THE CONSCIENCE OF A BOHUNK
Tressa Torrance's outlook on life was a comfortable one, born of her
own sunny nature. Its foundation was love, the keystone of its arch
peace. The blood of a gentle mother had effectually subdued in her the
fierce impetuosity of her father--as in life the frail little wife had
dominated the boisterous husband. Tressa wanted most to be loved. It
was food to her self-respect, to her easy and appealing ways, even to
the laugh bubbling so readily to her rosy lips. Most of all she wanted
to be loved by Adrian Conrad; her father--well, his love was impervious
to influence.
In her gentle love of peace the bickerings that surrounded her made her
shrink within herself, wondering, staunch in her faith that her daddy
and Adrian were right--without these blundering, uneducated foreigners
being quite as bad as their masters thought.
Desiring to escape it all for a time, she crept away one late afternoon
when Adrian and her father were in conference with the two Policemen.
They did not seem to notice. Less than a week ahead was the
commencement of the last operation on the trestle before handing over
to the big contractors complete; and the anxiety of the moment spoke in
the firmness of their tone and the grimness of their measures. Tressa
stole away, troubled at heart.
In her favourite retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the
forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her
crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair
and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself
whispered above her head in friendly commune with the great rustle of
the forest. Secluded without being closed in from the light, she felt
that she might untangle there more clearly the trifling problems of her
sheltered life.
As she worked she hummed. Into the network of woven threads she was
weaving the future--a month hence--a year--two years--five. And the
pictures pleased her progressively. Adrian, laughing into her eyes
after the season's hard struggle, was at her side . . . a happy husband
then . . . a beaming and foolishly proud father; and little tots with
their father's fair hair--
Something--more a feeling than a sound--arrested her. She flushed at
the thought that some one was looking at the pictures of her
imagination. Abashed, perhaps a trifle annoyed, but without a thought
of fear, she lifted her eyes. But when she beheld Koppy, hat in hand,
standing at the edge of her retreat with head bowed, his humility
seemed to call only for the sympathy always denied him. With maidenly
modesty she gathered her work to tighter compass, but no other
restraint did she feel in the presence of the man her friends accused
of unthinkable crimes. The inheritance of her femininity assured her
that she was in no danger. Koppy had always liked her--she knew that
also by virtue of that inheritance; and every woman loves the strong
thing that bends to her--loves, but perhaps does not respect.
Unconscious of the challenging coyness of words and manner, she spoke:
"You didn't frighten me a bit, Koppy."
"I didn't want to," he replied in a low voice.
"I don't think I heard you. I guess I must have--felt you."
He moved swiftly in among the trees and stood before her, soiled hat
turning in grimy hands.
"You--felt me?"
A vague and sudden sense of discomfort made her raise puzzled eyes to
his, but she dismissed it firmly as born of her father's suspicions.
Still she wished he would not stand so close, stooping over her, with
that funny look in his eyes. Suggestively she glanced at the white
trunk on which she was seated, and moved further along.
"I suppose it's an instinct," she said. "Animals must feel like that
about things they can't see or hear. Haven't you often been conscious
of being watched when you couldn't see the watcher?"
He smiled from a world of superior knowledge; the unseen watcher was
the foundation of the big game he was ever playing. The smile ended in
a short laugh, and somehow it startled her--she seemed so naked in
thought before this strange foreigner.
"You know what I mean," she went on lamely. "I suppose a gopher
peering from its hole in the ground would disturb me sooner or later."
"Don't explain," he almost pleaded, "don't try to explain." He seated
himself far up the trunk.
Again her puzzled eyes were on him. In some indefinite way he was so
different, so--so human and equal. Outwardly there was no evidence of
the change--the same nondescript clothes, the same grimy hands and
face, the same coarse boots and clumsiness.
He seemed to read her thoughts, for with a gesture of long-suppressed
protest he threw out his hands.
"Yes," he cried, "they're gnarled and dirty, and these old overalls are
the mark of my degradation." He flung his hat passionately on the
ground. "But I'm not always this way. Back in Chicago I
dress--sometimes. There I'm what I like to be, what I can be. Not
often--it is not that way I rule."
Her eyes were wide with surprise. "You--you speak--"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I speak English as well as you or any one
else. I think in English. But it pays me to look foreign, to fight
outwardly the 'civilising' influences of the country of my adoption."
A slight sneer twisted his lips. "I must look like a cut-throat,
because in that way I've reached the height I've attained in my
organisation. It shocks you, because you don't understand, because
you've never had to plough the row I've toiled along. . . . I'm not as
bad as I seem."
She picked up her work to cover the beating of her heart.
"If you're out of sympathy--"
"But I'm not out of sympathy," he interrupted earnestly. "I'm a Worker
of the World, and always will be. I would prefer not to have to dress
like this, but not because I deplore our aims. It is the misfortune of
the class of men for whom I fight. Miss Torrance"--he slid abruptly
down the trunk and leaned forward to look in her eyes--"I'm talking to
you as I never talked before, as I scarcely dared to think. Any one
else would hand me over to the Police. You won't. And to talk like
this to a fellow-worker would mean a knife slid in here. No, you won't
tell. I've known a lot of women, most of them bad ones because that's
the only kind I have a chance to meet, but I never knew one to sell a
man she did not hate . . . and a woman never hates till she first
loves. You've never loved more than one."
"And not likely to," she put in quietly, even as she thrilled to the
completeness of his trust.
He laughed harshly. "They all say that--that is, all but the kind any
man can buy. But you know nothing of them--forgive me for mentioning
them. . . . There aren't many women stick to their first love."
"Oh?" she said indifferently. "I haven't thought it worth discussing."
"No? Perhaps you're right. Many a time I've thought the same of
woman, all women--until I learned that every woman, good or bad, is
worth it."
His eyes had gone to the tree tops; they returned now so suddenly that
she started. A curious smile moved his lips.
"Do you know, you've disturbed all my convictions of women? I really
know so little of you that it may be foolish, but you've made me feel
that woman in the singular may be so much more to a man than the whole
mass of the sex. For you, or one of the very few like you, a man might
give up every other ambition without regret . . . and I've had
many--women and ambitions--in my day."
She was flushing, though she knew from the utter frankness of it that
he was not making love, not even being impertinent. She had no fear of
him, only of her inexperience in handling so strange a situation.
"You make a man feel there is everything in tossing aside all I've
attained, merely to settle down as a respectable citizen." He was
staring through the tree-tops again, hands clasped over one knee. "I
could make a way for myself, a good way, without all this fever, with a
woman like you to hold me straight. I know what I can do." A forlorn
smile wrinkled his face not unpleasantly. "But there are two
insuperable obstacles. The Workers wouldn't let me--and the woman
wouldn't have me. . . . That's why I grow desperate sometimes, why I--"
She questioned with her eyes his continued silence. "I won't tell,"
she promised gently, "but perhaps you'd better say no more."
He did not seem to hear her, and she was cudgelling her inexperience
for some smooth retreat, when he broke out explosively:
"I'm the product of over-sudden civilisation, like a thin-blooded man
plunging into cold water. From the crude half-lights of my own country
I leaped at one bound into the brilliance of civilisation's beam, as it
is found in America. And I couldn't stand it--few of us can. We get
numb to everything but our own discomfort. And knowing we're bound for
life, we struggle and beat our wings against things as we find them, in
a panic because they differ so from things we were born to. We're like
a bird in a room. It may be a cosy, warm and friendly room, but the
bird wants only to get out in the cold. . . . The human tide we're
plunged in from the very first day ignores us, or tramples us, or
drives us like cattle, forgetting that we are numb and bewildered,
panic stricken, unable to think beyond primal emotions. . . .
"If we could only have a year's apprenticeship where sympathy holds our
hands! If only we could enter the new state by a gradient instead of a
plunge! But there is no isle between, no one to lead us gently to the
light. . . . And few of us would pause to be led. And so we struggle,
and in the struggling hurt ourselves or are hurt. We strike out--and
are struck back by stronger force than ourselves. And so we tumble
back to sullen silence, watching and planning to beat that force as we
may. . . . And there I am."
The hopelessness of his tone held appealing hands to her. She longed
to help him, yet knew not how. And suddenly it came to her that
perhaps it lay within her power to build up the structure of
dissatisfaction that he was exposing to her.
"You know how foolish it is," she said. "You have intelligence, you
see where fighting leads. Why strike back? Go with the tide; it is
not trying to overwhelm you, only to do you good. There'd be few
knocks then."
"Ah," he cried bitterly, "but it's too late. The poison of resistance
has flooded our veins, and as yet there is no antidote. Slowly it has
been weaving itself into the very fibre of my character; I can't help
it. At moments like this I see, for my mind still retains some of its
sense of proportion . . . but part of the poison of it is that we do
more with our hands, these hands you hate, than with our minds. Ten
years it has been coursing through me. Can I alter my stature by a
thought? As I talk to you I'm able to stand aside and watch the
horrible thing, but gnawing always at me is the memory of those early
days of panic."
She shook her head. "You'll never understand," she sighed. "I hoped
you would."
"But I do understand. It's you can't, because you never stood on
foreign shore--alone."
"Yet it is better than home, or you wouldn't come in your thousands."
"Better than home, yes, but worse than we hoped. Only those who flee
the rude traditions, the heartless laws, the ignorance and comfortless
life of worn-out Europe can see the pictures the very word 'America'
rouses in us. I don't know whether it is not more the fault of our
ignorance than of the boasts of those who have already gone, of those
who would profit by our going, that we land with hopes nothing on earth
could justify. And, not finding the milk and honey flow out to lave
our ship, we start depressed and resentful. We land in a strange
country with only a word of its language. No one greets us, no one
holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty tenement
houses to hide ourselves--where disloyalty is the air we breath,
discomfort our bed, and robbery our experience--robbed by the very
friends who preceded us. Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the
drudgery that faces us, we learn to live for ourselves alone.
Helpless, we drift into the hands of our own kind, who wax rich on the
sale of us in herds to work no one else would undertake. Sullen, keen
to the injustice of things, but ignorant of the simplicity of redress,
we fall victims to our own morbid hatreds, to anything that promises to
feed our fury. . . .
"That is where the Independent Workers of the World gets its recruits.
And once its clutches close on us--" He stopped suddenly and clambered
to his feet. "Miss Torrance, you'd better go home. You shouldn't come
here. Go--right away!" His fists were clenched, his under lip gripped
between his teeth.
She had dropped from her seat and was staring at him, alarmed at last.
Over his face, into his very clothes and manner, had passed something
that tumbled her rudely back to the Koppy she knew best, the malignant,
sneering, mesmeric, uncouth underforeman her father and Adrian
suspected. He stooped and lifted his hat jerkily.
"Workers strong," he said in his broken English. "They see big things,
they do them. I, a vice-president--just a Pole, but big man--I order.
Go home!"
Yet he turned his back before she did, and even as she started away she
knew he knew that he could not harm her. She ran as she had never run
before, clutching her work in a grim little fist, not from fear of
Koppy but of the strange thing she had seen.
Within sight of the grade she sank on the forest floor and lay looking
up through tangled pictures, as through the woven ceiling of green
leaves that sprinkled the sky. Then she sat up, smoothed her hair,
wiped from her face every mark of agitation, and sauntered back to the
shack.
"Where have you been?" Conrad called anxiously to her from the doorway.
"We were calling you."
"Just getting away from you cold-blooded schemers," she laughed.
"There's peace in the woods tonight, anyway." And she went past him to
the kitchen to boil the kettle.