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The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the book he had commenced. Within the week he received it.
It was thrilling reading—setting at war, in each chapter, his keen mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had produced.
And yet his emotions did not lag far behind his mental acceptance. He saw again, and more clearly, that he had come to a parting of the paths in his thinking and being; the past months had inevitably brought him to this. What did other people think of these matters, if they knew of them at all? What would his father think? Again and again he told himself that Paul must accept these obvious, scintillating conclusions from undeniable premises; but a deeper voice, which yielded a sterner satisfaction, reminded that the economic upset—the socialism—expounded here was in direct opposition to all that his father incarnated. The chasm that had split him from Paul was no new thing; it bedded in childhood antipathies, in petty, intangible causes, in dislike at the elder's uneven rigor of discipline, in a deep-seated resistance against being molded to fit the father's pattern, rather than according to his own leanings.
If his father would come with him, well and good; if not, the son at least would be intellectually honest, and right!
There was no doubt in his mind but that Mary, the essence of motherly understanding, would go with him in these new ways.
He finished the rereading with a sense of physical exhaustion, as if the inner conflicts had shaken his bodily balance. With this was a false sense that these must have always been his thoughts—the things that had seeded and sprouted just below his consciousness. How could he have overlooked them so long? The obvious explanation, that they had not been there, did not occur; and he would have denied it, if it had been called to his attention.
A night's tossing wakefulness induced a different mood. The spirit-tiring reading became unreal and inconclusive; he had strayed off after a marsh-light dancing over the morbid swamps of his emotional imagination. Further reading would purge this from his system.
The librarian obligingly pointed out the rest of the scanty shelf-end of socialist books. Ah, these would correct his wandering! There were Engel's "Origin of the Family," a treatise by Bax that he could not unravel, a rebound "Communist Manifesto," Blatchford's "Merrie England," the first volume of "Capital," in the Swan Sonnenschein edition. Eliminating the Bax book, he began to go conscientiously through the others; the task opened into a joyful journey. The persuasive structure that Wells had erected found buttresses and foundations. There was no longer room for carping or delay—he was convinced; more than that, he was stirred by an inner storm, he heard an evangelical trumpeting such as must have overwhelmed Saul in the blinding reproach along the road to Damascus, he acknowledged a lashing command to spend himself for the splendid achievement of this immense dream, nay, this reality that was even now inevitably growing and strengthening throughout the whole man-sown planet.
He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking.
Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths? In college he had had two courses in classical economy; but the subjects had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day.
He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned.
Wealth—all wealth—was the product of labor. That, and nothing else.
Rent, interest, profit—labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money—gold calved no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest. Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor.
War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clashing imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one.
And here was a vast body of men—he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to get the marvelous figures again—throughout every country in the world, with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws, striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace. And he had stayed out of it so long!
Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had gone; money kings must go.
He had called himself a Democrat: by God, he would be a real one!
Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the Gods"; after rereading it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules—the Heraklaphorbia—this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above the sleeping city—a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.
The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines obtruded themselves in fragmentary fashion:
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me,
The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone;
I hear the voices of the hill and sea;
I talk with them, in language all our own.
Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown,
Vast shining ones, who fling their melody
To those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone.
Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.
Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free,
The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown,
Chanting their boisterous rebel litany;
The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....
And then toward the end,
Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone,
Blood-brother to them all eternally.
All things are one with me, and we are grown
One in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....
This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger for an answer to life's unresting questionings.
Men, women, children—the iron city, the world—staggered blindly on, pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but have it, God's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these things.
The following Friday—it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the third evening with her—he tacked the talk around to this theme that had so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East, where the stars rose.
"You know, Jane, I finished that Wells book ... the one I saw first on your table."
"You liked it?" He could feel a smile in the quiet query.
A playful accusation answered her. "You didn't tell me to read it!"
"I knew you would find it for yourself."
He thought this over. "That was better. Tell me, Jane: are you a socialist?"
"Mm ... yes, of course; all sensible people are."
"A member of the party?"
"I've never joined, though I've heard Kate O'Hare, and some of the local 'comrades' speak. And I went to the Debs meeting last fall."
So she was a socialist—one of the despised, reviled believers in the newer, finer creed! He had guessed it all along; the certainty as to it had played some part in the pleasure at his own mental choice. Out of a joyed heart he announced, "I'm going to join—at once! I met a member of the Adamsville local—a Mr. Duckworth——"
"I've met him,—an architect, isn't he? A dear old type!"
"That's the one. He has my application card."
"My dear boy! You're much too precipitate. You ought to read—and think—a lot first."
When she heard his achievements, she had to confess that what he had read already exceeded her desultory knowledge.
"But what will your father think of you!"
Pelham meditated, and spoke out of a divided mind. "He thinks pretty straight. And he likes Wells. I'm going to talk it over with him."
"Here's to a pleasant session! I envy you your courage, Pelham. What Auntie didn't say to me! Even Mrs. Anderson shrugs at my opinions. She's thoroughly bourgeois—charity, labor laws, factory reforms are as far as she dares contemplate." A little smile curved her cheek bewitchingly, as the brilliance of her large eyes caressed him approvingly. "Anything's bourgeois that we socialists don't like, you know."
She went on, after an intimate moment of pondering. "Let me tell you what we are trying to do, first. Mrs. Anderson's committee wants the state to pass a decent mining law. We're behind the rest of the country now in safeguards for miners; and our limping laws aren't observed. The Board of Trade has endorsed the new law, but the state labor federation has played off. Meet those men.... Most of the union bosses are crooks, you know."
"I know the other side says that——" His tone was incredulous.
"There are crooks in both camps, Pelham. Just watch John Pooley and his gang! And, while you talk to the redoubtable Paul J., see what he thinks about our mining bill."
"It's such a little thing, Jane, with socialism to fight for!"
She nodded her head, with a charming echoey dogmatism. "Big movements go forward by little things.... What's the time?"
The radium face of his watch made his own expression fall. "I'm afraid we must turn back, dear lady.... I'll sound my father, and let you know."
His mother, the next morning, casually began to cross-examine him concerning his sudden friendship for the girl. He had not seen Dorothy, he reflected with a start, for two weeks now; Jane had told him that the Meades were leaving for the summer, perhaps to be gone the next year as well. He hardly minded. Dorothy was a closed alley; she did not think,—and even if he had loved her, he could not have married her. But this girl....
"Jane's splendid, mother. I like her immensely."
"Mother knows her, Pelham. She is undeniably clever. She spoke at the State Federation of Women's Clubs in favor of our joining the National. Clever, but very ... young. There are negro clubs in the National, you know. Don't you remember, dear, I told you how I defeated the resolution?"
"I don't remember your mentioning her."
"She made the speech just after mine. She said, 'I am sure that Mrs. Judson, if she met her negro mammy in heaven, would be glad to see her.' And I answered, 'Yes; when I meet her, I expect to say, "Mammy Sarah, how are you? And how are all your folks?" I wouldn't say, "Well, Mrs. Sarah Barbour, what is your opinion of the present state of the drama, and the influence of Kant and Schelling upon American philosophy?"' It floored her. The resolution was defeated."
"I don't see anything so awful in it."
"But—negro clubs, Pelham!"
He waived the point. "She is clever."
Mary pursed her lips. "Her ideas seem ... radical. That's bad enough, in a man; in a woman, it's inexcusable. It gets her talked about."
"People talk about Jane Addams, and Sara Bernhardt."
"There is a difference. I hope mother's boy won't see too much of such a woman.... You haven't mentioned Nellie Tolliver in some time."
"Nellie's head doesn't hold anything except bridge and the club."
"Mrs. Tolliver is a member of the Highland Study Circle, with me, Pelham. Nellie is a dear, sweet girl. Any woman would be proud to have her for a daughter."
Pelham yawned brutally. "Hollis is coming along, mother.... I'm not bothering about marriage yet."
Conquering a bothersome timidity, he sounded his father upon the proposed law, and his recent reading. Paul saw through the timid questionings at once, and answered cautiously. "It won't do you any harm to read that stuff. We all pass through it. Twenty-five years ago, your mother and I read Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,' and liked it. Of course such things can't be taken too seriously."
At the mention of the mining law, the father snorted. "So that's what that Lauderdale girl has been up to! You'll find, Pelham, that Mrs. Anderson is something of a busybody. As that law is framed now, it would bankrupt every mine operator in the State within a year."
"But the principle of the thing——"
"The principle is admirable. But don't you bother about such generalities. You'd better get your mind down to the problems of the mountain; there's enough to be done here to keep your ingenuity exercised."
Jane's chummy note answered his scrawled report of the conversation. "And you might tell him that T. L. G.—'That Lauderdale Girl'—gives him her regards. He likes the principle, does he? I think we've got Governor Tennant on our side, although he's pretty close to your father's crowd. Once the law is passed, we'll make all the mine operators sit up straight! Until Friday night, then...."