“What?” queried Grant absently. His attention left her again, for the men from South Harvey at whom he was directing volts of courage from his blazing eyes.
“Well–she’ll be scared to death for fear mother and I will cut her socially for it! She’s dying to get into the inner circle, and she’ll abuse little Joe for this–which,” smiled Laura, “will be my revenge, and will be badly needed by little Joe.” But she was talking to deaf ears.
A street car halted them before Brotherton’s store for a minute. Grant looked anxiously in the door way, and saw only Miss Calvin, who turned away her head, after smiling at her brother.
“I wonder where George can be?” asked Grant.
“Don’t you know?” replied Laura, looking wonderingly at him. “There’s a little boy at their house!”
The crowd was hooting and cheering and the procession was just ready to turn into the court house corner, when Grant felt Laura’s quick hand clasp. Grant was staring at Kenyon, white and wild-eyed, standing near them on the curb.
“Yes,” he said in a low voice, “I see the poor kid.”
“No–no,” she cried, “look down the block–see that electric! There comes father, bringing mother back from the depot–Oh, Grant–I don’t mind for me, I don’t mind much for father–but mother–won’t some one turn them up that street! Oh, Grant–Grant, look!”
Less than one hundred feet before them the electric runabout was beginning to wobble unsteadily. The guiding hand was trembling and nervous. Mrs. Nesbit, leaning forward with horror in her face, was clutching at her husband’s arm, forgetful of the danger she was running. The old Doctor’s eyes were wide and staring. He bore unsteadily down upon the procession, and a few feet from the head of the line, he jumped from the machine. He was an old man, and every year of his seventy-five years dragged at his legs, and clutched his shaking arms.
“Joe Calvin–you devil,” he screamed, and drew back his cane, “let her go–let her go.”
The crowd stood mute. A blow from the cane cracked on the young legs as the Doctor cried:
“Oh, you coward–” and again lifted his cane. Joe Calvin tried to back the prancing horse away. The blow hit the horse on the face, and it reared, and for a second, while the crowd looked away in horror, lunged above the helpless old man. Then, losing balance, the great white horse fell upon the Doctor; but as the hoofs grazed his face, Kenyon Adams had the old man round the waist and flung him aside. But Kenyon went down under the horse. Calvin turned his horse; some one picked up the fainting youth, and he was beside Mrs. Nesbit in the car a moment later, a limp, unconscious thing. Grant and Laura ran to the car. Dr. Nesbit stood dazed and impotent–an old man whose glory was of yesterday–a weak old man, scorned and helpless. He turned away trembling with a nervous palsy, and when he reached the side of the machine, his daughter, trying to hide her manacled hand, kissed him and said soothingly:
“It’s all right, father–young Joe’s vexed at something I said down in the Valley; he’ll get over it in an hour. Then I’ll come home.”
“And,” gasped Mrs. Nesbit, “he–that whippersnapper,” she gulped, “dared–to lay hands on you; to–”
Laura shook her head, to stop her mother from speaking of the handcuff,–“to make you walk through Market Street–while,” but she could get no further. The crowd surrounded them. And in the midst of the jostling and milling, the Doctor’s instinct rose stronger than his rage. He was fumbling for his medicine case, and trying to find something for Kenyon. The old hands were at the young pulse, and he said unsteadily:
“He’ll be around in a few minutes.”
Some one in the crowd offered a big automobile. The Doctor got in, waved to his daughter, and followed Mrs. Nesbit up the hill.
“You young upstart,” he cried, shaking his fist at Calvin as the car turned around, “I’ll be down in ten minutes and see to you!” The provost marshal turned his white steed and began gathering up his procession and his prisoners. But the spell was broken. The mind of the crowd took in an idea. It was that a shameful thing was happening to a woman. So it hissed young Joe Calvin. Such is the gratitude of republics.
In the court house, the provost marshal, sitting behind an imposing desk, decided that he would hold Mrs. Van Dorn under $100 bond to keep the peace and release her upon her own recognizance.
“Well,” she replied, “Little Joe, I’ll sign no peace bond, and if it wasn’t for my parents–I’d make you lock me up.”
Her hand was free as she spoke. “As it is–I’m going back to South Harvey. I’ll be there until this strike is settled; you’ll have no trouble in finding me.” She hurried home. As she approached the house, she saw in the yard and on the veranda, groups of sympathetic neighbors. In the hall way were others. Laura hurried into the Doctor’s little office just as he was setting Kenyon’s broken leg and had begun to bind the splints upon it. Kenyon lay unconscious. Mrs. Nesbit and Lila hovered over him, each with her hands full of surgical bandages, and cotton and medicine. Mrs. Nesbit’s face was drawn and anxious.
“Oh, mamma–mamma–I’m so sorry–so sorry–you had to see.” The proud woman looked up from her work and sniffed:
“That whippersnapper–that–that–” she did not finish. The Doctor drew his daughter to him and kissed her. “Oh, my poor little girl–they wouldn’t have done that ten years ago–”
“Father,” interrupted the daughter, “is Kenyon all right?”
“Just one little bone broken in his leg. He’ll be out from under the ether in a second. But I’ll–Oh, I’ll make that Calvin outfit sweat; I’ll–”
“Oh, no, you won’t, father–little Joe doesn’t know any better. Mamma can just forget to invite his wife to our next party–which I won’t let her do–not even that–but it would avenge my wrongs a thousand times over.”
Lila had Kenyon’s hand, and Mrs. Nesbit was rubbing his brow, when he opened his eyes and smiled. Laura and the Doctor, knowing their wife and mother, had left her and Lila together with the awakening lover. His eyes first caught Mrs. Nesbit’s who bent over him and whispered:
“Oh, my brave, brave boy–my noble–chivalrous son–”
Kenyon smiled and his great black eyes looked into the elder woman’s as he clutched Lila’s hand.
“Lila,” he said feebly, “where is it–run and get it.”
“Oh, it’s up in my room, grandma–wait a minute–it’s up in my room.” She scurried out of the door and came dancing down the stairs in a moment with a jewel on her finger. The grandmother’s eyes were wet, and she bent over and kissed the young, full lips into which life was flowing back so beautifully.
“Now–me!” cried Lila, and as she, too, bent down she felt the great, strong arms of her grandmother enfolding her in a mighty hug. There, in due course, the Doctor and Laura found them. A smile, the first that had wreathed his wrinkled face for an hour, twitched over the loose skin about his old lips and eyes.
“The Lord,” he piped, “moves in a mysterious way–my dear–and if Laura had to go to jail to bring it–the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away–blessed be–”
“Well, Kenyon,” the grandmother interrupted the Doctor, stooping to put her fingers lovingly upon his brow, “we owe everything to you; it was fine and courageous of you, son!”
And with the word “son” the Doctor knew and Laura knew, and Lila first of all knew that Bedelia Nesbit had surrendered. And Kenyon read it in Lila’s eyes. Then they all fell to telling Kenyon what a grand youth he was and how he had saved the Doctor’s life, and it ended as those things do, most undramatically, in a chorus of what I saids, and you saids to me, and I thought, and you did, and he should have done, until the party wore itself out and thought of Lila, sitting by her lover, holding his hands. And then what with a pantomime of eyes from Laura and the Doctor to Mrs. Nesbit, and what with an empty room in a big house, with voices far–exceedingly far–obviously far away, it ended with them as all journeys through this weary world end, and must end if the world wags on.
CHAPTER XLVIII
WHEREIN WE ERECT A HOUSE BUILT UPON A ROCK
That evening in the late twilight, two women stood at the wicket of a cell in the jail and while back of the women, at the end of a corridor, stood a curious group of reporters and idlers and guards, inside the wicket a tall, middle-aged man with stiff, curly, reddish hair and a homely, hard, forbidding face stood behind the bars. The young woman put her hand with the new ring on it through the wicket.
“It’s Kenyon’s ring–Kenyon’s,” smiled Lila, and to his questioning look at her mother, the daughter answered: “Yes, grandma knows. And what is more, grandpa told us both–Kenyon and me–what was bothering grandma–and it’s all–all–right!”
The happy eyes of Laura Van Dorn caught the eyes of Grant as they gazed at her from some distant landscape of his turbulent soul. She could not hold his eyes, nor bring them to a serious consideration of the occasion. His heart seemed to be on other things. So the woman said: “God is good, Grant.” She watched her daughter and cast a glance at the shining ring. Grant Adams heard and saw, but while he comprehended definitely enough, what he saw and heard seemed remote and he repeated:
“God is good–infinitely good, Laura!” His eyes lighted up. “Do you know this is the first strike in the world–I believe, indeed the first enterprise in the world started and conducted upon the fundamental theory that we are all gods. Nothing but the divine spark in those men would hold them as they are held in faith and hope and fellowship. Look at them,” he lifted his face as one seeing Heavenly legions, “ten thousand souls, men and women and children, cheated for years of their rights, and when they ask for them in peace, beaten and clubbed and killed, and still they do not raise their hands in violence! Oh, I tell you, they are getting ready–the time must be near.” He shook his head in exultation and waved his iron claw.
Laura said gently, “Yes, Grant, but the day always is near. Whenever two or three are gathered–”
“Oh, yes–yes,” he returned, brushing her aside, “I know that. And it has come to me lately that the day of the democracy is a spiritual and not a material order. It must be a rising level of souls in the world, and the mere dawn of the day will last through centuries. But it will be nonetheless beautiful because it shall come slowly. The great thing is to know that we are all–the wops and dagoes and the hombres and the guinnies–all gods! to know that in all of us burns that divine spark which environment can fan or stifle–that divine spark which makes us one with the infinite!” He threw his face upward as one who saw a vision and cried: “And America–our America that they think is so sordid, so crass, so debauched with materialism–what fools they are to think it! From all over the world for three hundred years men and women have been hurrying to this country who above everything else on earth were charged with aspiration. They were lowly people who came, but they had high visions; this whole land is a crucible of aspirations. We are the most sentimental people on earth. No other land is like it, and some day–oh, I know God is charging this battery full of His divine purpose for some great marvel. Some time America will rise and show her face and the world will know us as we are!”
The girl, with eyes fascinated by her engagement ring, scarcely understood what the man was saying. She was too happy to consider problems of the divine immanence. There was a little mundane talk of Kenyon and of the Nesbits and then the women went away.
An hour later an old man sitting in the dusk with a pencil in his left hand, was startled to see these two women descending upon him, to tell him the news. He kissed them both with his withered lips, and rubbed the soft cheek of the maiden against his old gray beard.
And when they were gone, he picked up the pencil again, and sat dumbly waiting, while in his heart he called eagerly across the worlds: “Mary–Mary, are you there? Do you know? Oh, Mary, Mary!”
The funeral of the young men killed in the shaft house brought a day of deepening emotion to Harvey. Flags were at half mast and Market Street was draped in crape. The stores closed at the tolling of bells which announced the hour of the funeral services. Two hundred automobiles followed the soldiers who escorted the bodies to the cemetery, and when the bugle blew taps, tears stood in thousands of eyes.
The moaning of the great-throated regimental band, the shrilling of the fife and the booming of the drum; the blare of the bugle that sounded taps stirred the chords of hate, and the town came back from burying its dead a vessel of wrath. In vain had John Dexter in his sermon over Fred Kollander tried to turn the town from its bitterness by preaching from the text, “Ye are members one of another,” and trying to point the way to charity. The town would have no charity.
The tragedy of the shaft house and the imprisonment of Grant Adams had staged for the day all over the nation in the first pages of the newspapers an interesting drama. Such a man as Grant Adams was a figure whose jail sentence under military law for defending the rights of a free press, free speech, free assemblage and trial by jury, was good for a first page position in every newspaper in the country–whatever bias its editorial columns might take against him and his cause. Millions of eyes turned to look at the drama. But there were hundreds among the millions who saw the drama in the newspapers and who decided they would like to see it in reality. Being foot loose, they came. So when the funeral procession was hurrying back into Harvey and the policemen and soldiers were dispersing to their posts, they fell upon half a dozen travel-stained strangers in the court house yard addressing the loafers there. Promptly the strangers were haled before the provost marshal, and promptly landed in jail. But other strangers appeared on the streets from time to time as the freight trains came clanging through town, and by sundown a score of young men were in the town lockup. They were happy-go-lucky young blades; rather badly in need of a bath and a barber, but they sang lustily in the calaboose and ate heartily and with much experience of prison fare. One read his paperbound Tolstoy; another poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town knew that a plague was upon them.
Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke the sound of hurrying feet–always the feet of the young men. For Youth goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade. So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over, there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with archaic ideas of morality–ideas perhaps of property and morals that were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust, and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden, golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger, played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found their danger in fighting for free speech, and free assemblage. They were tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war comes.
And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Constitution of the United States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of diversion for the police, the more did the wooden head of Market Street throb with rage and the more did the people imagine a vain thing.
And when seventy of them had crowded the jail, and their leaders blandly announced that they would eat the taxes all out of the county treasury before they stopped the fight for free speech, Market Street awoke. Eating taxes was something that Market Street could understand. So the police began clubbing the strangers. The pilgrims were meeting Danger, their lost comrade, and youth’s blood ran wild at the meeting and there were riots in Market Street. A lodging house in the railroad yards in South Harvey was raided one night–when the strike was ten days old, and as it was a railroadmen’s sleeping place, and a number of trainmen were staying there to whom the doctrines of peace and non-resistance did not look very attractive under a policeman’s ax-handle–a policeman was killed.
Then the Law and Order League was formed. Storekeepers, clerks, real estate men, young lawyers, the heart of that section of the white-shirted population whom Grant Adams called the “poor plutes,” joined this League. And deaf John Kollander was its leader. Partly because of his bereavement men let him lead, but chiefly because his life’s creed seemed to be vindicated by events, men turned to him. The bloodshed on Market Street, the murder of a policeman and the dynamiting of the shaft house with their sons inside, had aroused a degree of passion that unbalanced men, and John Kollander’s wrath was public opinion dramatized. The police gave the Law and Order League full swing, and John Kollander was the first chief in the city. Prisoners arrested for speaking without a permit were turned over to the Law and Order League at night, and taken in the city auto-truck to the far limits of the city, and there–a mile from the residential section, in the high weeds that fringed the town and confined the country, the Law and Order League lined up under John Kollander and with clubs and whips and sticks, compelled the prisoners to run a gauntlet to the highroad that leads from Harvey. Men were stripped, and compelled to lean over and kiss an American flag–spread upon the ground, while they were kicked and beaten before they could rise. This was to punish men for carrying a red flag of socialism, and John Kollander decreed that every loyal citizen of Harvey should wear a flag. To omit the flag was to arouse suspicion; to wear a red necktie was to invite arrest. It was a merry day for blithe devotees of Danger; and they were taking their full of her in Harvey.
The Law and Order League was one of those strange madnesses to which any community may fall a victim. Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright–with Jasper Adams a nimble echo, church men, fathers, husbands, solid business men, were its leaders.
They endorsed and participated in brutalities, cowardly cruelties at which in their saner moments they could only shudder in horror. But they made Jared Thurston chairman of the publicity committee and the Times, morning after morning, fanned the passions of the people higher and higher. “Skin the Rats,” was the caption of his editorial the morning after a young fellow was tarred and feathered and beaten until he lost consciousness and was left in the highway. The editorial under this heading declared that anarchy had lifted its hydra head; that Grant Adams preaching peace in the Valley was preparing to let in the jungle, and that the bums who were flooding the city jail were Adams’s tools, who soon would begin dynamiting and burning the town, when it suited his purpose, while his holier-than-thou dupes in the Valley were conducting their goody-goody strike.
Plots of dynamiting were discovered. Hardly a day passed for nearly a week that the big black headlines of the Times did not tell of dynamite found in obviously conspicuous places–in the court house, in the Sands opera house, in the schoolhouses, in the city hall. So Harvey grew class conscious, property conscious, and the town went stark mad. It was the gibbering fear of those who make property of privilege, and privilege of property, afraid of losing both.
But for a week and a day the motive power of the strike was Grant Adams’s indomitable will. Hour after hour, day after day he paced his iron floor, and dreamed his dream of the conquest of the world through fellowship. And by the power of his faith and by the example of his imprisonment for his faith, he held his comrades in the gardens, kept the strikers on the picket lines and sustained the courage of the delegates in Belgian Hall, who met inside a wall of blue-coated policemen. The mind of the Valley had reached a place where sympathy for Grant Adams and devotion to him, imprisoned as their leader, was stronger than his influence would have been outside. So during the week and a day, the waves of hate and the winds of adverse circumstance beat upon the house of faith, which he had builded slowly through other years in the Valley, and it stood unshaken.