XII
Pelham avoided his father the next week. The son came late to breakfasts, his father did not return for luncheon, and in the evenings Pelham dropped by one of the clubs for dinner.
He simply could not face the parent. They had passed, several times, on the place; they had spoken politely. But Pelham felt that this was only a courteous truce. Their ways of thinking were irreconcilable; what he regarded as his father's intellectual dishonesty, plus his own open opposition at the federation meeting, brought the conflict to a head at last.
His father was pledged, soul and brain, to things as they were. He was deaf to the call of progress, blind to what was imminent in the world around him, Pelham's emotionalized thinking told him. Paul was a Democrat, as grandfather Judson had been; he would remain one, even though he must see that the tariff issue was an outworn ruse, and that the states' rights question had been wiped out bloodily fifty years before. He was a capitalist; he would remain one, as long as a sleepily tolerant public opinion permitted this criminality in its midst.
Yes, criminality! Property was theft; Pelham was glad to find, in his new favorite, "Erewhon," an insistent echo of Proudhon's declaration. The lands, the waters, and their products shaped by labor's hands, must belong to labor, to the people; no whitewashing by legal titles could make the robbery justifiable. Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. And his father was irretrievably part and parcel of it.
Pelham took it up with his mother, in one forlorn attempt to win her backing. She checked sharply his criticism of Paul. "He is your father, Pelham. He is older, knows more, than you. I cannot listen to you."
A sense of shame prevented the son's turning to Jane. He saw her once or twice; but she had been so right, he so wrong, about his father, that he could not feel at ease with her, until the sting of the disappointment wore off. Pelham was ashamed to go to her; he went, instead, to the clubs.
Dorothy was away; but he made out. On the night of Sue's dance, he delayed until almost midnight, in order to avoid his parents. He had worked late that afternoon, and had walked afterwards through the new portion of Hewintown that lay on both sides of the railroad track. The drabness, the noisome poverty, even in new shacks, depressed him immeasurably; his disgust at the utter inartistry had long been dulled.
As he paused at the bottom of the steps to the dancing floor, the shocking contrast unsteadied him. There, where the workers lived, all was bleak want; here, where the drones celebrated, all was plenteous riot.
The curving lines of dazzling gowns, where Lane Cullom led an elaborate figure—the shimmer of jewels, the gross powdered bosoms of the chaperones, the smug smartness of the men—what a pitiable travesty of pleasure! Festooned flowers, deferential service, barbaric, subtly lascivious music—this waste would have fed those workers for years! These were not brilliant nor creative people—merely average humanity, whom the spin of the unfair wheel had swung to the top, to fling broadcast the stolen blood-toll of underpaid, underfed, underwise grubbers.
An overdressed, overperfumed matron brushed down the steps, and gushingly pushed her simpering daughter at him. An indecent exposure, as of a woman whose charms were on sale—his mind leapt to a miner's widow, holding by the hand her anemic, sunken-eyed daughter, who had stopped him and begged for work that afternoon—any work, to keep life in her daughter's body. And this waste!
Shaking off the depressed mood, he submerged his moralizing nature, and lashed himself into a hearty share in the pleasure-making. The unhealthy intoxication caught and held him; he danced and philandered with an abandon foreign to his nature. He felt that his part in the revel dirtied him. Once started, he hurled himself almost hysterically into the soiling gayety.
He had told Tom Hewin he might be late the next morning, despite the rush caused by wartime orders; it was after four when he went to bed. A troubled dream bridged his passage from sleep to waking.
He dreamt that he was flying—a common beginning of his dreams. He had powerful, sullen red wings, that beat against the gusty waves of wind, and swirled him up and forward out of the misty valley shadows toward the lean black peak of a solitary hill. Here a figure cowered—for a moment he fancied it was Jane. It turned frightened eyes up to his—no, it was his mother. He crept into her embrace.
All at once he was aware of an approaching darkness flying between him and the twinkling valley lights at an unbelievable depth below. The darkness took form as a vast black flyer mounting toward him. He unwound his mother's arms from his neck. Dimly he knew that it was a time of war, and those twinkling lights were the eyes of vast munition factories, packed with explosives.
In a slanting drop he shot toward the black figure. He did not see the face; but he knew it for his father. Lower and lower he and the black figure circled, until the night activity below could almost be made out. He avoided two beating rushes of the black wings. He grappled with the enemy.
He felt his arms pressing outward the fierce talons that sought to grasp him, his hands straining against the pulsing throat. Back, back, back he pressed—then with a mighty effort released, and flung the other, wheeling like a thrown stick, straight into the factory of death below.
Desperately his wings beat upward. A wide-tongued flash of fire bit into the night, there was a crash as if the earth burst apart.
Still half asleep, he sat up in bed. The roar rang in his ears. The house shook; fragments of window pane tinkled on the floor.
Out of bed he jumped, avoiding the broken glass, still uncertain what was dream, what reality.
Somewhere outside he heard a negro's frightened scream, and the sound of running steps.
He pulled on a shirt and a pair of working trousers, and knotted his shoe-strings. As he ran down the hall, Hollis, his tones shaking, was speaking to the doctor on the wire.
On reaching the back porch, a peculiar smell struck his nostrils—just a suggestion of a heavy odor that he knew at once. The dead fumes of dynamite—could they be blasting that close to the house? An overcharge, perhaps?
Over the sink his mother bent, washing the blood from the arm of the cook, Diana. "What's the matter, mother?"
She turned an alarmed face to his. "The glass cut her arm—nothing serious. Hollis is phoning the doctor." As he came closer, she whispered, "Artery."
"Can I help?"
She looked white and worried. "You'd better go to the mine, Pelham. It's an explosion, I think."
"Which way?"
"Sounded very close—that first ramp, perhaps——"
He went for the car; it would be quicker, and it might be needed.
As he cut through the gap, on the road just under the summit in front, parallel to the old dummy line, he noticed that the gap workings, and the second ramp, were deserted. The road turned sharply to the north, circling the long squat storehouse. He slowed mechanically, as a quick side squint caught the group on the steps: McArdle, the clerk, his anemic face, under the sparse scrub of beard, flushed from his emotional exertion, hectoring the dozen frightened negroes in front of him.
"What's wrong, Mac?"
The white man cursed the panicky negroes, the explosion, his job which kept him tied to the building.... "I can't get 'em to go back, Mr. Judson, the——" He was off again.
"Leave the store, come on with me——" He snapped open the door of the car.
"Got to watch the phone. The hospitals are sending doctors——"
"It's that bad?"
Pelham turned on the power again, and turned up the front of the hill. The air was clear here of the sickly odor that had reached the house—the wind swept this slope clear of the reminder of what lay beyond. Just before the ramp buildings showed beyond the trees, it came to him again—the stabbing, strangling odor of exploded dynamite. The tendency to nausea twisted his face into grotesque inhumanity; he held his breath as well as he could, and shoved on.
Now he had a view of the head of the ramp, and the shacks on both sides. His first impression was that it looked strangely usual: same houses, same isolated scrags of trees, all the familiar slopes and rises. A cloudy, half-hysterical belief fought within him that nothing had happened; surely exploding death and stifling horrors had not torn this kindly hill, these humble workers!
His vision cleared. The shacks were not the same; there was only a torn dilapidation on the farther side of the opening, only the vacuous shells of buildings stood on the nearer side. Horror visible, a wavering fog of dust and gray-smoky vapor, hovered over the top of the ramp. The huddling activity of the figures grouping and scattering above the opening, this was all unusual.
Running the car against a mound of red earth, he climbed clumsily out. His legs trod an unreal soil; it was as if he had forgotten how to articulate their use. The hurrying men descending the artificial slope did not notice him; they were intent on what was below.
On the third level he passed four figures lying parallel, motionless, dreadfully relaxed. He pressed his hands madly against his face, to clear the dust from his eyes, the punishing ache from his nostrils. He stopped, unable to proceed; dead men even this high up! One of the men shuddered, raised himself sideways. He saw that they were merely resting, recovering. The rescue work must be going on, then! He hurried lower.
Here was Tom Hewin, eyes bloodshot, a blackened bandage bulging out from his forehead. "You too?"
Hewin came closer, peering emptily into Pelham's face. He muttered something.
"What's 'at?"
"Hell." The manager held to his arm, as a rock to cling to, and, walking painfully, led him down the cluttered ramp, deeper into the dizzying mist. Every few feet he stopped to shout disjointed explanations or profanity into Pelham's ear. Grotesque shapes appeared suddenly, flowed both sides of them, were gone. Flickering lanterns bobbed horribly around the entrances; they stumbled over two prone figures, their wavering lantern lights sputtering out, like star-headed deities fallen and expiring. Wild bursts of imaginative activity rocked Pelham's perceptions; there was nothing real in the whole thing. The only living creatures were himself and this shrunken, dirtied being who shouted in his ear, descending ever into a darkening pit.
"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. Niggers, maybe."
"They're digging in?"
"They got into six. Working on eight—the whole mountain's caved down."
"What did it?"
"Overcharge—damn' carelessness—God knows. At this time of all others—the damn' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked—an' then they overcharge! The damn'——"
"Shall I take eight?"
"I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope. Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside.
The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without. Pelham went at the job quickly—Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight."
The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown.
He saw Jane Lauderdale at the other end of the long drab room, busily directing the emergency workers the United Charities had sent. Deaf to the questions of the company doctor at his side, he stood for a long moment. Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress—mother or wife—clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern sunshine drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death.
Jane did not see him. He returned to the grim task of providing for what new bodies were borne into the temporary morgue.
He could not find time to think; here was all that he could do.