XX
"What do you think of that, comrade Judson?" Mrs. Hernandez asked, pushing the morning paper over, and watching his expression closely.
The first sheet of the Times-Dispatch held a page-wide display headline, concerning a dynamiting conspiracy unearthed among the leaders of the strike. With furious amazement Pelham read of the finding of a bundle of the explosive sticks on the tracks just before a trainload of workers was to arrive, and of a heavy charge, its fuse lit, in an upper opening of the second ramp. Company guards, he read, had testified to seeing four strikers sneak down the gap, away from the entry. Wilson, Jensen, and two other active agitators were already in jail; other arrests were to follow. A two column editorial bitterly assailed the "un-American" laborers, and demanded the militia to end the reign of terror.
"It's a plant, I'm sure. They're aching for an excuse to bring on the soldiers."
"They got four of the boys," she reminded him.
"It's outrageous."
He hurried around to the strike headquarters. Ben Spence, Dawson, McGue, and four others broke off their tense discussion as he entered.
"Why didn't you phone me about this?"
Spence answered, his tone not too friendly. "Couldn't find you."
"We haven't seen you for a week, Mr. Judson," blared out Dawson. "We been readin' the social news, too. You've been busy."
"Yes.... I've been busy on my report." A flash of his father's acidity spoke in the tones. Then he asked more quietly, "What about bonds?"
"You can help there," Spence mollified him. "We've got most of 'em arranged for. When will your report go up?"
Pelham twisted forward on his chair. "It'll contain this latest plant. I'll finish this week. I suspected something of the kind." He told them of the offer made by Jim Hewin.
"It's an old stunt," said Dawson, unbending a little from his suspicion of "white-collar" meddling in labor troubles. "They ought to be ashamed to pull such stale gags. But here in the South——Those blackguardly uglies will swear any of us into jail."
"There's the jury," said Spence, a fighting flash in his eyes. "We can play a trick or two. Corporations ain't popular in Adamsville. Well, we'll get the boys out first."
The whole thing brought Pelham up sharply to his neglected work. He got one more maddeningly brief sight of Louise, before she continued her round of visits. "I'll be back, lover boy, around the holidays."
"How can I stand your being away?"
But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.
Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals.
Yet the evening was different, to him. The memory of intimate contacts with the brief love who had gone left a mental stigma upon his body; he was less willing than ever to touch Jane, or think of kissing her; she must be kept all the more congealed in icy protection. As defense against unnerving personal confidences, he had brought his report, which had begun to trouble him, to ask her help and counsel. "I'm afraid of it, Jane. You see, it goes all the way ... about my own father. It'll be bound to make trouble for him ... and me. I could have another inspector frame the final wording——"
"You back out! You must be a changeling some corporation elf has dumped off on me!"
"Don't tease. The thing bites too hard; it has nothing but teeth."
"Of course you'll make it! Give it here; we'll fix it so that it can masticate the toughest corporation board. What if it does make trouble? It's the truth...."
She went over the whole of it, toning down the vituperative rhetoric of the opening and conclusion, adding force to his presentation of facts. He was startled at her ability to vivify the abstractions symbolizing the red rage tearing apart city and mountain. Before she was done, he was re-converted to faith in his eloquent accusations.
At length it was finished. He saw that advance copies reached the papers on the day it was received by the governor. The Advertiser and the Times-Dispatch did not even mention it. But the ever-helpful Register more than made up for their censoring. The slashing indictment of the companies for their disregard of the protective laws, the startling story of their lobbies to defeat safety measures, even the account of his father's activity at the State Federation of Labor, with the advertisements in the Voice of Labor as exhibits, were given in full. This was a new frankness in Adamsville politics. From this Pelham passed to a treatment of starvation wages on the one hand, and prodigal salaries, surpluses and dividends on the other. He featured that the strike was for the enforcement of existing laws, and that the companies refused any arbitration. The conclusion recommended that the state enforce arbitration, or, if the companies could not be controlled, that the profiteering be ended by the state's taking over the mines and running them.
The lonely editorial voice of the Register backed up even the most radical demands of the document.
The answer of the companies came promptly. Both of the other papers broke silence by denouncing the report as dishonest propaganda, with a demand for the removal of the offending young hothead. They called again for the militia to end the disorder at the mines.
Pelham received a wire from Governor Tennant the same night, suspending him from the state's services under charges of misconduct in office. The two hostile papers gave the details, the next morning; his strike activities were set forth, and given as reasons for his dismissal.
"You'll get your hearing," Ben Spence told him, "but that'll be all. It's good-bye with you, my boy. And you've drawn just two pay checks!"
His father descended on him in proxy during the afternoon, in the person of Pratt Judson, who had run up from Jackson, at Paul's suggestion, after interviewing the governor, to act as intermediary. Pelham listened with ill grace to his uncle's suave attempts to cloud the matter.
"Bob Tennant is a friend of yours, as well as mine, Pelham. It would certainly hurt him to remove you; but what is he to do?"
"Does my father demand the removal?"
"You know better. He stood up for you, even against the whole board of directors. Family means a lot to Paul. But they're out for your scalp. You've played yourself into their hands."
"I don't see how," the boy repeated doggedly, curving a steel-edged ruler until it cracked alarmingly. "I don't see how."
"If you'd gotten anyone's advice, my boy, you would know that a state official can't take sides in such matters. You've actually served on the strike committees, haven't you?"
"Heretofore inspectors haven't failed to serve the companies. They weren't fired."
"Let's not beat around the bush. Here's the best that Tennant can do. The charges need never come up, if you don't kick up another row. The suspension can go for the present, and then in due course you can resign. Mary tells me you've wanted to take up advanced work in sociology. You know I'm not a rich man, Pelham; but I'll be willing, to pull you out of this hole, to stand the whole expense."
"Would you advise me to retreat under fire? Resign, with charges hanging over me?"
The portly uncle thought a minute. "They'll be withdrawn now, Pelham, if you'll agree to resign in six months, and take a vacation until then. There'll be nothing against you."
The ruler splintered abruptly, littering the ordered desk. "It's running away from a fight, Uncle Pratt, and you know it. I can't do it."
"Think of the family—a black mark like this——"
"I'm thinking of the miners ... of my duty to them and the people."
"We're practical men, Pelham. You know enough about politics to know that you're butting your head against a stone mountain."
"Then I'll butt, damn 'em! Talk straight, Uncle Pratt. Would you advise me to back out of a fight in the middle of it?"
The elder man grinned in defeated sympathy. "You're a young fool, Pelham. We've got to do this quickly, or it's too late. I could give you until to-morrow to think it over——"
"I don't need the time. This is the only answer I could make."
"Well, I'll tell Paul. If you ever get into a scrape of any kind——"
"I appreciate that, and I'll remember it."
The strike committee heard what had occurred within an hour, as far as Pelham's decision was concerned.
"Good boy!" said Spence. "Give 'em a run for their dirty money."
Serrano, an unofficial member of the group, broke in excitedly. "Why not run Judson as labor candidate for sheriff, and elect him? That's the best answer to make to the crooks! You'd run, wouldn't you?"
Pelham thought rapidly. It would at least give a wonderful chance for propaganda, even if they couldn't overcome the big odds against them. "I don't think we could win——"
"Win? We'd lick the lights out of 'em! Man, Adamsville's waking up! With the strike going on, you could beat out Dick Sumter hands down! Look how he's turned the sheriff's office over to the companies! Will you do it?"
There might be something in it; his heart expanded sharply from the excitement. He kept his voice level. "I'd be willing to, of course. What do you think of it, Ben?"
The cautious labor lawyer was not so enthusiastic. "You might do it, Judson. You'd have to have union labor entirely behind you——"
"We can make 'em endorse him!"
"Socialist and all?" quizzed Spence, smiling doubtfully.
"Sure! Think what it would mean to the strike, if we had the sheriff's office! We could enforce order then.... They'd have no chance to call out their brass-buttoned Willies."
"Well, it's a big chance."
The hearing at Jackson, the next week, was the cut-and-dried farce that Pratt Judson and Spence had predicted. The governor was friendly but firm. "It's my duty, Mr. Judson, as a servant of all the people, to remove you."
Jane, on fire with the idea of the campaign, caught his hand impulsively when he hurried back to tell her. "Don't mind it. We knew what they would do.... Now—show them!"
The thing moved slowly. There were countless obstacles. Pooley, Bowden, the regular machine, would not hear of it. An uproarious meeting of the Trade Council shoved through an endorsement. The leaders changed their talk then, but Pelham felt their hidden antipathy working against him. So far there had been no open announcement of the race, and it was now the last week of August.
"Ben Spence, you've got to put this thing over. Hire Arlington Hall—the socialist local will put up the money—and start it next Sunday afternoon."
"Hadn't we better wait until things are straightened out a bit——"
"We'll wait until election's over, then. We've waited three weeks now."
"All right. Dawson says he'll back you; he's worth a lot."
Then began first-hand knowledge of the detail of politics for Pelham. Even before the announcement meeting, the socialist local, in its haphazard groping for democracy, selected a committee to steer the campaign. They met in Pelham's office the next night.
Pelham mused over their faces, as they blundered down to business. Surely the most extraordinary group ever assembled to direct the political destinies of Adamsville! Serrano, a bricklayer, a loud voiced, commanding bulk of a man, who banged with the improvised gavel; Christopher Duckworth, pioneer in the Adamsville movement, an impecunious old architect who had had his name on the state ticket at every election for sixteen years; two machinists, fighting units of a fighting group, "Mule" Hinton and Henry Gup; the party's state secretary, Mrs. Ola Spigner, who had come up from her farm in Choctaw County, ever on hand for a fight; Phifer Craft, a failure as a commission merchant, and a deep theoretical student of Marx and Dietzgen; Abe Katz, spokesman of the tailors' union and the Arbeiter Ring; and his landlady, Mrs. Hernandez, invariable woman member on committees. They were not even leaders in their trades, except Serrano and perhaps Katz. Most were poor speakers or spoke not at all. But out of the ill-lit slums and lean cheap suburbs they had been flung together by a burning idealism for a greater world. They were the hands of a people's groping faith.
"I mofe we elect us a treasurer," said Abe Katz seriously. So began the business of the campaign.
Dawson, Ben Spence, even Bowden and the Bivens group dropped in at occasional meetings; but this faithful nucleus was always on hand, doing the real work. They mapped out the itinerary of speakers, got out the first literature, sent soliciting committees to the various unions for endorsement and funds, in fact directed the whole campaign.
Any of the comrades were willing to be broken in as chairmen of the meetings. The speaking at first fell heavily on Serrano, Duckworth, and Pelham himself; but gradually the liberal element of the city came into the fight. Dr. Gulley threw the support of his Free Congregation into the contest with the "County Ring," as represented by Sumter; near-radical lawyers, Will Tatum, Judge Deason, Harvey Cade, eager to oust the corporation toadies, were invaluable assistants; Lane Cullom's car was always at the call of the committee, and shared with Pelham's the duty of touring the rambling county roads to the further meetings.
The unique campaign drew crowds from the start. One night Pelham called for a show of hands of all the men present who were voters; the result was so astonishing, that he repeated the lesson again and again. In West Adamsville, filled with itinerant furnace workers, not one man in fifteen was a voter. In the country districts, about one in ten; in the city, slightly less. With the aid of Ben Spence, he looked up the question, and thereafter added a vigorous attack on the election laws to his onslaughts on the company-owned sheriff's office.
"Do you know what your servants down in Jackson did in 1902, when they framed the new Constitution? They told you it would take the vote from 'the niggers'; it took the vote from you white men as well. In New York, in Illinois, in most of the northern and eastern states, from eighteen to twenty-two per cent of the population vote; in Western suffrage states, up to thirty-five per cent. And in the South? Georgia has something like five per cent, this state four, and Mississippi only three and a half per cent! Half of the men in this state are white; six out of every ten of these have been disfranchised by that Constitution. The cumulative poll tax, which says you can't vote unless every poll tax since 1902 has been paid by the February before the election, the grandfather clause, giving votes to the southern slave-masters and not to the southern wage-slaves who make the state's wealth now, these have robbed you of your voice in the government. The southern laborer has been classed with children, women, negroes, and idiots—will you stand for it?"
The campaign, thanks to the Register's hearty support, began to alarm the politicians. Pat Donohoo, who controlled five saloons, and claimed to be able to deliver the Irish and Catholic vote, came in to see Pelham. "We know your father," he confided huskily. "Give me your word that you'll behave when you're elected, and I'll see that you get every Catholic and Irish vote in the county. We're out to teach Dick Sumter a lesson."
Pelham answered briskly. "Of course I'll behave. My platform says what I'll do, Donohoo. If your men want to vote for me, go to it. They'll get a square deal from me, I'll promise that."
"You see," he explained to the committee, "he's playing safe. No matter who's elected, he can claim the credit."
"Never trust them Catholics," said Mrs. Spigner, a devout propagandist for the Menace. "They're all Jesuits."
"He couldn't deliver anyhow," consoled Ben Spence.
The crafty lawyer made the labor support fairly solid, by promising liberal appointments to the State Federation crowd. Pelham did not know about this, and Spence did not imagine that the promises would have to be fulfilled.
For one of the meetings the candidate worked harder than usual. It had been old Duckworth's suggestion that a speaking be advertised for the corner across from the University Club, in the very heart of the "silk-stocking" district. The neighborhood was liberally posted, and the committee were on hand to cover the retreat of the speakers, if too much of a riot developed. To their surprise, the large crowd listened to Dr. Gulley's fervent appeals, to the withering sarcasm of Harvey Cade, and to Judson's vitriolic attack on the leisure class, with close and appreciative attention. One or two of the East Highlands boys hooted a few times, but a policeman routed them. The applause was as hearty here as at Hazelton or Irondale.
Pelham's opponent stirred himself tardily, and was careful not to answer the accurate broadside of charges flung at him by the deposed mining inspector. General attacks on socialism were much more popular than lame apologies for an unfair and one-sided administration; and the common charge that American socialism was pro-German was roared and ballyhooed by the political servants of the corporations, upon platforms opulently framed in bunting. Pelham laughed at this intense patriotism, suddenly discovered as an answer to the sheriff's anti-labor activities; but it made continual inroads upon his strength with the docile people. The tide wavered to and fro; the Register claimed four days before election that Judson's chances were better than even; the alarmed opposing sheets insisted that there was only one man in the race, and that the iron city would never tolerate a man who openly advocated free love, kaiserism, and the despotism of the mob.
The closing rally of the Democrats came on Saturday night, an old-fashioned whooping wind-up in the Lyric theater; Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoarse over the hoarsened voice of their leader,—though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd.
The final applause was given; the reporters rushed off with their copy; the squads of comrades and union men left with their wives and children for cheap scattered homes. Pelham took Jane back to the Andersons', to sit, glum and wholly exhausted, slumped against the back of the couch, until after two.
"Never mind, you dear old fighter," she insisted. "You've done more than anyone else could."
Tuesday, election day, was a hectic tumult of excitement for both sides. Lane Cullom insisted on driving Pelham in his car, proud of the reflected light that went to the faithful aid of the candidate. The relief of shooting along chill stretches of November road from polling-place to polling-place was indescribable.
At five the polls closed. Pelham, after a lunch-stand supper, sat in his half-dismantled headquarters, his finger upon the pulse of the wires that led to every part of the county.
The returns began. One by one the faithful precincts lifted Judson to a good lead, and increased it. Hazelton, West Adamsville, distant Coalstock, the mining boxes, all went well, more than neutralizing the early farming returns, which were four to one for Sumter. And then the totals grew evener, and wavered now one way, now another. The vocal vote was Judson's; the silent, unchangeable Democratic mass began to lend its weight to the incumbent. There was still a fighting chance. Counting at the city boxes proceeded with sickening slowness.
The last of the county returns was wired from distant Chinaberry Junction: Judson led by fifty-two votes! If the city had broken even, he would have it!
The jubilant comrades and strikers conscripted sudden parades of celebration; the corporations were licked! It would paralyze the companies to have the law-enforcers, their oldtime bulwark, turned against them!
Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter—this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.
The morning papers gave the corrected figures—8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.
"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the class struggle!"
At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy assurances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a shimmer of thin November sunshine, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs—that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had transmuted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.
Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.
There was a flavor of bitterness in his first words. "It was really a victory, after all——"
"You've heard that enough to-day, I know. Don't try to talk: here, these cushions——" slipping them easily under his head, as a firm hand upon his shoulder soothed his protest. "Let yourself relax, all over. There."
Her eyes meditated between one of the chairs and the end of the couch beside him. She sat upon the couch.
The drowsy stillness, the moment's remoteness from the iron affairs of the racking city, the soft rustle of her dress, the gentle eddies of air that seemed scented by her presence, lulled and comforted. He reached for her hand, and laid it against his cheek, where it loitered, a cool solace, a gradual masterer of his undirected fancies.
The hours sagged by. There was little talk; that could wait. Not of his willing his mind began to embroider the miserly store of caresses he had asked or received from Jane; one by one the feverish moments with the other girl, purged into a less bodily ecstasy, recurred to him, with his own love's face and form holding their rightful place in his arms—translated memories which in their turn were embellished by a drugged imagination into warmer visionings of mutual surrender. Attempts to re-channel his thinking were unsuccessful; at last he let the wanton heart have its way.
Never had he needed a mother as now, Jane felt, as she bent her energy toward his tired spirit. He needed more than a mother; his feverish driving unrest would quiet, in arms that held him closer than a mother's might. The time had come for her to be mother to him, and something else. Winner or not, he was a hearty fighter ... decent.... Jane Lauderdale Judson ... the name meant something now; she had helped it mean something. A tired boy; her tired boy....
He looked up into her face at last. Her eyes, radiant with unspoken caresses, were a madonna's ... twin stars over a fretted sea; twin stars, in a heaven so near that he could reach and touch it. Unsteadied, he swung painfully to a seat beside her. Then, compelled by her dominant eyes, he turned and faced her in the shadowy hush. Unsteadily he put out his two arms, touching her lightly, fearfully, upon the shoulders, and lingering there. The pressure of his fingers drew her toward him; a pressure from no visible fingers pushed him inexorably toward her. He felt her breast touch him softly, and settle contentedly against him. He pressed his flushed face against the soft neck and the tendrils of her hair; his lips lay against her flesh, although he did not dare move them.
There was an unhurried rapture of stirless content. Half solaced for the moment, he released her; but his eyes could not leave hers, nor his face move far from her own.
Her clear voice came to him quietly, with the mellow reverberations of a gong touched in dusky stillness. "Stupid...." He could not read the half-closed eyes; he had to lean closer to make out the words. "Is that all?... Must I ask you?..."
His lips touched hers, closed upon them, clung there. A giddy faintness came with the long-withheld ardor; his eyes shut out sight, the other senses ceased for the moment—the frantic remnant of his will and consciousness seeking to make the moment perpetual. His own being seemed to flow out and into the other, he seemed to absorb from the vital contact all of the inestimable dearness that she meant to him. This consummation, devoutly unwished for so long, was for that reason in its realization doubly dear; it brought an ecstasy so brimming that for the time no other sensation found space to obtrude.
Too soon, to his heart, the ecstatic eternity ended. Suddenly ashamed of her daring in permitting the tardy rapture, not to think of inviting it, Jane drew back, releasing her tingling lips into a prim pucker of uncertainty. He sought her a second time, quickened to an arrogant sense of ownership of intangible wonders. Her protest reached him: "We shouldn't, Pelham dear...."
She found her lips too busied to frame more negative commandments, despite her unevenly ebbing struggles of protest.
At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment.
Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?"
"At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy.
"It wipes out all the irks and littlenesses.... Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself.
"I love your hair," she arranged it more to her liking. "It fretted your eyes, that last speech.... I wanted to kiss it away ... then."