Before the lockout had been two days old, one of the State officers of a labor association had visited Thessaly, had addressed a hastily convened meeting of the ejected workmen, and had promised liberal assistance from the central organization. He had gone away again, but two or three subordinate officials of the body had appeared in town and were still there. They professed to be preparing detailed information upon which their chiefs could act intelligently. They had money in their pockets, and displayed a quite metropolitan freedom about spending it over the various bars. Some of the more conservative workmen thought these emissaries put in altogether too much time at these bars, but they were evidently popular with the great bulk of the men. They had a large fund of encouraging reminiscence about the way bloated capitalists had been beaten and humbled and brought down to their knees elsewhere in the country, and they were evidently quite confident that the workers would win this fight, too. Just how it was to be won no one mentioned, but when the financial aid began to come in it would be time to talk about that. And when the French Canadians came, too, it would be time—The rest of this familiar sentence was always left unspoken, but lowering brows and significant nods told how it should be finished.
So completely did this great paralytic stroke to industry monopolize attention, that events in the village, not immediately connected with it, passed almost unnoticed. Nobody gave a second thought, for example, to the dissolution of the law firm of Tracy & Boyce, much less dreamed of linking it in any way with the grand industrial drama which engaged public interest.
Horace, at the same time, took rooms at the new brick hotel, the Central, which had been built near the railroad depot, and opened an office of his own a block or two lower down Main Street than the one he had vacated. This did not attract any special comment, and when, on the evening of the 16th of November, a meeting of the Thessaly Citizens’ Club was convened, fully half those who attended learned there for the first time that the two young lawyers had separated.
The club at last had secured a building for itself—or rather the refusal of one—and this meeting was called to decide upon ratifying the purchase. It was held in a large upper room of the building under discussion, which had been the gymnasium of a German Turn Verein, and still had stowed away in its comers some of the apparatus that the athletes had used.
When Horace, as president, called the gathering to order, there were some forty men present, representing very fairly the business and professional classes of the village. Schuyler Tenney was there as one of the newer members; and Reuben Tracy, with John Fairchild, Dr. Lester, Father Chance, and others of the founders, sat near one another farther back in the hall.
The president, with ready facility, laid before the meeting the business at hand. The building they were in could be purchased, or rented on a reasonably extended lease. It seemed to the committee better to take it than to think of erecting one for themselves—at least for the present. So much money would be needed: so much for furniture, so much for repairs, etc.; so much for heating and lighting, so much for service, and so on—a very compact and lucid statement, indeed.
A half hour was passed in more or less inconclusive discussion before Reuben Tracy rose to his feet and began to speak. The story that he and Boyce were no longer friends had gone the round of the room, and some men turned their chairs to give him the closer attention with eye and ear. Before long all were listening with deep interest to every word.
Reuben started by saying that there was something even more important than the question of the new building, and that was the question of what the club itself meant. In its inception, the idea of creating machinery for municipal improvement had been foremost. Certainly he and those associated with him in projecting the original meeting had taken that view of their work. That meeting had contented itself with an indefinite expression of good intentions, but still had not dissented from the idea that the club was to mean something and to do something. Now it became necessary, before final steps were taken, to ask what that something was to be. So far as he gathered, much thought had been given as to the probable receipts and expenditure, as to where the card-room, the billiard-room, the lunch-room, and so forth should be located, and as to the adoption of all modern facilities for making themselves comfortable in their new club-house. But about the original objects of the club he had not heard a syllable. To him this attitude was profoundly unsatisfactory. At the present moment, the village was laboring under a heavy load of trouble and anxiety. Nearly if not quite a thousand families were painfully affected by the abrupt stoppage of the two largest works in the section. If actual want was not already experienced, at least the vivid threat of it hung over their poorer neighbors all about them. This fact, it seemed to him, must appeal to them all much more than any conceivable suggestion about furnishing a place in which they might sit about at their ease in leisure hours. He put it to the citizens before him, that their way was made exceptionally clear for them by this calamity which had overtaken their village. If the club meant anything, it must mean an organization to help these poor people who were suddenly, through no fault of their own, deprived of incomes and employment. That was something vital, pressing, urgent; easy-chairs and billiard-tables could wait, but the unemployed artisans of Thessaly and their families could not.
This in substance was what Reuben said; and when he had finished there succeeded a curious instant of dead silence, and then a loud confusion of comment. Half a dozen men were on their feet now, among them both Tenney and John Fairchild.
The hardware merchant spoke first, and what he said was not so prudent as those who knew him best might have expected. The novel excitement of speaking in public got into his head, and he not only used language like a more illiterate man than he really was, but he attacked Tracy personally for striving to foment trouble between capital and labor, and thereby created an unfavorable impression upon the minds of his listeners.