Day after day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength
departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The
men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic
determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of
hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless
stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins
that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany
bars.
Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his
individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the
strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did
not bend under it. He would not admit the hopelessness of the
contest--and he fought on. At the end of a month he was still able to
fire his audiences with sincere, if theatrical, oratory; he could still
play upon them and be certain of a response. At the end of two months
he--even he--was forced to admit that they listened with stolidness,
with apathy. They were falling away from him; but he fought on. He
would not admit defeat, would not, even in his most secret thoughts,
look forward to inevitable failure.
Every man that deserted was an added atom of strength to Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated. Every hungry baby, every ailing wife, every empty
dinner table fought for the company and against Dulac. Rioting ended.
It requires more than hopeless apathy to create a riot; there must be
fervor, determination, enthusiasm. Daily Dulac's ranks were thinned by
men who slunk to the company's employment office and begged to be
reinstated.... The back of the strike was broken.
Bonbright Foote saw how his company crushed the strike; how,
ruthlessly, with machinelike certainty and lack of heart, it went ahead
undeviatingly, careless of obstructions, indifferent to human beings in
its path. There was something Prussian about it; something that
recalled to him Bismarck and Moltke and 1870 with the exact, soulless
mechanical perfection of the systematic trampling of the France of
Napoleon III.... And, just as the Bonbright Foote tradition crunched
the strike to pieces so it was crunching and macerating his own
individuality until it would be a formless mass ready for the mold.
The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating
direction by heart and mind. No day passed upon which the rod of
Bonbright's will was not bent, was not twisted to make it follow the
direction of some other will stronger than his--the direction of the
accumulated wills of all the Bonbright Footes who had built up the
family tradition.
No initiative was allowed him; he was not permitted to interest himself
in the business in his own youthful, healthy way; but he must see it
through dead eyes, he must initiate nothing, criticize nothing, suggest
nothing. He must follow rule.
His father was not satisfied with him, that he realized--and that he
was under constant suspicion. He was unsatisfactory. His present mental
form was not acceptable and must undergo painful processes of
alteration. His parents would have taken him back, as a bad bargain,
and exchanged him for something else if they could, but being unable,
they must make him into something else.
Humiliation lay heavy on him. Every man in the employ of Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, must realize the shamefulness of his position,
that he was a fiction, a sham held up by his father's hands. Orders
issued from his lips to unsmiling subordinates, who knew well they were
not his orders, but words placed in his mouth to recite parrot-like.
Letters went out under his signature, dictated by him--according to the
dictation of his father. He was a rubber stamp, a mechanical means of
communication.... He was not a man, an individual--he was a marionette
dancing to ill-concealed strings.
The thing he realized with abhorrence was that when he was remade, when
he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create--when at
last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was
master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other
automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same,
never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic
priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material
as needful--with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their
religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be a symbol....
He approached his desk in the morning with loathing, and left it at
night without relief. Hopelessness was upon him and he could not flee
from it; it was inescapable.
True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend--a
sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and
Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them....
Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to
help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so
Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He
discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of
efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have
taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor
had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a
boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that
course.... So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in
his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote,
Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw
where modern business would make changes and improvements--but after
the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew
indifferent.
Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines.
"Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely--and the matter ended.
In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one
process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pass from one
machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary
employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw
time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew
better. He knew how it should be done--but he did not care.... The
methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the
laws of his father's life.
Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm
Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a
woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the
city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had
won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden,
almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of
salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made
her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all.
Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She
continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked
after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had
cooked the meals and made the beds.... She represented womanhood of a
sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with....
There was much about her which gave him food for reflection.
And Hilda.... Since their first meeting there had been no reference to
the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the
knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his
friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by,
how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade,
a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be
wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully.
Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in
his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own
with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would
never have dared to drive.
She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her
attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity.
... He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet
he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her
the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.
He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile
field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with
Hilda.... The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent
reason--though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this
excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.
He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see
her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but
more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position.... She
represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so
wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive
difference.... And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the
moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life.
He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a
result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing
the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he
accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words,
he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote
VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with
the beggar maid.
So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the
molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that
was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father.
There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he
had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically
watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form....
After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning
soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and
presently his father summoned him to come in.
"I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary
talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of
Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going
repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your
secretary--whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists."
The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle,
nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the
guilty look of youth.
"Is it true?" snapped his father.
"I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily.
Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or
little.
"Have you no respect for your family name?... If you must have things
like this in your life, for God's sake keep them covered up. Don't be
infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering
like ghouls over the liaison of my son with--with a female anarchist
who is--the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?"
Liaison!... Liaison!... The foreign term beat again and again against
Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in
connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it
was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain.
"Liaison, sir!... Liaison?" he said, fumblingly.
"I can find a plainer term if you insist."
For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously
detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his
father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he
regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation,
this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that,
but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!...
Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family
tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin
unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission.
His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought
bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer
by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who
was outraged.... It was HER!
His father could think that of her--casually. The mere fact that she
was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the
senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his
son.... The Sultan throwing his handkerchief.
Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat.
"It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because
stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface.
"Bosh!" said the father.
Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled
off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer
to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his
smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones.
"It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie."
"Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful...."
"Careful!... I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever
did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. ...
And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to
believe.... I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could
believe such a thing of her.... Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll
tell you why.... I'll tell you why, good and plenty! ... My first day
in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile
was the only life or brightness in the place.... Everything else was
dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes.
Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!... Men dead
and rotten and eaten by worms--they run this place, and you want me to
let them run me.... Every move you make you consult a skeleton.... And
you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to
walk with a weight of dead bones.... I've tried. You are my father, and
I thought maybe you knew best.... I've submitted. I've submitted to
your humiliations, to having everything that's ME--that is individual
in me--stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back
in its place. ... She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit--and
you kicked her out.... And I've been going to see her--just to see her
smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you....
That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will
keep on making it so.... Probably you'll grind me into the family
groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've
just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the
man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer..."
He stopped, pale, panting, quivering.
"How dare you!... How dare--"
"Dare!"... Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great,
quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to
have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on
his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped,
clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. ... A
lie.... A slimy lie!"