Mountain Part 20

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 subst.i.tuted. 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 pa.s.sed, 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 whitewas.h.i.+ng by legal t.i.tles 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, p.r.o.nounced 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 gus.h.i.+ngly 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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, was.h.i.+ng the blood from the arm of the cook, Diana. "What's the matter, mother?"

She turned an alarmed face to his. "The gla.s.s 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?"