Part 9

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!

His vision cleared. The shacks were not the same; there was only a torn dilapidation on the farther side of the opening, only the vacuous shells of buildings stood on the nearer side. Horror visible, a wavering fog of dust and gray-smoky vapor, hovered over the top of the ramp. The huddling activity of the figures grouping and scattering above the opening, this was all unusual.

Running the car against a mound of red earth, he climbed clumsily out. His legs trod an unreal soil; it was as if he had forgotten how to articulate their use. The hurrying men descending the artificial slope did not notice him; they were intent on what was below.

On the third level he passed four figures lying parallel, motionless, dreadfully relaxed. He pressed his hands madly against his face, to clear the dust from his eyes, the punishing ache from his nostrils. He stopped, unable to proceed; dead men even this high up! One of the men shuddered, raised himself sideways. He saw that they were merely resting, recovering. The rescue work must be going on, then! He hurried lower.

Here was Tom Hewin, eyes bloodshot, a blackened bandage bulging out from his forehead. "You too?"

Hewin came closer, peering emptily into Pelham's face. He muttered something.

"What's 'at?"

"Hell." The manager held to his arm, as a rock to cling to, and, walking painfully, led him down the cluttered ramp, deeper into the dizzying mist. Every few feet he stopped to shout disjointed explanations or profanity into Pelham's ear. Grotesque shapes appeared suddenly, flowed both sides of them, were gone. Flickering lanterns bobbed horribly around the entrances; they stumbled over two prone figures, their wavering lantern lights sputtering out, like star-headed deities fallen and expiring. Wild bursts of imaginative activity rocked Pelham's perceptions; there was nothing real in the whole thing. The only living creatures were himself and this shrunken, dirtied being who shouted in his ear, descending ever into a darkening pit.

"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. Niggers, maybe."

"They're digging in?"

"They got into six. Working on eight--the whole mountain's caved down."

"What did it?"

"Overcharge--damn' carelessness--God knows. At this time of all others--the damn' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked--an' then they overcharge! The damn'----"

"Shall I take eight?"

"I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope. Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside.

The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without. Pelham went at the job quickly--Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight."

The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown.