WHEREIN WE ERECT A HOUSE BUILT UPON A ROCK
That evening in the late twilight, two women stood at the wicket of a
cell in the jail and while back of the women, at the end of a corridor,
stood a curious group of reporters and idlers and guards, inside the
wicket a tall, middle-aged man with stiff, curly, reddish hair and a
homely, hard, forbidding face stood behind the bars. The young woman put
her hand with the new ring on it through the wicket.
"It's Kenyon's ring--Kenyon's," smiled Lila, and to his questioning look
at her mother, the daughter answered: "Yes, grandma knows. And what is
more, grandpa told us both--Kenyon and me--what was bothering
grandma--and it's all--all--right!"
The happy eyes of Laura Van Dorn caught the eyes of Grant as they gazed
at her from some distant landscape of his turbulent soul. She could not
hold his eyes, nor bring them to a serious consideration of the
occasion. His heart seemed to be on other things. So the woman said:
"God is good, Grant." She watched her daughter and cast a glance at the
shining ring. Grant Adams heard and saw, but while he comprehended
definitely enough, what he saw and heard seemed remote and he repeated:
"God is good--infinitely good, Laura!" His eyes lighted up. "Do you know
this is the first strike in the world--I believe, indeed the first
enterprise in the world started and conducted upon the fundamental
theory that we are all gods. Nothing but the divine spark in those men
would hold them as they are held in faith and hope and fellowship. Look
at them," he lifted his face as one seeing Heavenly legions, "ten
thousand souls, men and women and children, cheated for years of their
rights, and when they ask for them in peace, beaten and clubbed and
killed, and still they do not raise their hands in violence! Oh, I tell
you, they are getting ready--the time must be near." He shook his head
in exultation and waved his iron claw.
Laura said gently, "Yes, Grant, but the day always is near. Whenever two
or three are gathered--"
"Oh, yes--yes," he returned, brushing her aside, "I know that. And it
has come to me lately that the day of the democracy is a spiritual and
not a material order. It must be a rising level of souls in the world,
and the mere dawn of the day will last through centuries. But it will be
nonetheless beautiful because it shall come slowly. The great thing is
to know that we are all--the wops and dagoes and the hombres and the
guinnies--all gods! to know that in all of us burns that divine spark
which environment can fan or stifle--that divine spark which makes us
one with the infinite!" He threw his face upward as one who saw a vision
and cried: "And America--our America that they think is so sordid, so
crass, so debauched with materialism--what fools they are to think it!
From all over the world for three hundred years men and women have been
hurrying to this country who above everything else on earth were charged
with aspiration. They were lowly people who came, but they had high
visions; this whole land is a crucible of aspirations. We are the most
sentimental people on earth. No other land is like it, and some day--oh,
I know God is charging this battery full of His divine purpose for some
great marvel. Some time America will rise and show her face and the
world will know us as we are!"
The girl, with eyes fascinated by her engagement ring, scarcely
understood what the man was saying. She was too happy to consider
problems of the divine immanence. There was a little mundane talk of
Kenyon and of the Nesbits and then the women went away.
An hour later an old man sitting in the dusk with a pencil in his left
hand, was startled to see these two women descending upon him, to tell
him the news. He kissed them both with his withered lips, and rubbed the
soft cheek of the maiden against his old gray beard.
And when they were gone, he picked up the pencil again, and sat dumbly
waiting, while in his heart he called eagerly across the worlds:
"Mary--Mary, are you there? Do you know? Oh, Mary, Mary!"
The funeral of the young men killed in the shaft house brought a day of
deepening emotion to Harvey. Flags were at half mast and Market Street
was draped in crape. The stores closed at the tolling of bells which
announced the hour of the funeral services. Two hundred automobiles
followed the soldiers who escorted the bodies to the cemetery, and when
the bugle blew taps, tears stood in thousands of eyes.
The moaning of the great-throated regimental band, the shrilling of the
fife and the booming of the drum; the blare of the bugle that sounded
taps stirred the chords of hate, and the town came back from burying its
dead a vessel of wrath. In vain had John Dexter in his sermon over Fred
Kollander tried to turn the town from its bitterness by preaching from
the text, "Ye are members one of another," and trying to point the way
to charity. The town would have no charity.
The tragedy of the shaft house and the imprisonment of Grant Adams had
staged for the day all over the nation in the first pages of the
newspapers an interesting drama. Such a man as Grant Adams was a figure
whose jail sentence under military law for defending the rights of a
free press, free speech, free assemblage and trial by jury, was good for
a first page position in every newspaper in the country--whatever bias
its editorial columns might take against him and his cause. Millions of
eyes turned to look at the drama. But there were hundreds among the
millions who saw the drama in the newspapers and who decided they would
like to see it in reality. Being foot loose, they came. So when the
funeral procession was hurrying back into Harvey and the policemen and
soldiers were dispersing to their posts, they fell upon half a dozen
travel-stained strangers in the court house yard addressing the loafers
there. Promptly the strangers were haled before the provost marshal, and
promptly landed in jail. But other strangers appeared on the streets
from time to time as the freight trains came clanging through town, and
by sundown a score of young men were in the town lockup. They were
happy-go-lucky young blades; rather badly in need of a bath and a
barber, but they sang lustily in the calaboose and ate heartily and with
much experience of prison fare. One read his paperbound Tolstoy; another
poured over his leaflet of Nietzsche, a third had a dog-eared Ibsen from
the public library of Omaha, a fourth had a socialist newspaper, which
he derided noisily, as it was not his peculiar cult of discontent; while
others played cards and others slept, but all were reasonably happy. And
at the strange spectacle of men jail-bound enjoying life, Harvey
marveled. And still the jail filled up. At midnight the policemen were
using a vacant storeroom for a jail. By daybreak the people of the town
knew that a plague was upon them.
Every age has its peculiar pilgrims, whose pilgrimages are reactions of
life upon the times. When the shrines called men answered; when the new
lands called men hastened to them; when wars called the trumpets woke
the sound of hurrying feet--always the feet of the young men. For Youth
goes out to meet Danger in life as his ancient and ever-beloved comrade.
So in that distant epoch that closed half a decade ago, in a day when
existence was easy; when food was always to be had for the asking, when
a bed was never denied to the weary who would beg it the wide land over,
there arose a band of young men with slack ideas about property, with
archaic ideas of morality--ideas perhaps of property and morals that
were not unfamiliar to their elder comrades of the quest and the joust,
and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden,
golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our
civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and
the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these
hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger,
played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found
their danger in fighting for free speech, and free assemblage. They were
tremendously in earnest about it, even as the good Don Quixote was with
his windmills in the earlier, happier days. They were of the blithe cult
which wooes Danger in Folly in times of Peace and in treason when war
comes.
And so Harvey in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of
Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad
sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men
laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon
on the Mount to provoke arrest, reading the Constitution of the United
States to invite repression, even reading the riot act by way of
diversion for the police, the more did the wooden head of Market Street
throb with rage and the more did the people imagine a vain thing.
And when seventy of them had crowded the jail, and their leaders blandly
announced that they would eat the taxes all out of the county treasury
before they stopped the fight for free speech, Market Street awoke.
Eating taxes was something that Market Street could understand. So the
police began clubbing the strangers. The pilgrims were meeting Danger,
their lost comrade, and youth's blood ran wild at the meeting and there
were riots in Market Street. A lodging house in the railroad yards in
South Harvey was raided one night--when the strike was ten days old, and
as it was a railroadmen's sleeping place, and a number of trainmen were
staying there to whom the doctrines of peace and non-resistance did not
look very attractive under a policeman's ax-handle--a policeman was
killed.
Then the Law and Order League was formed. Storekeepers, clerks, real
estate men, young lawyers, the heart of that section of the
white-shirted population whom Grant Adams called the "poor plutes,"
joined this League. And deaf John Kollander was its leader. Partly
because of his bereavement men let him lead, but chiefly because his
life's creed seemed to be vindicated by events, men turned to him. The
bloodshed on Market Street, the murder of a policeman and the dynamiting
of the shaft house with their sons inside, had aroused a degree of
passion that unbalanced men, and John Kollander's wrath was public
opinion dramatized. The police gave the Law and Order League full swing,
and John Kollander was the first chief in the city. Prisoners arrested
for speaking without a permit were turned over to the Law and Order
League at night, and taken in the city auto-truck to the far limits of
the city, and there--a mile from the residential section, in the high
weeds that fringed the town and confined the country, the Law and Order
League lined up under John Kollander and with clubs and whips and
sticks, compelled the prisoners to run a gauntlet to the highroad that
leads from Harvey. Men were stripped, and compelled to lean over and
kiss an American flag--spread upon the ground, while they were kicked
and beaten before they could rise. This was to punish men for carrying a
red flag of socialism, and John Kollander decreed that every loyal
citizen of Harvey should wear a flag. To omit the flag was to arouse
suspicion; to wear a red necktie was to invite arrest. It was a merry
day for blithe devotees of Danger; and they were taking their full of
her in Harvey.
The Law and Order League was one of those strange madnesses to which any
community may fall a victim. Kyle Perry and Ahab Wright--with Jasper
Adams a nimble echo, church men, fathers, husbands, solid business men,
were its leaders.
They endorsed and participated in brutalities, cowardly cruelties at
which in their saner moments they could only shudder in horror. But they
made Jared Thurston chairman of the publicity committee and the
_Times_, morning after morning, fanned the passions of the people
higher and higher. "Skin the Rats," was the caption of his editorial the
morning after a young fellow was tarred and feathered and beaten until
he lost consciousness and was left in the highway. The editorial under
this heading declared that anarchy had lifted its hydra head; that Grant
Adams preaching peace in the Valley was preparing to let in the jungle,
and that the bums who were flooding the city jail were Adams's tools,
who soon would begin dynamiting and burning the town, when it suited his
purpose, while his holier-than-thou dupes in the Valley were conducting
their goody-goody strike.
Plots of dynamiting were discovered. Hardly a day passed for nearly a
week that the big black headlines of the _Times_ did not tell of
dynamite found in obviously conspicuous places--in the court house, in
the Sands opera house, in the schoolhouses, in the city hall. So Harvey
grew class conscious, property conscious, and the town went stark mad.
It was the gibbering fear of those who make property of privilege, and
privilege of property, afraid of losing both.
But for a week and a day the motive power of the strike was Grant
Adams's indomitable will. Hour after hour, day after day he paced his
iron floor, and dreamed his dream of the conquest of the world through
fellowship. And by the power of his faith and by the example of his
imprisonment for his faith, he held his comrades in the gardens, kept
the strikers on the picket lines and sustained the courage of the
delegates in Belgian Hall, who met inside a wall of blue-coated
policemen. The mind of the Valley had reached a place where sympathy for
Grant Adams and devotion to him, imprisoned as their leader, was
stronger than his influence would have been outside. So during the week
and a day, the waves of hate and the winds of adverse circumstance beat
upon the house of faith, which he had builded slowly through other years
in the Valley, and it stood unshaken.