operate coal-mines with “scab” labor were leading to bankruptcy. So a new fund had been subscribed. What was to be done with it was a secret not entrusted to the rank and file of the membership, but Perry White had given so definite an idea that Keating was returning to the “field” again, to be ready for the next move of “Troop E”. He was to take the night train, and Hal would go with him.

  Meantime Hal went away by himself, and the shadow of destruction looming over him drove him to a desperate course. He sought Lucy May and poured out his soul to her. He was going back to Horton, it might be to his death; so now, if ever, the lady from Philadelphia must summon her nerve and her aristocratic tradition, and act. “What do you want?” she asked; and Hal told her, and she stared at him aghast.

  Then he saw her eyes go to the wall of her reception-room, where in two large gilt frames hung a stately lady in furbelows and a stern-looking gentleman in ruffles, each with yellowish-brown complexions cracked with age. These were ancestors, it appeared; of the names and doings of such the little lady’s mind was a store-house. Hal would tease her about them, declaring that she used these portraits as ikons, or shrines; when someone failed to invite her to a dinner-party, or when a rival got more votes for president of the Tuesday Afternoon Club—then Lucy May would come to this holy place to remind herself that she was a daughter of colonial governors and of duchesses from over seas!

  So Hal had jested; and Lucy May replied with words which made him stare at her—the little witch! No, he did not care anything about his ancestors, the men of two hundred years ago were dead and buried to him; but what about the men of two hundred years from now? Did he never make appeal to them? And Hal realized that this was exactly the custom he had adopted, in the stress of this cruel struggle. When the whole world flouted him and humiliated him—when General Wrightman sent him to jail, or when Tony Lacking threw him into the waste-paper basket—he would make his appeal to the future, and cheer himself with its imagined applause!

  Pretty soon Brother Edward came home to dinner, and Lucy May announced that she and Hal were going that evening to hear Mrs. John Curtis expound her plan for a home for destitute cats and dogs. For God’s sake, said Edward, what were they coming to now? But of course, when one got started fooling with crank ideas, there was no telling what would come next! No, thank you—Edward would not be roped into a rich woman’s scheme for self-advertising! He would stay at home and rea
d the latest adventure of Sherlock Holmes. So, at eight in the evening, Hal and his sister-in-law, in their gladdest rags, entered the latter’s electric and set out upon a journey.

  It was the same road by which Hal had taken Little Jerry to the New Year’s party at the home of “Mr. Otter”. But this time they went farther yet—to a place where a spur came down from the foothills and spread itself into a lofty table-land, a mile wide and two or three miles long, overlooking the landscape for enormous distances. The road went round the foot of it, and all the way was a great fence of iron-railings, twelve feet high. If you were riding on the “rubber-neck wagon”, which every day came out to behold these sights, you would hear the man with the big horn explaining how many thousands of tons of metal were in this fence, and how if the palings were set end on end, they would reach to Omaha, or to Tokio, or to the moon, or wherever it was.

  At one place in the top of the ridge was a bend in the fence, where a road turned in and stopped in front of massive gates, with a brown-stone keeper’s lodge and guard-house on either side, but so hidden with trees and bushes that you could get no glimpse of them, even by day. In front of these gates Lucy May’s bold little limousine came to a halt, and rang its tinkly bell; and a man came out of a side-gate, and took the card which was held out to him. “Will you please to wait,” he said, and without stopping to hear whether the lady would please or not, he went into the lodge to the telephone. A new calling-custom, introduced since the strike, it seemed. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!

  As all believers in fairy-stories know, there are magic words which have power to cause the most massive gates to swing back upon their hinges. It is the modern custom to have these magic words engraved upon little pieces of card-board, which the fortunate possessor has only to present. Silently and majestically the gates gave way, and the bold little electric rang its tinkly bell again, and glided up a long winding avenue lined with pine-trees, coming to a great yellow building trimmed with white, and stopping under the shelter of a porte-cochere with columns big as the pillars of the temples of Karnak.

  A man-servant opened the door of the electric, and took it in charge; another man-servant opened the door of the house, and a third stood by to remove the wraps of the guests. Before them went up a broad stair-case, with a carpet of royal purple, woven all in one piece; on one side was the mantel of white marble, six feet high, from a palace in Ferrara, and on the other side were tapestries woven for the popes at Avignon. You might read the prices of these art-treasures ever so often in the society columns of the Western City “Herald”; you might hear malicious doubts of their genuineness in any Western City drawing-room.

  “Mr. Warner will wait for me,” said Lucy May, to the servant; and so Hal was free to wander about and improve his artistic sensibilities, while the little lady followed the lackey down a broad corridor, and through a side door, into a passage comparatively low, almost a tunnel. There was another door ahead, and as they approached it the knees of the little lady were trembling, the hands of the little lady were clenched, and the little white teeth were biting the little red lips so hard that the blood almost came. Deep within the little lady soul were voices crying out: “You are not afraid! You are not afraid! You are a daughter of colonial governors and of duchesses from over seas! He is nothing but a pack-peddler—he is common! Common! Common as dirt!”

  The servant opened the door, and the little lady went through. But it proved a false alarm, for the corridor continued to another door—it took several such barriers to protect an American man of business from the society-doings of the women-folk of his family! Again the little lady clenched her hands and bit her lip; again the voices spoke, and the servant opened and bowed, and Lucy May passed through, and into the presence of the Coal King.

  [8]

  It was a common-place looking room, its ceiling low, its walls covered with book-cases and filing-cabinets. At one end was a library-table with a shaded lamp, and a couple of worn leather arm-chairs. Between that and the door stood a chess-table, and before it sat two men. Neither of them moved when the door opened; until the servant’s voice broke the silence: “Mrs. Warner, sir.”

  One of the men turned and got up—slowly, with what seemed reluctance. He was a heavy man, with a powerful frame, stoop-shouldered, sluggish; his head hung forward, so that when he turned it to look at you, you thought of some animal, swinging from side to side in a menagerie cage. By the eyes, and the folds of the skin, it might have been a hippopotamos; by the set of the jaw and the protruding lip, a bulldog. The old man’s hair was grey, and straggly, because he ran his hands in it when he thought. He had on a brown smoking-jacket shiny at the elbows, a pair of baggy black trousers, and ragged green carpet-slippers which might have been a wedding-gift.

  The heavy-lidded eyes fixed themselves upon the unexpected caller, a lady in a brocaded opera-cloak of blue silk, with a tiny diadem of a hat on top of soft brown hair; a lady petite, exquisite, with fine, sensitive features, now wearing a look of ineffable serenity, of proud assurance. You might have thought it Queen Titania, come to command some surly old Caliban-monster.

  “Good evening, Mr. Harrigan,” she said; and her voice was musical, as poets tell about the voices of mountain-streamlets.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” said the old Caliban-monster.

  “Mr. Harrigan, I have to talk to you about something personal.”

  “Yes, ma’am?” said the monster. (One of the monstrous things about him was that all the ladies of his family together had not been able to break him of that plebian form of address.)

  “I shall have to see you alone,” said the little lady; and she looked at the other man, who sat at the chess-table, not having lifted his eyes. He was white-haired, thin and old, with the pale face of a student. Lucy May knew all about him—who in Western City did not know about Jacob Apfel, who had been a dealer in second-hand clothing, and had “staked” Old Peter in his early days, and now lived with the Coal King, collecting bugs and postage-stamps and snuff-boxes by day, and in the evening playing chess with his crony!

  “Alone, Mr. Harrigan,” said the little lady, in the voice of the duchesses from over seas.

  And the head of Peter Harrigan swung round. “Get out, Jake!” So the old man rose from the chess-table, and without a sound or glance went through a door at the other side of the room.

  “Now, ma’am?” said Old Peter.

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Harrigan,” said Lucy May. She realized perfectly well that he did not want to sit down, nor to have her sit down; but she was mistress of ceremonies wherever she went, and he, who hated snobbery, cursed it with all the force of his forceful being, was yet bound by it, helpless.

  “Mr. Harrigan,” said Lucy May, having put herself at ease, “I have come on a strange errand.”

  “Yes, ma’am?” said the uneasy old monster.

  “I will begin by mentioning some things I have not come for. I don’t want any money from you; I am not raising funds for anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the other again. He did not smile, but there was a trace more of humanness in his voice.

  “In the next place, I have nothing to do with the affairs of my husband. I gather that you are not on cordial terms with him. I wish you to know that I am not either. I am unhappy about his business—almost as unhappy as you are about yours.”

  Not by so much as a flicker of an eye-lid did Old Peter betray his attitude to that remark; but the little lady had that strange sense which enables ladies to feel their way—as bats fly in darkness, dodging a thousand obstructions. She went on, the smile going out of her face, and her voice becoming grave. “Circumstances, Mr. Harrigan, have willed it that your fate and mine are bound together. You don’t know it, possibly, but I know it, and you will know it before long. You may not wish this, but it is a fact that I have to play a part in your life, whether for good or evil. So it seemed the sensible thing to come and talk matters out with you.”

  Again there was a
silence.

  “You, Mr. Harrigan, are a lonely and unhappy old man. Life has played a trick on you. You have worked hard, and made a success, but you haven’t found happiness—you are embittered, desolate, shut up in yourself. You sit here now and peer out at me, and you’re saying: ‘What new kind of dodge is this? What’s this one after?’ You’re saying that, aren’t you, Mr. Harrigan?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Old Peter.

  “You’ve got something that everybody wants—that’s money; everybody is putting his wits to work, thinking up some way to get at you, some new scheme, some pretence, some ‘spiel’, as they call it. There is no end to their devices—charities, reform movements, causes, religions, arts, sciences; a new kind of healer to make you well, a new kind of prophet to save your soul, a new kind of power or dignity or learning to impress you—to separate you from your money! They gather like flies about a honey-pot—you have to shut yourself up in a cage, with servants and guards outside, and miles of iron fence all about you, to keep yourself safe. And even then they break through!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Old Peter.

  [9]

  There had come the trace of a smile to the eyes of the old Caliban-monster, and the little lady saw it, and renewed her courage. “You have an impulse towards humanness, Mr. Harrigan—isn’t it so? But then the old habit reasserts itself. You say: ‘Watch out now! This is a smooth one, this is the smartest yet—but all the more dangerous for that! She has her graft!’ Now listen, Mr. Harrigan—get this clear in your mind. I don’t want anything from you, there’s nothing you could offer me that I would take. I have money of my own, and as you know, I have my social position—I don’t have to come to the Harrigans.”