"High brifate; prefet gorporal," the old man interrupted, in rejection of
the title.
Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,
"Brevet corporal is good."
Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke. "I think Mr.
Lindau is right. Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though if
you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less
frequent on ours. We were fighting more immediately for existence. We
were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that if
each were not for all, then none was for any."
The colonel's words made their impression. Dryfoos said, with authority,
"That is so."
"Colonel Woodburn," Fulkerson called out, "if you'll work up those ideas
into a short paper--say, three thousand words--I'll engage to make March
take it."
The colonel went on without replying: "But Mr. Lindau is right in
characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as
no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible
that he could have used. I was very much struck by it."
The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that
no effort sufficed to dislodge him. The dinner went on from course to
course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to
bring the talk back to 'Every Other Week.' But perhaps because that was
only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to
bring a number of men together under Dryfoos's roof, and make them the
witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth,
Fulkerson's attempts failed. The colonel showed how commercialism was the
poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple,
agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct,
divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon
before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had
flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of
tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the
practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen
insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had
embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst
passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy
one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted
itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in
the hands of monopolies--the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the
Rubber Trust, and what not. And now what was the next thing? Affairs
could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next
thing?
The company listened for the main part silently. Dryfoos tried to grasp
the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived
of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he
knew he had never been in that. He did not like to hear competition
called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he
approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it
was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him
sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in
that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel
made against the present condition of things he said more and more
fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt." His eyes glowed, his hand
played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, "And what is the
next thing?" he threw himself forward, and repeated: "Yes, sir! What is
the next thing?"
"Natural gas, by thunder!" shouted Fulkerson.
One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's posture to lean over him and
put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It
expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature
had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a
small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in
combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of
laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to
Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained
the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to
Frescobaldi. In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer
himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist's
anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.
"Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We want to congratulate you," Fulkerson
called to him. "Here, gentlemen! Here's Frescobaldi's health."
They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his
hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos:
"You are please; no? You like?"
"First-rate, first-rate!" said the old man; but when the Italian had
bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said
dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well, or
the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice and clean."
"Yes," Fulkerson answered, "and that ain't quite the style--that little
wiggly-waggly blue flame--that the gas acts when you touch off a good
vein of it. This might do for weak gas"; and he went on to explain:
"They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down;
and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light
and heat his house. I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a
pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My,
my, my! You fel--you gentlemen--ought to go out and see that country, all
of you. Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let 'em see how
it works! Mind that one you torpedoed for me? You know, when they sink a
well," he went on to the company, "they can't always most generally
sometimes tell whether they're goin' to get gas or oil or salt water.
Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the Kanawha,
back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and
then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-well a
blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn't ripe for gas yet. Now
they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don't seem
to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo
down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they
call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the
torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and
in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil
and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens;
and when it clears up the derrick's painted--got a coat on that'll wear
in any climate. That's what our honored host meant. Generally get some
visiting lady, when there's one round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day
we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I
declined. I told 'em I hadn't much practice with Go-devils in the
newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn't very well myself, anyway.
Astonishing," Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his
explanation by an anecdote, "how reckless they get using dynamite when
they're torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place where a fellow was
handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to
caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of 'em in his hand,
and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it was. I
turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind
of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he was the fool kind,
that if you tried to stop him he'd keep on hammering that cartridge, just
to show that it wouldn't explode, till he blew you into Kingdom Come.
When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman. 'Pay
Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,' says he. 'He's too safe a man
to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.' I never saw anybody so
cool."
Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson's flattery and, without
lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn. "I had all sorts of
men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very
little trouble with them, generally speaking."
"Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable--dractable--tocile?"
Lindau put in.
"Yes, generally speaking," Dryfoos answered. "They mostly knew which side
of their bread was buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one
time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there. Some of the men
tried to form a union--"
"No, no!" cried Fulkerson. "Let me tell that! I know you wouldn't do
yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want 'em to know how a strike can be
managed, if you take it in time. You see, some of those fellows got a
notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up
wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos's foreman was the
ringleader in the business. They understood pretty well that as soon as
he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched
out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted
him--everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in
diamonds--and then they came to him, and--told him to sign a promise to
keep that foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with
the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them
all knock off. Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn't tell where
the mouse was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course.
There wasn't anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a
first-rate man, and he did his duty every time; only he'd got some of
those ideas into his head, and they turned it. Mr. Dryfoos signed, and
then he laid low."
March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him
murmur in German, "Shameful! shameful!"
Fulkerson went on: "Well, it wasn't long before they began to show their
hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark. He agreed to everything; there never was
such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn't a thing they asked of
him that he didn't do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry
as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men marched
into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen
Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows
found themselves out of a job. You never saw such a mad set."
"Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an
aesthetic point of view. "Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in
a play."
"That was vile treason," said Lindau in German to March. "He's an
infamous traitor! I cannot stay here. I must go."
He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him
under his voice: "For Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau! You owe it to
yourself not to make a scene, if you come here." Something in it all
affected him comically; he could not help laughing.
The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed
Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: "You are right. I must have
patience."
Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, "Pity your Pinkertons couldn't have given
them a few shots before they left."
"No, that wasn't necessary," said Dryfoos. "I succeeded in breaking up
the union. I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ
any man who would not swear that he was non-union. If they had attempted
violence, of course they could have been shot. But there was no fear of
that. Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut one another's
throats in the long run."
"But sometimes," said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching throughout.
for a chance to mount his hobby again, "they make a good deal of trouble
first. How was it in the great railroad strike of '77?"
"Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, colonel," said
Fulkerson. "But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze
the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end."
"Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always. But it's the
exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected. And a
little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a
danger of the exceptional in your system. The fact is, those fellows have
the game in their own hands already. A strike of the whole body of the
Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic
seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given
points, and your government couldn't move a man over the roads without
the help of the engineers."
"That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the
conjecture. He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as something
already accomplished.
"Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?"
said Fulkerson. "It would be a card."
"Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson," said Kendricks.
Fulkerson laughed. "Telepathy--clear case of mind transference. Better
see March, here, about it. I'd like to have it in 'Every Other Week.' It
would make talk."
"Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking," said
the colonel.
"Well, sir," said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his
imperial stuck straight outward, "if I had my way, there wouldn't be any
Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole
country."
"What!" shouted Lindau. "You would sobbress the unionss of the
voarking-men?"
"Yes, I would."
"And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidalists--the
drosts--and gompines, and boolss? Would you dake the righdt from one and
gif it to the odder?"
"Yes, sir, I would," said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.
Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March
put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say
in German: "But it is infamous--infamous! What kind of man is this? Who
is he? He has the heart of a tyrant."
Colonel Woodburn cut in. "You couldn't do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your
system. And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that kind
of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected. Your
commercialized society has built its house on the sands. It will have to
go. But I should be sorry if it went before its time."
"You are righdt, sir," said Lindau. "It would be a bity. I hobe it will
last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour
gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own
gorrubtion--what then?"
"It's not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to
pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice," said the
colonel. "But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then
we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea,
not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility
--responsibility. The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall
be responsible to the central authority--emperor, duke, president; the
name does not matter--for the national expense and the national defence,
and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes
and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.
"The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the
support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in
war. The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the
ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from
within, and the poor--"
"No, no, no!" shouted Lindau. "The State shall do that--the whole beople.
The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that will not
voark, they shall sdarfe. But no man need sdarfe. He will go to the
State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf foodt.
All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople's and
be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall be no rich and no boor;
and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt dare to addack
a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?"
"Lion and lamb act," said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much
champagne, what words he was using.
No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, "You are
talking paternalism, sir."
"And you are dalking feutalism!" retorted the old man.
The colonel did not reply. A silence ensued, which no one broke till
Fulkerson said: "Well, now, look here. If either one of these millenniums
was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would become of
'Every Other Week'? Who would want March for an editor? How would Beaton
sell his pictures? Who would print Mr. Kendricks's little society verses
and short stories? What would become of Conrad and his good works?" Those
named grinned in support of Fulkerson's diversion, but Lindau and the
colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning.
A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one. "Ah," he said,
as he bit off the end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece,
where the brandy was still feebly flickering, "I wonder if there's enough
natural gas left to light my cigar." His effort put the flame out and
knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerson
cackled over the ruin: "I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after
labor and capital have fought it out together. I hope this ain't ominous
of anything personal, Dryfoos?"
"I'll take the risk of it," said the old man, harshly.
He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi's man, "You can
bring us the coffee in the library."
The talk did not recover itself there. Landau would not sit down; he
refused coffee, and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company;
Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked
his cigar; the others followed him. It seemed to March that his own
good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.