"GUILTY."
Speechless and dazed, Gabriel stared at her as though at some strange
apparition.
"Daughter of--of Isaac Flint?" he stammered, clinging to the bars.
"Come, come, lady, yuh can't stay no longer!" the officer again
insisted, tapping her on the shoulder. "Yuh'd oughta been out o' here
ten minutes ago! No, nuthin' doin'!" he concluded, as she turned to him
appealingly. "Not today! Time's up an' more than up!"
Catherine stretched out her hand to Gabriel, in farewell. He took it,
silently.
"Good-bye!" said she. "Until I come again, good-bye. Keep up a stout
heart, for I am with you. We--we _can't_ lose. We shall win--we _must_
win! Don't condemn me for being what I am and who I am, Gabriel. Only
think what--with your help--I may yet be! And now again, good-bye!"
Their hands parted. Gabriel, still silent, stood there in his cell,
watching her till she vanished from his sight down the long corridor of
grief and tears. The officer, winking wisely to himself, thrust his
tongue into his cheek.
"Daughter of Isaac Flint, th' Billionaire!" he was thinking, with
derision. "Oh, yes, billionaires' daughters would be visitin' Socialists
an' bums an' red-light con-workers like this geezer. Oh yes, sure, sure
they would--I should worry!"
Which mental attitude was fortunate, indeed; for it, and it alone,
preserved the girl from a wild blare of newspaper notoriety. Had the
truth been known, who could have imagined the results?
For a long time after the girl had departed, Gabriel sat there in his
cell, motionless and sunk in deepest thought. His emotions passed
recording. That this woman, his ideal, his best-beloved, the cherished,
inmost treasure of his heart and soul--she whom he had rescued, she who
had lain in his arms and shared with him that unforgettable hour in the
old sugar-house--should now prove to be the daughter of his bitterest
enemy, surpassed belief and stunned all clear understanding.
Flint! The very name connoted, for Gabriel, all that was cruel and
rapacious, hateful, vicious and greedy; all that meant pain and woe and
death to him and his class. Visions of West Virginia and Colorado rose
before his mind. He heard again the whistle of the "Bull Moose Death
Special" as it sped on its swift errand of barbarism up Cabin Creek,
hurling its sprays of leaden death among the slaves of this man and his
vulturine associates.
Flint! He whispered the name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents
at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs
and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the
charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay
in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and
west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; and his thoughts,
projected into the future, dwelt bitterly on the Air Trust now already
under way--the terrible, coming slavery which he, Gabriel, had struggled
to checkmate, only to find himself locked like a rat in a steel trap!
"And this woman," he groaned in agony of soul, "this woman, all in all
to me, is--is _his_ daughter!"
Flinging himself upon his hard and narrow bunk, he buried his head in
his powerful arms, and tried to blot out thought from his fevered brain;
but still the current ran on and on and on, endlessly, maddeningly. And
to the problem, no answer seemed to come.
"She must know who I am," he pondered. "Even if her father has not told
her, the papers have. True, she doesn't believe the infamous charge
against me; but what then? Can she, on the other hand, believe the
truth, that her father has conspired with Slade and those Cosmos thugs,
and with the press and courts and the whole damnable prostituted system,
to suppress and kill me?
"Can she believe her father guilty of all that? And of all the horrors
of this capitalist Hell, that I have told her about? No! Human nature is
incapable of such vast turnings from all the habits and environments of
a lifetime. In her veins flows the blood of that arch-criminal, Flint.
Her thoughts must be, to some extent, his thoughts. She must share his
viewpoint, and be loyal to him. After this first flush of reaction
against her father, she will go back to him. It is inevitable. Betwixt
her and me is fixed a boundless space, wider than Heaven and earth. She
is one pole, and I the other. If I have any strength or resolution or
philosophy, now is the hour for its trial.
"This woman must be, shall be put away from every thought and wish and
hope. And the word FINIS must be written at the end of the one brief
chapter where our life-stories seem to have run along together in a
false harmony and a fictitious peace!"
Thus pondered Gabriel, in the gloom of his harsh cell, branded with
crime and writhing in the agony of soul that only those who love
hopelessly can ever know.
And Catherine, what of her? What were her thoughts, emotions,
inspirations as--seeming to live in a dream, with Gabriel's eloquence
and the new vision of a better, saner, kindlier world shining through
her soul--she made her way back to the dingy hotel where now, shabby as
it was, she felt she had no right to stay, while others, homeless,
walked the brutal streets?
Who shall know them? Who shall tell? A blind man, suddenly made to see,
can find no words to express the wonder and bright glory of that sudden
sight. A deaf man, regaining his lost sense, cannot describe the sudden
burst of sound that fills the new, strange world wherein he finds
himself. So, now, this cultured, gently bred woman, for the first time
in her life understanding the facts, glimpsing the tragedy and grasping
the answer to it all, felt that no words could compass her strange
exultation and enlargement.
"It--it's like a chrysalis emerging into the form of a light, swift
butterfly!" she pondered, as, back in her room once more, she prepared
to write two letters. "Just for the present, I can't understand it all.
I don't know, yet, whether I'm worthy to be a Socialist, to be one of
that company of earnest, noble men and women striving for life and
liberty and joy for all the world. But with the help of the man I trust
and honor and believe in, and--and love--perhaps I may yet be. God
grant it may be so!"
She thought, a few minutes more, her face lighted by an inner radiance
that made its beauty spiritual and pure and calm. Then, having somewhat
composed her thoughts, she wrote this letter to Maxim Waldron:
My Dear Wally:
I am writing you without date or place, just as I shall write my
father, because whatever happens, I insist that you two let me go
my way in peace, without trying to find, or hamper, or importune
me. My mind is fully made up. Nothing can change it. We have come
to the parting of the ways, forever.
Though I may feel bitterly toward you for what I now understand as
your harsh and cruel attitude toward the world, and the rôle you
play as an exploiter of human labor, I shall not reproach you. You
simply cannot see these things as I have come to see them since my
feet have been set upon the road toward Socialism. Don't start,
Wally--that's the truth. Perhaps I'm not much of a Socialist yet,
because I don't know much about it. But I am learning, and shall
learn. My teacher is the best one in the world, I'm sure; and added
to this, all my natural energy and innate radicalism have flamed
into activity with this new thought. So, you see, the past is even
more effectively buried than ever. How could anything ever be
possible, now, between you and me?
Cease to think of me, Wally. I am gone out of your life, for all
time, as out of that whole circle of false, insincere, wicked and
parasitic existence that we call "society." That other world, where
you still are, shall see me no more. I have found a better and a
nobler kind of life; and to this, and to all it implies, I mean to
be forever faithful. I beg you, never try to find me or to answer
this.
Good-bye, then, forever.
Catherine.
After having read this over and sealed it, she wrote still another:
Dear Father:
It is hard to write these words to you. I owe you a debt of
gratitude and love, in many ways; yet, after all, your will and
mine conflict. You have tried to force me to a union abhorrent and
impossible to me. My only course is this--independence to think,
and act, and live as I, no longer a child but a grown woman, now
see fit.
I shall never return to you, father. Life means one thing to you,
another to me. You cannot change; I would not, now, for all the
world. I must go my way, thinking my own thoughts, doing my own
work, living up to my own ideals, whatever these may be. Your money
cannot lure me back to you, back to that old, false, sheltered,
horrible life of ease and idleness and veiled robbery! The skill
you have given me as a musician will open out a way for me to earn
my own living and be free. For this I thank you, and for much else,
even as I say good-bye to you for all time.
I have written Wally. He will tell you more about me, and about
the change in my views and ambitions, which has taken place. Do not
think harshly of me, father, and I will try to forgive you for the
burden I now know you have laid upon the aching shoulders of this
sad, old world.
And now, good-bye. Though you have lost a daughter, you may still
rejoice to know that that daughter has found peace and joy and vast
outlets for the energies of her whole heart and soul and being, in
working for Socialism, the noblest ideal ever conceived by the mind
of man.
Farewell, father; and think sometimes, not too unkindly, of
Your
Kate.
One week after these letters were mailed, "Tiger" Waldron, fanning the
fires of the old man's terrible rage, had decided Flint to disinherit
Catherine and to name him, Waldron, as his executor. Gabriel's fervent
wish that she might be penniless, was granted.
On the very day this business was put through, practically delivering
the Flint interests into Waldron's hands in the case of the old man's
death, a verdict was reached in Gabriel's case, at Rochester.
This case, crammed through the calendar, ahead of a large jam of other
business, proved how well unlimited funds can grease the wheels of Law.
It proved, also, that in the face of infinitely-subsidized witnesses,
lawyers, judge and jurymen, black becomes white, and a good deed is
written down a crime.
Catherine, working incognito, co-operated with the Socialist defense,
and did all that could be humanely done to have the truth made known, to
overset the mass of perjury and fraud enmeshing Gabriel, and to force
his acquittal.
As easily might she have bidden the sea rise from its bed and flood the
dry and arid wastes of old Sahara. Her voice and that of the Socialists,
their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain. A solid battery of
capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other
means--particularly including the majority of the priests and
clergy--swamped the man and damned him and doomed him from the first
word of the trial.
Money flowed in floods. Perjury overran the banks of the River of
Corruption. Herzog branded the man a thief and fire-eater. Dope-fiends
and harlots from the Red-Light district, "madames" and pimps and
hangers-on, swore to the white-slave activities of this man, who never
yet in all his four and twenty years had so much as entered a brothel.
Forged papers fixed past crimes and sentences on him. By innuendo and
direct statement, dynamitings, arsons, violence and rioting in many
strikes were laid at his door. His Socialist activities were dragged in
the slime of every gutter; and his Party made to suffer for evil deeds
existing only in the foul imagination of the prosecuting attorneys. The
finest "kept" brains in the legal profession conducted the case from
start to finish; and not a juryman was drawn on the panel who was not,
from the first, sworn to convict, and bought and paid for in hard cash.
After three days--days in which Gabriel plumbed the bitterest depths of
Hell and drank full draughts of gall and wormwood--the verdict came.
Came, and was flashed from sea to sea by an exulting press; and preached
on, and editorialized on, and gloated over by Flint and Waldron and
many, many others of that ilk--while Catherine wept tears that seemed to
drain her very heart of its last drops of blood.
At last she knew the meaning of the Class Struggle and her terrible
father's part in it all. At last she understood what Gabriel had so long
understood and now was paying for--the fact that Hell hath no fury like
Capitalism when endangered or opposed.
The Price! Gabriel now must pay it, to the full. For that foul verdict,
bought with gold wrung from the very blood and marrow of countless
toilers, opened the way to the sentence which Judge Harpies regretted
only that he could not make more severe--the sentence which the
detectives and the prison authorities, well "fixed," counted on making a
death-sentence, too.
"Gabriel Armstrong, stand up!"
He arose and faced the court. A deathlike stillness hushed the room,
crowded with Socialists, reporters, emissaries of Flint, private
detectives and hangers-on of the System. Heavily veiled, lest some of
her father's people recognize her, Catherine herself sat in a back seat,
very pale yet calm.
"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say, why sentence should not
be pronounced upon you?"
Gabriel, also a little pale, but with a steadfast and fearless gaze,
looked at the legal prostitute upon the bench, and shook his head in
negation. He deigned not, even, to answer this kept puppet of the ruling
class.
Judge Harpies frowned a trifle, cleared his throat, glanced about him
with pompous dignity; and then, in a sonorous and impressive tone--his
best asset on the bench, for legal knowledge and probity were not
his--announced:
"_It is the judgment of this court that you do stand committed to pay a
fine of three thousand dollars into the treasury of the United States,
and to serve five years at hard labor in the Federal Penitentiary at
Atlanta!_"