Youth Challenges Part 2

Bonbright turned and looked at the speaker with curiosity awakened as to the man's personality. The man was young--under thirty, and handsome in a black, curly, quasi-foreign manner.

Bonbright turned his eyes from the man to the girl at his side. "He looks--" said Bonbright.

"How?" she asked, when it was apparent he was not going to finish.

"As if," he said, musingly, "he wouldn't be the man to call on for a line smash in the last quarter of a tough game."

Suddenly the speech came to an end, and the crowd poured on.

"Good night," said the girl. "I must find Mr. Dulac. I promised I would walk home with him."

"Good night," said Bonbright. "His name is Dulac?"

"Yes."

Men like Dulac--the work they were engaged upon--had not fallen within the circle of Bonbright's experience. Bonbright's training and instincts had all been aristocratic. At Harvard he had belonged to the most exclusive clubs and had a.s.sociated with youths of training similar to his. In his athletics there had been something democratic, but nothing to impress him with democracy. Where college broadens some men by its contacts it had not broadened Bonbright, for his contacts had been limited to individuals chipped from the same strata as himself....

In his home life, before going to college, this had been even more marked. As some boys are taught arithmetic and table manners, Bonbright had been taught veneration for his family, appreciation for his position in the world, and to look upon himself and the few a.s.sociates of his circ.u.mscribed world as selected stock, looked upon with especial favor and graciousness by the Creator of the universe.

Therefore this sudden dip into reality set him s.h.i.+vering more than it would another who entered the water by degrees. It upset him.... The man Dulac stirred to life in him something that was deeper than mere curiosity.

"Miss--" said he, and paused. "I really don't know your name."

"Frazer," she supplied.

"Miss Frazer, I should like to meet this Dulac. Would you be willing?"

She considered. It was an unusual request in unusual circ.u.mstances, but why not? She looked up into his boyish face and smiled. "Why not?" she said, aloud.

They pressed forward through the crowd until they reached Dulac, standing beside his barrel, surrounded by a little knot of men. He saw the girl approaching, and lifted his hand in acknowledgment of her presence. Presently he came to her, casting a careless glance at Bonbright.

"Mr. Dulac," she said, "Mr. Foote has been listening to your speech. He wants to meet you."

"Foote!" said Dulac. "Not--"

"Mr. Bonbright Foote," said the girl.

Evidently the man was nonplussed. He stared at Bonbright, who extended his hand. Dulac looked at it, took it mechanically.

"I heard what you were saying, Mr. Dulac," said Bonbright. "I had never heard anything like it before--so I wanted to meet you."

Dulac recovered himself, perceived that here was an opportunity, and spoke loudly so that the staring, interested workingmen, who now surrounded them, could hear distinctly.

"I'm glad you were present," said he. "It is not often we workingmen catch the ear of you employers so readily. You sit apart from your men in comfortable offices or in luxurious homes, so they get little opportunity to talk straight from the shoulder to you.... Even if they had the chance," he said, with a look about him, "they would not dare.

To be respectful and to show no resentment mean their bread and b.u.t.ter."

"Resentment?" said Bonbright. "You see I am new to the business and to this. What is it they resent?"

"They resent being exploited for the profit of men like yourself....

They resent your having the power of life and death over them...."

The girl stood looking from one man to the other; from Dulac, tall, picturesquely handsome, flamboyant, conscious of the effect of each word and gesture, to Bonbright, equally tall, something broader, boyish, natural in his unease, his curiosity. She saw how like he was to his slender, aristocratic father. She compared the courtesy of his manner toward Dulac with Dulac's studied brusqueness, conscious that the boy was natural, honest, really endeavoring to find out what this thing was all about; equally conscious that Dulac was exercising the tricks of the platform and utilizing the situation theatrically. Yet he was utilizing it for a purpose with which she was heart and soul in sympathy. It was right he should do so....

"I wish we might sit down and talk about it," said Bonbright. "There seem to be two sides in the works, mine and father's--and the men. I don't see why there should be, and I'd like to have you tell me. You see, this is my first day in the business, so I don't understand my own side of it, or why I should have a side--much less the side of the men.

I hadn't imagined anything of the sort.... I wish you would tell me all about it. Will you?"

The boy's tone was so genuine, his demeanor so simple and friendly, that Dulac's weapons were quite s.n.a.t.c.hed from his hands. A crowd of the men he was sent to organize was looking on--a girl was looking on. He felt the situation demanded he should show he was quite as capable of courtesy as this young sprig of the aristocracy, for he knew comparisons were being made between them.

"Why," said he, "certainly.... I shall be glad to."

"Thank you," said Bonbright. "Good night." He turned to the girl and lifted his hat. "Thank YOU," said he, and eyes in which there was no unfriendliness followed him as he walked away, eyes of men whom Dulac was recruiting for the army of the "other side" of the social struggle.

He hurried home because he wanted to see his father and to discuss this thing with him.

"If there is a conflict," he said to himself, "in our business, workingmen against employer, I suppose I am on the employer's side.

THEY have their reasons. We must have our reasons, too. I must have father explain it all to me."

His mother called to him as he was ascending the stairs:

"Be as quick as you can, Bonbright. We have guests at dinner to-night."

"Some one I know?"

"I think not," His mother hesitated. "We were not acquainted when you went to college, but they have become very prominent in the past four years.... Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Lightener--and their daughter,"

Bonbright noticed the slight pause before the mention of the daughter, and looked quickly at his mother. She looked as quickly away.

"All right, mother," he said.

He went to his room with another disturbance added to the many that disquieted him. Just as certainly as if his mother had put it into words he knew she had selected this Lightener girl to be Mrs. Bonbright Foote VII--and the mother of Bonbright Foote VIII.

"Confound it," he said, "it's started already.... Dam Bonbright Foote VIII!"

CHAPTER III

Bonbright dressed with a consciousness that he was to be on exhibition.

He wondered if the girl had done the same; if she, too, knew why she was there and that it was her duty to make a favorable impression on him, as it was his duty to attract her. It was embarra.s.sing. For a young man of twenty-three to realize that his family expects him to make himself alluring to a desirable future wife whom he has never seen is not calculated to soothe his nerves or mantle him with calmness. He felt silly.

However, here HE was, and there SHE would be. There was nothing for it but to put his best foot forward, now he was caught for the event, but he vowed it would require more than ordinary skill to entrap him for another similar occasion. It seemed to him at the moment that the main object of his life thenceforward would be, as he expressed it, "to duck" Miss Lightener.

When he went down the guests had arrived. His mother presented him, using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue--as if she had said "our Rembrandt," or, "our Chippendale sideboard."

Mrs. Lightener did not impress him. Here was a quiet, motherly personality, a personality to grow upon one through months and years.

At first meeting she seemed only a gray-haired, shy, silent sort of person, not to be spoken of by herself as Mrs. Lightener, but in the reflected rays of her husband, as Malcolm Lightener's wife.