At his first opportunity he phoned down to Jane an insistent plea for
that afternoon. "You'll have to see me, lady dear; I've something
important to tell you."
Was there ever a girl to whom these words, from even a passable lover,
or, for that matter, a possible one, did not bring the fluttering
fantasy of what woman has been so long taught to consider the one
important something that she is to hear? This thought came first to
Jane; then, smiling at her overstayed fraction of thinking, she promised
the afternoon.
She was on the porch when his wheels slid to a standstill at the curb;
he was beside her before she was well out of her chair. "The most
amazing thing, Jane!" as urgent fingers levitated her into the seat
beside him. "Dad's coming our way!"
Something of his flaring enthusiasm heightened her reply. "You can't be
serious! I'd as soon expect Auntie to be a convert!" Her mothering eyes
searched his face anxiously. "You aren't teasing me?"
"Indeed not! He's to speak at the state labor convention himself, in
favor of proper mining regulations. It's great, Jane! I wouldn't have
believed it of him!"
Her mobile lips curved doubtfully. "For your sake, I hope you're right,
Pelham. But--how can he? Why, boy, he's on the other side--he must be!
How could he line up with our ideas, when it would take money out of his
own pocket? Miracles don't happen, I'm afraid. I wish----" She sighed.
There was something to admire, almost love, in his hearty zeal over the
amazing convert; he was so boyish, so peltingly trustful!
"_I_'m for it, remember. And I'm his son." Her unsympathetic unbelief
widened his gaze.
Her fingers brushed his arm in a fleet unspoken caress. "You're a good
boy, Pelham. I haven't gotten over my wonder at you. But--you're pulling
against him, in all of this, remember."
"He's decent." Real pain spoke here; his own doubts of the father gave
an obstinate tinge to his reception of her objections.
A cynical sureness hardened the eyes for a moment. "Nobody's decent,
when his pocket-book's affected." A merry laugh parted her lips. "How
unfeeling you must find me! Let's pray I'm entirely wrong. Why not get a
look at his speech, before he delivers it?" Incredulous,
hope-against-hope eagerness flickered in her face.
This Pelham at once agreed to do. There was some ground for Jane's
hesitancy, he reflected; most men, given Paul's position, would have
been permanently intractable. But his father, after all, was different.
He could hardly let her go back for supper, although she had promised. A
dizzying intemperance drove on his tongue. "I wish I could keep you, now
that I have you here," and his eyes dwelt upon her alluring
shapeliness; her gaze was intently busied with the panorama of
uninspired villas. "You don't know what knowing you has meant to me,
Jane. I was in the dumps over the whole business...."
"It's mutual, Pelham. The iron city has chiefly solid iron headpieces, I
think. You were a rare find."
He chuckled. "You make the thing too intellectual, at that. I assure you
that I wouldn't offer to elope with a suffrage tract, or a skirted
treatise on socialism. My offer holds good, if you're willing."
Playfully he increased the speed.
"Lauderdale isn't Barkis," she temporized. "Have you known me four
weeks, or five?"
"So romance perishes, as the lady grows arithmetical! Love can't be
weighed on the iceman's scales."
"Nor can mental dynamite blast it out, Mr. Miner. Modern marriage isn't
a thing to venture lightly. Love's blindness was once thought a
blessing----"
"It's often a mercy," he slipped in.
"To-day's surgery is curing the blindness. It's all right to mate as
birds do, if people could part as easily. But when a heart must be
pledged, not only to honeymoon days, but to the petty irks, and the
tedious astronomical study of the skyhigh cost of living----It needs
reflection."
"You might give me a crouton of comfort. The especial heart I sit beside
isn't pledged elsewhere, I hope?"
"Now, really----"
"That's not asking too much."
"It is," the lips pursed grimly. "It's pledged, alas, to the Uplift of
the Underdog, the Castigation of the Capitalist Canine, the Manufacture
of the Millennium, the Fashioning of the Future's Fascinating
Feminism----"
"Enough, enough! But to no single heart," in pleading insistence.
"Nor to no married one neither," she laughed.
"Content, i' faith! Now you may go home to single blessedness and that
supper you thoughtlessly promised to grace." But Pelham wondered, more
than once, whether the girl's last light retort had hidden a dig at his
friendship with Dorothy. Well, Jane had said less than he deserved, at
that.
The convention came closer and closer; and still Paul had not had time
to prepare the speech, when the son made his requests. The work at the
third ramp, and the planning of an opening on the newly purchased crests
beyond, kept Pelham's hands exceptionally busy, so that he did not find
much time to wonder at his failure to see the expected address.
Three days before the convention, Jane met him with a worried face.
"Something's rotten in the environs of the iron Copenhagen, Pelham. I
learned about it from comrade Hernandez. One of the few socialist
delegates, a Birrell-Florence miner named Jensen--I don't think you've
met him--has been offered a direct bribe to oppose the mining bill.
Somebody's busy, that's sure."
"That does sound discouraging. Let's go over your mining reports, so
that I can get the facts straight. I ought to understand the situation,
at least."
They went over the figures together. He began to visualize what the
class struggle meant, here in the quiet, placid South. There had been
four large mine explosions in the state the year before, the one at
Flagg Mines killing a hundred and ninety-two----"And all of it useless,
Pelham! The simplest mine safeguards----"
"The owners can't know of them!"
She shut her lips. "They cost something. Every cent cuts down profits.
It's cheaper to kill men."
"It's horrible!" In dejected impotence he clenched his hands. The
unemotional rows of figures began to acquire a breathing significance.
His vivid imagination pictured mangled forms, the bursting hell of
explosions, the isolated horror of lonely accident and death, the pallid
faces of starving mothers and babies, staining the broad margins of the
cheap white paper.
She looked up from the pamphlets, her brows creased. Pelham smothered an
impulse to kiss away the slight gravure of worry. "The West, bad as it
is in some things, at least has modern laws and safeguards." An unmeant
accusation drove in her tones. "The creaky old laws here are not even
followed! When was the last inspection of your mines?"
"More than a month ago. The inspector wasn't very thorough, I noticed.
They were pronounced safe."
"It ought to be done weekly, at least, beside a daily inspection by your
forces. Gas can collect in the coal mines, flaws and cracks in the
roofing anywhere--only close inspection will do.... And, then, think of
the wages paid here! Can a man live--decently, I mean, so that he can
send his children to school, and all, on what you pay? And Judge
Florence gets seventy-five thousand salary--outside of his dividends."
"My father gets fifty."
"It's compulsory starvation and death for the ones who really produce
the wealth.... We'll see what the convention does."
Pelham missed the opening sessions; but Jane gave him reports of the
meetings she witnessed, supplemented by what Hernandez and Jensen told
him. It was a heated gathering. Big John Pooley was accused outright of
dishonest accounting, by one violent structural iron worker. The oily
eloquence of Robert E. Lee Bivens smoothed this over. Each of the
administration officials--"the boodle gang," as the noisy radical
minority called them--was flayed; the editor of the _Voice of Labor_
received an especial lashing from Jensen, who charged him with
deliberately selling out labor's paper to the corporations.
The machinery rolled smoothly. All protests were tombed in safely packed
committees.
At last came the final night, with Paul's speech, and consideration of
the mining bill afterward, as the only unfinished business.
Pooley, using his gavel vigorously, secured general quiet. He spoke of
the honor paid by having as their distinguished visitor the wide-awake
vice-president of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company. "Every
act in his life marks Paul Judson as a friend of labor. Many of you do
not know that he holds a union card--the printers elected him to
honorary membership more than a year ago. He is one of us. His problems
are our problems. He is turning the splendid force of his intellect to a
solution of the labor question which will help employer and employee
alike. A gentleman of sterling integrity, a leader among leaders----"
The fulsome eulogy continued for a quarter of an hour.
Jane, who sat beside Pelham, sniffed audibly at most of the speech. He
had asked his mother to go with them; but she had been too busy planning
a dance at the country club, which Paul was giving for Sue, to take the
evening off. He would have Jane to look after, his mother reminded him.
The boy was irritated at his companion's attitude. The glamor of the
situation, with his father as the recognized champion of labor, fitted
smoothly into his own rebellious dreams. With this support, he could
achieve his rosiest plannings.
Paul rose to speak, alert, dignified, commanding.
He paid tribute to the audience, and to the hosts of labor they
represented. They were particularly fortunate, he said, in their
leadership; under the sane, conservative guidance of such men they were
sure to reflect credit on the city, the state, the entire South.
"I believe in you. I believe in the work you are doing. You are the
brawn and the backbone of our free white Anglo-Saxon democracy, the
flower of the world's peoples. And the backbone"--he smiled
embracingly--"is as necessary as the head; the brawn is as essential as
the brain.
"There are some--socialists, anarchists, or whatever you choose to call
them--who are working for a body without a head, brawn without a brain.
You can find such bodies in the morgue. The decapitated socialist state
is a corpse."
There was a burst of applause at this. Pelham went chill all over, as he
realized how unpopular socialism would be made to appear. And--his
father speaking!
"We have passed, as a people, out of the black gloom, our heritage from
a red war of brother against brother, into the golden sunshine of a new
day, a day of prosperity and plenty, an hour of progress and
enlightenment. While the rest of the world is torn with war, peace is
upon us; our products, sold to the warring world, assure an
unprecedented prosperity to us. Beware lest the evil counselor, the
plausible deceiver, the wily plotter creep in, and our ears lend
attention to his seductive tones! This is no time for the disorganizer.
We, as well as you, are fighting for the best things of life--peace,
freedom, and the welfare of every one, capitalist and laborer alike, and
a whole-souled, complete understanding and brotherhood between all of
us!"
The applause was noisily demonstrative. One delegate, who had attended
too many sub-conventions in various bars, started down the aisle to
shake the hand of "brother Judson." The vigorous pilotage of two ushers
steered him into the safer harbor of the street.
After the interruption, Paul turned to his topic. "I favor state mining
regulation--and the stricter the better, always conserving the full
liberty of the individual to make his free contract. That present joke
at Jackson--that so-called mining law, which would bankrupt every mine
owner, and drive into unemployment and starvation every mine employee in
the state--I know that none of you can be so blind to your own interest
as to favor it.
"I hope that you will go on record as favoring a sane, reasonable
law--one protecting your employer's profit, so that your wages will be
safe."
He branched into a technical discussion of the flaws of the law,
emphasizing what labor would lose in every case if the proposed changes
were made. There were growls of dissent from some quarters--even Pelham,
sick at heart, hissed one of his statements; but the applause
overwhelmed the disagreement. Benignant John Pooley, seated at the
speaker's right, led the handclapping at every pause.
"It's up to you," Paul's tones sharpened, grew crisper. "You have it in
your power to go on record against it, or for it. If against it, you
assure a continuation of the present helpful and hopeful laws--not
perfect, by any means, but laws which will be constantly bettered by an
intelligent legislature, representative of the whole people. Or you can
favor it--and thereby favor, instead of prosperity and progress,
bankruptcy for the owners, spiritual bankruptcy for its supporters, and,
worse than all, a wide-spread business depression, which will force
capital elsewhere, slow down and stop the wheels of industry, drive the
storekeepers out of business, and drag your own wives and families into
want, poverty, ultimate degradation and death.
"The smoke from those mining settlements and furnace stacks upon the
mountain above our iron city is the symbol of life--life for all of us.
It is the pillar of smoke by day, the cloud of fire by night. This
bill"--and he pointed an imperative finger first at the chairman, and
then over the audience--"this bill will clear the sky of that smoke, and
leave those mines and furnaces to rot and rust into scrap-iron. Take
your choice. I believe that you cannot fail to take the wise, the sane,
the brotherly, the prosperous way, for all of us, for Adamsville and the
nation."
Before he could settle into his chair, and while the applause thundered
at its fullest, Jensen was on his feet, shouting a demand that the chair
recognize him. Pooley blandly motioned him again and again into his
seat. The applause persisted.
"A question, Mr. Chairman! A question, Mr. Chairman!"