The Coal War (36 page)

Jessie had sunk into the background of Hal's consciousness; but when he met her, the spell was renewed, as poignant and intense as ever. The smile upon her lips, the light in her eyes, the very odor of the perfume she used, the touch of her soft garments—all these were intoxicating to his senses, and threw his mind into confusion. What was this mad thing he had been doing—casting away the gracious things of life, and going down into a bottomless pit of sordidness?

He controlled himself—listening meantime to what Jessie was saying. She was so unhappy; she had waited for him to come to her, but the weeks dragged by, and the months. How much longer was this dreadful strike going to last?

“I would have to be a wise man to tell you that, Jessie.”

“And you mean to stay on, no matter how long it drags out?”

“I couldn't possibly do anything else.”

“But then—what am
I
to do, Hal?”

So he told her of the decision he had come to. “I don't think there's any possibility of our making each other happy. You will never approve what I am doing, never be interested in it. We should only be tearing each other to pieces, and we ought to realize it, before it's too late.”

“
Hal!
” she exclaimed. Her voice was stricken with fear. She could not go on.

“That's it,” he said, taking up her unspoken thought. “We ought to part, Jessie.”

She drew up the electric by the side of the roadway; for it is not safe to run an automobile when one's eyes are blinded with tears, and one's hands trembling. “Surely, the strike can't last forever, Hal!”

“Not this one; but there will be others—there is a class-war, which will last longer than your life-time or mine.”

“And you'll always be mixed up in it?”

“Always.”

“You're never going to work, Hal? I mean—like other people?”

“You mean at making money? But my brother runs the business; he wouldn't let me have anything to do with it if I wanted to.”

“But so many other things you might do, Hal—besides being a labor agitator!”

“I might study, Jessie, and write about these things; I might take to editing a paper, or even go into politics; but it wouldn't make a bit of difference—I should still seem dreadful to you and to all your world. If I didn't, I would know that I was on the wrong track—that I wasn't accomplishing anything.”

He paused; realizing how perverse his last statement must sound to her, and being moved by her grief, he began once more trying to explain—the old, wearisome propaganda, to which she listened because he forced her to.

“But what can I
do
, Hal?”

“There's nothing you can do, dear—because you don't want to do it.”

“But if I
wanted
to, what would it be?”

“The words are in the Bible—leave all and follow me. Break with your family and friends, every thing you consider decent, and come with your mind made up to help me.”

There was another long pause; at last Jessie spoke, in a whisper. “Hal!”

“Well?”

“Isn't there somebody else?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—some other woman?”

“No, Jessie—I'm not thinking about Mary Burke, if that's your idea. Can't you understand, I'm fighting for something dearer than life, and I'm under the shadow of destruction! I've seen such things in that tent-colony—there's no use telling you about them, there's no use telling what I fear, or why I've come to town at this moment. It would only drive you to distraction. I've thought it out, and I see that I can never be what you want me to be, I can never make you happy, I can never do anything but tear you to pieces. So we ought to have it over with, once for all.”

She sat twisting her hands together in distress. “Oh, Hal, it's so dreadful!”

Now it is a habit of women to suffer, and break men down. Sometimes they do it by instinct; sometimes, having found that it can be done, they do it deliberately. Being young, but on the way to maturity, Jessie was now doing it a little of both ways. She might have succeeded, had there not come an interruption—an automobile passing by, driven by a girl who recognized them, and waved her hand.

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 read 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!