The Web of Life Part 3

"They'll have enough of it before the works open," Porter added.

Parker Hitchc.o.c.k looked bored. Such things were not in good form; they came from the trade element in the family. His cousin Caspar had Miss Lindsay's attention. She was describing a Polish estate where she had visited the preceding summer.

"Did you send him round to our office?" Porter asked jokingly.

Sommers's keen eyes rested on his host's face inquiringly.

"No-oh," Alexander Hitchc.o.c.k drawled; "I had a talk with him."

"They are rather dangerous people to talk with," Dr. Lindsay remarked.

"He was a Norwegian, a big, fine-looking man. He was _all right_. He couldn't talk much English, but he knew that his folks were hungry. 'You gif me a yob,' he kept saying, until I explained I wasn't in the business, had nothing to do with the Pullman works. Then he sat down and looked at the floor. 'I vas fooled.' Well, it seems he did inlaying work, fine cabinet work, and got good pay. He built a house for himself out in some place, and he was fired among the first last winter,--I guess because he didn't live in Pullman."

"That's the story they use," Brome Porter said sceptically. "You should call the watchman; they're apt to be dangerous."

"A crowd of 'em," put in Carson, "were at the Pullman office this morning; wanted to _arbitrate_."

He spoke deprecatingly of their innocence, but Porter's tones were harsh.

"To arbitrate! to arbitrate! when we are making money by having 'em quit."

Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k turned apprehensively to her companion. Her handsome, clear face was perplexed; she was distressed over the way the talk was going.

"It's as bad as polo!" she exclaimed, in low tones. But the doctor did not hear her.

"Is it so," he was asking Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k, "that the men who had been thrifty enough to get homes outside of Pullman had to go first because they didn't pay rent to the company? I heard the same story from a patient in the hospital."

By this time Caspar Porter had turned his attention to the conversation at the other end of the table. His florid face was agape with astonishment at the doctor's temerity. Parker Hitchc.o.c.k shrugged his shoulders and muttered something to Miss Lindsay. The older men moved in their chairs.

It was an unhappy topic for dinner conversation in this circle.

"Well, I don't know," Colonel Hitchc.o.c.k replied, a slight smile creeping across his face. "Some say yes, and some say no. Perhaps Porter can tell you."

"We leave all that to the superintendent," the latter replied stiffly. "I haven't looked into it. The works isn't a hospital."

"That's a minor point," Carson added, in a high-pitched voice. "The real thing is whether a corporation can manage its own affairs as it thinks best or not."

"The thrifty and the s.h.i.+ftless," interposed Dr.

Lindsay, nodding to his young colleague.

"Well, the directors are a unit. That settles the matter," Porter ended dogmatically. "The men may starve, but they'll never get back now."

The young doctor's face set in rather rigid lines. He had made a mistake, had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable slough, when Brome Porter began again sententiously:

"The laborer has got some hard lessons to learn. This trouble is only a small part of the bigger trouble. He wants to get more than he is worth.

And all our education, the higher education, is a bad thing." He turned with marked emphasis toward the young doctor. "That's why I wouldn't give a dollar to any begging college--not a dollar to make a lot of discontented, lazy duffers who go round exciting workingmen to think they're badly treated. Every dollar given a man to educate himself above his natural position is a dollar given to disturb society."

Before Sommers could accept the challenge in this speech, Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k asked,--

"But what did you do with your visitor, papa?"

"Well, we had some more talk," he replied evasively. "Maybe that's why I missed you, Brome, at the club. He stayed most an hour."

"Did he go then?" the girl pressed on mischievously.

"Well, I gave him a 'yob' over at the yards. It wasn't much of a 'yob'

though."

This speech aroused some laughter, and the talk drifted on in little waves into safer channels. The episode, however, seemed to have made an undue impression upon Sommers. Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k's efforts to bring him into the conversation failed. As for Mrs. Lindsay, he paid her not the slightest attention. He was coolly taking his own time to think, without any sense of social responsibility.

"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low, insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one wants you to?"

Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream.

Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled.

"I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly.

"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head to catch every syllable of his reply.

"I seemed to see things in a flash--to feel an iron crust of prejudice."

The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young doctor tried again to phrase the matter.

"These people--I mean your comfortable rich--seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their inst.i.tutions, and all that," he blundered on.

"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising her head and glancing over the table.

"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks sound 'young' even to me."

"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"

She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.

"Yes," Sommers a.s.sented; "it is harder to understand."

It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic att.i.tude, so much more completely than a man. Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k's voice brought his idle musing to an end.

"I hope you will talk with Dr. Lindsay. He is a very able man. And," she hesitated a moment and then looked frankly at him, "he can do so much for a young doctor who has his way to make."

"Don't you think that might make it harder for me to talk to him?" Sommers asked, irritated by her lack of tact.

The girl's face flushed, and she pressed her lips together as if to push back a sharp reply.

"That is unfair. We are going now--but sometime we must talk it out."

The men stretched themselves and rearranged their chairs in little groups.

Parker Hitchc.o.c.k, Carson, and young Porter--were talking horses; they made no effort to include the young doctor in their corner. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably stranded in the middle of the long room, when Dr.