THROUGH STEEL BARS.
True to her plan, Catherine ended her journey at Rochester. She engaged
a room at a second-rate hotel--marvelling greatly at the meanness of the
accommodations, the like of which she had never seen--and, at ten
o'clock of the morning, appeared at the Central Police Station. The
bundle of papers in her hand indicated that she had read the latest lies
and venom poured out on Gabriel's defenseless head.
The haughty, full-fed sergeant in charge of the station made some
objections, at first, to letting her see Gabriel; but the tone of her
voice and the level look of her gray eye presently convinced him he was
playing with fire, and he gave in. Summoning an officer, he bade the man
conduct her. Iron doors opened and closed for her. She was conscious of
long, ill-smelling, concrete-floored corridors, with little steel cages
at either side--cages where hopeless, sodden wrecks of men were
standing, or sitting in attitudes of brutal despair, or lying on foul
bunks, motionless and inert as logs.
For a moment her heart failed her.
"Good Lord! Can such things be?" she whispered to herself. "So
this--this is a police station? And real jails and penitentiaries are
worse? Oh, horrible! I never dreamed of anything like this, or any men
like these!"
The officer, stopping at a cell-door and banging thereon with some
keys, startled her.
"Here, youse," he addressed the man within, "lady to see youse!"
Catherine was conscious that her heart was pounding hard and her breath
coming fast, as she peered in through those cold, harsh metal bars. For
a minute she could find no thought, no word. Within, her eyes--still
unaccustomed to the gloom--vaguely perceived a man's figure, big and
powerful, and different in its bearing from those other cringing
wretches she had glimpsed.
Then the man came toward her, stopped, peered and for a second drew
back. And then--then she heard his voice, in a kind of startled joy:
"Oh--is it--is it _you_?"
"Yes," she answered. "I must see you! I must talk with you, again, and
know the truth!"
The officer edged nearer.
"Youse can talk all y' want to," he dictated, hoarsely, "but don't you
pass nothin' in. No dope, nor nothin', see? I'll stick around an' watch,
anyhow; but don't try to slip him no dream powders or no 'snow.' 'Cause
if you do--"
"What--what _on_ earth are you talking about?" the girl demanded,
turning on the officer with absolute astonishment. But he, only winking
wisely, repeated:
"You heard me, didn't you? No dope. I'm wise to this whole game."
At a loss for his meaning, yet without any real desire to fathom it,
Kate turned back toward Gabriel.
A moment they two looked at each other, each noting any change that
might have taken place since that wonderful hour in the sugar-house,
each hungering and thirsting for a sight of the other's face. In her
heart, already Kate knew as well as she knew she was alive, that this
man was totally innocent of the foul charges heaped upon him. And so she
looked at him with eyes wherein lay no reproach, no doubt and no
suspicion. And, as she looked, tears started, and her heart swelled
hotly in her breast; for he was bruised and battered and a helpless
captive.
"He, caged like a trapped animal!" her thought was. "He, so strong, and
free, and brave! Oh, horrible, horrible!"
He must have read something of this feeling, in her face; for now,
coming close to the bars, he said in a low tone:
"Girl--your name I don't know, even yet--girl, you mustn't pity me!
That's _one_ thing I can't have. I'm here because the master class is
stronger than my class, the working class. Here, because I'm dangerous
to that master class. This isn't said to make myself out a martyr. It's
only to make you see things right. I'm not complaining at this plight.
I've richly earned it--under Capitalism. So, then, _that's_ settled.
"And now, what's more important, tell me how _you_ are! And did your
wound cause you much trouble? I confess I've passed many an anxious
hour, thinking of your narrow escape and of your injury. It wasn't too
bad, was it? Tell me!"
"No," she answered, still holding to the bars, for she somehow felt
quite unaccountably weak. "It wasn't very bad. There's hardly any scar
at all--or won't be, when it's fully healed. But all this is trifling,
compared to what _you've_ suffered and are suffering. Oh, what a
horrible affair! What frightful accusations! Tell me the truth,
Boy--how, why could--?"
He looked at her a moment, in silence, noting her splendid hair and eyes
and mouth, the firm, well-moulded chin, the confident and self-reliant
poise of the shapely head; and as he looked, he knew he loved this
woman. He understood, at last, how dear she was to him--dearer than
anything else in all the world save just his principles and stern life
work. He comprehended the meaning of all, his dreams and visions and
long thoughts. And, caring nothing for consequences, unskilled in the
finesse of dealing with women, acting wholly on the irresistible
impulses of a heart that overflowed, he looked deep into those gray eyes
and said in a tone that set her heart-strings vibrating:
"Listen! The truth? How could I tell you anything else? I know not who
you are, and care not. That you are rich and powerful and free, while I
am poor and in captivity, means nothing. Love cares not for such
trifles. It dares all, hopes all, trusts all, believes all--and is
patient in adversity."
"Love?" she whispered, her face paling. "How do you dare to--?"
"Dare? Because my heart bids me. And where it bids, I care not for
conventions or consequences!" He flung his hand out with a splendid
gesture, his head high, his eyes lustrous in the half-light of the cell.
"Where it leads, I have to follow. That is why I am a Socialist! That is
why I am here, today, outcast and execrated, a prisoner, in danger of
long years of living death in the pestilential tomb of some foul
penitentiary!"
"You're here because--because you are a Socialist?" she asked.
He nodded.
"Yes," said he. "I tried to help a suffering, outcast woman--or one who
posed as such. And she betrayed me to my enemies. And so--"
"There _was_ a woman in this affair, then?" Catherine queried with
sudden pain. "The newspapers haven't made the story _all_ up out of
whole cloth?"
"No. There _was_ a woman. A Delilah, who delivered me into the hands of
the Philistines, when I tried to help her in what she lied in telling me
was her need. Will you hear the story?"
Still very pale, she formed a half-inarticulate "Yes!" with her full
lips. Then, seeming to brace herself by a tighter clasp on the hard
steel grating, she listened while he spoke.
Earnestly, honestly and with perfect straightforwardness, omitting
nothing, adding nothing, he gave her the narrative of that fatal night's
events, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the
wonderfully-disguised woman, till her cudgel-blow had laid him senseless
on the floor.
He told her the part that every actor therein had played; how the whole
drama had been staged, to dishonor and convict him, to railroad him to
the Pen for a long term, perhaps to kill him. He spoke in a low voice,
to prevent the watching officer from overhearing; and as he talked, he
thanked his stars that in all this network of conspiracy and crime
against the Party and against himself, his captors had not yet placed
him incommunicado. For some reason--perhaps because they thought their
case against him absolutely secure and wanted to avoid any appearance of
unfairness or of martyrizing him--this restriction had not yet been laid
upon him. So now his message of the truth could reach the ears of her
who, more than all the world beside, had grown dear to him and precious
beyond words.
He told her, then, not only the story of that night, but also all that
had since happened--the newspaper attacks on him and on the Party; the
deliberate attempt to poison the community and the nation against him;
the struggle to fix a foul and lasting blot upon his name, and ruin him
beyond redemption.
"And why, all this?" he added, while she--listening so intently that she
hardly breathed--knew that he spoke the living, vital truth. "Why this
persecution, this plotting, this labor and expense to 'get' me. Do you
want to know?"
"Yes, tell me!" she whispered. "I don't understand. I can't! It--it all
seems so horrible, so unreal, so--so different from what I've always
believed about the majesty and purity of the law! Can these things be,
indeed?"
He laughed bitterly.
"Can they?" he repeated. "When you see that they _are_, isn't that
answer enough? And the reason of it all is that I'm a Socialist and know
certain secrets of certain men, which--if I should tell the
world--might, nay, surely would precipitate a revolution. So, these men,
and the System behind them, have tried to discredit me by this foul
charge. After this, if the charge sticks, I may shout my head off,
exposing what I know; and who will listen? You know the answer as well
as I! Do I complain? No, not once! What I must suffer, for this
wondrous Cause, is not a tenth what thousands suffer every day, in
silence and high courage. What has happened to me, personally, is but
the merest trifle beside what has already happened to thousands,
fighting for life and liberty, for wife and home and children; for the
right to work and live like men, not beasts!"
"You mean the--the working class?" she ventured, wonderingly. "Is this
outrage really a minor one, compared with what they, who feed and warm
and carry the whole world, have to suffer? Tell me, for I--God help me,
I am ignorant! I am beginning to see, to half-see, awful, dim, ghostly
shapes of huge, unspeakable wrongs. Tell me the truth about all this, as
you have told it about yourself--and let me know!"
Then Gabriel talked as never he had talked before. To this, his audience
of one, there in the dirty and ill-smelling police station, he unfolded
the sad tale of the disinherited, the enslaved, the wretched, as never
to a huge, and spell-bound audience in hall or park or city street. His
eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.
With master strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad
picture--the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its
natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the
crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women
forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower
wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and
heartless drudging for a pittance.
He told her of child slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures
he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon's
greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the
Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising,
soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty,
sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills. And as he talked, she
saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little
boys and girls, giving their lives drop by drop, and cough by cough,
that _she_ might have purple and fine linen and the rich, soft, easy
paths of life.
* * * * *
Then, pausing not, he spoke to her of white slavery, of girls and women
by the uncounted thousand forced to barter their own bodies for a
mockery of life; and, stinging as a nagaika, he laid the lash of blame
on Capitalism, evil cause of an evil and rotten fruit, of disease and
crime, and misery, and death. He told her of political corruption beyond
belief; of cheating, lying, trickery and greed, for power. Of war, he
told her, and made all its inner, hideous motives clear. She seemed
verily to see the trenches, the "red rampart's slippery edge," the
spattered blood and brains and all the horror of Hell's nethermost
infamy--and then the blasted, wrecked and wasted homes, the long trail
of mourning and of hopeless ruin--the horror of this crime of crimes,
all for profit, all for gold and markets, all for Capitalism!
And then, while the girl stood there listening, spell-bound by her first
insight, her first understanding of the true character of this, our
striving, slaving world, held by a few for their own inordinate pride
and power, the man's voice changed.
With new intonations and a deeper tone, he launched into some outlines
of the great hope, the splendid vision, the Wondrous Ideal--Socialism,
the world-salvation.
Sentence by sentence, imagery of this vast, noble thought flowed from
his inspired lips. Clearly he showed this woman all the causes of the
world's travail and pain; and clearly made her see that only in one way,
only through the ownership of the world by the world's children as a
whole, could peace and justice, life and joy and plenty and the New Time
come to pass, dreamed of and yearned for by many sages and prophets, and
now close at hand on the very threshold of reality!
Socialism! It leaped from his spirit like a living flame, consuming
dross and waste and evil, lighting up the future with its shining
beacon, its message of hope to the hopeless, of rest and cheer and peace
to all who labored and were heavy laden.
Socialism! The glory of the vision seemed to blind and dazzle Catherine.
In its supernal light, things grievous to be understood and borne were
now made clear. For the first time in all her life, the woman saw, and
knew, and grasped the truths of this strange nexus of conflict, pain and
sorrow, that we know as our existence.
"Socialism! The Hope of the World!" Gabriel finished. "And for this, and
for what I know about its enemies, I stand here in this cell and may yet
go to a living death. This is my crime, and nothing else--this battle
for the freedom and the joy of the world--this struggle against the
powers of ignorance and darkness, priestcraft and greed, lust, treachery
and foulness, cruelty and hate and war! This, and this only. You have
heard me. I have spoken!"
He fell silent, crossed his arms upon the bars of the cage that pent
him, and laid his head upon them with a motion of weariness.
Something strangely stirred the heart of the woman. Her hand went out
and touched his thick, black hair.
"Be of good cheer," she whispered. "Though I am ignorant and do not
fully understand, as yet, some glimmer of the light has reached my eyes.
I can learn, and I _will_ learn, and dare, and do! All my life I have
eaten the bread of this bitter slavery, taken the thing I had no right
to take, unknowingly wielded the lash on bleeding backs of men and women
and children.
"All my life have I, in ignorance and idleness, done these things. But
never shall I do them again. That is all past and gone, an evil dream
that is no more. From now, if you will be patient and forgive and teach
me, I will stand with you and yours, and glory in the new-found strength
and majesty of this supreme ideal!"
He made no answer, save to reach one hand to her, through the bars.
Their hands met in a long, clinging tension. The policeman, somewhat
down the corridor, moved officiously in their direction.
"Here, now, none o' that!" he blurted. "Break away! An' say, time's up.
Yuh stayed too long, miss, as it is!"
Their hands parted. Still Gabriel did not look up.
"Are--are you coming back again?" he asked.
"Yes, Gabriel. Tomorrow."
"And will you tell me then who you are?"
"I'll tell you now, if you want to know."
"I do," he answered, and raised his head. Their eyes met, steadily. "I
do, now that you too have seen the light, and that you understand. Tell
me, who are you?"
A moment's pause.
Then, facing him, she answered:
"I am Catherine Flint, only daughter of Isaac Flint, the Billionaire!"