The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

And after another month—when the magazine of light urged resistance to the draft—it became apparent not only that the New Dawn would not stop the war, but that the war would incredibly stop the New Dawn. The despoilers of America actually plotted to destroy it, to smother its message, to adjust new shackles about the limbs of labour.

Sharon Whipple was the first of the privileged class to say that something had got to be done by the family—unless they wanted to have the police do it. Gideon was the second. These two despoilers of the people summoned Harvey D. from Washington, and the conspiracy against spiritual and industrial liberty ripened late one night in the library of the Whipple New Place. It was agreed that the last number of the New Dawn went pretty far—farther than any Whipple ought to go. But it was not felt that the time had come for extreme measures. It was believed that the newest Whipple should merely be reasoned with. To this end they began to reason among themselves, and were presently wrangling. It developed that Sharon's idea of reasoning lacked subtlety. It developed that Gideon and Harvey D. reasoned themselves into sheer bewilderment in an effort to find reasons that would commend themselves to Merle; so that this first meeting of the conspirators was about to break up fruitlessly, when Sharon Whipple was inspired to a suggestion that repelled yet pricked the other two until they desperately yielded to it. This was that none other than Dave Cowan be called into consultation.

"He'll know more about his own son than we do," urged Sharon.

Harvey D.'s feeling of true fatherhood was irritated by this way of putting it, but in the end he succumbed. He felt that his son was now far removed from the sphere of Dave Cowan, yet the man might retain some influence over the boy that would be of benefit to all concerned.

"He's in town," said Sharon. "He's a world romper, but he's here now. I heard him to-day in the post office telling someone how many stars there are in the sky—or something like that."

The following afternoon Dave Cowan, busy at the typesetting machine of the Newbern Advance, Daily and Weekly, was again begged to meet a few Whipples in the dingy little office of the First National. The office was unchanged; it had kept through the years since Dave had last illumined its gloom an air of subdued, moneyed discretion. Nor had the Whipples changed much. Harvey D. was still neat-faced and careful of attire, still solicitous of many little things. Gideon, gaunt and dour, was still erect. His hair was white now, but the brows shot their questioning glance straight. Sharon was as he had been, round-chested, plump; perhaps a trifle readier to point the ends of the grizzled brows in choleric amaze. The Whipple nose on all three still jutted forward boldly. It was a nose never to compromise with Time.

Dave Cowan, at first glance, was much the same, even after he had concealed beneath the table that half of him which was never quite so scrupulously arrayed as the other. But a second glance revealed that the yellow hair was less abundant. It was now cunningly conserved from ear to ear, above a forehead that had heightened. The face was thinner, and etched with new lines about the orator's mouth, but the eyes shone with the same light as of old and the same willingness to shed its beams through shadowed places such as first national banks. He no longer accepted the cigar, to preserve in the upper left-hand waist coat pocket with the fountain pen, the pencil, and the toothbrush. He craved rather permission to fill and light the calabash pipe. This was a mere bit of form, for he was soon talking so continuously that the pipe was no longer a going concern.

Delay was occasioned at the beginning of the interview. It proved to be difficult to convey to Dave exactly why he had been summoned. It appeared that he did not expect a consultation —rather a lecture by Dave Cowan upon life in its larger aspects. The Whipples, strangely, were all not a little embarrassed in his presence, and the mere mention of his son caused him to be informative for ten minutes before any of them dared to confine the flow of his discourse within narrower banks. He dealt volubly with the doctrines espoused by Merle, whereas they wished to be told how to deal with Merle. As he talked he consulted from time to time a sheaf of clippings brought from a pocket.

"A joke," began Dave, "all this socialistic talk. Get this from their platform: They demand that the country and its wealth be redeemed from the control of private interests and turned over to the people to be administered for the equal benefit of all. See what they mean? Going to have a law that a short man can reach as high as a tall man. Good joke, yes? Here again: 'The Socialist Party desires the workers of America to take the economic and political power from the capitalistic class.' Going to pull themselves off the ground by their boot straps, yes? Have a law to make the weak strong and the strong weak. Reads good, don't it? And here's the prize joke—one big union: Socialist Party does not interfere in the internal affairs of labour unions, but supports them in all their struggles. In order, however, that such struggles might attain the maximum of efficiency the socialists favour the closest organic cooperation of all unions as one organized working body.

"Get that? Lovely, ain't it? And when we're all in one big union, who are we going to strike against? Against ourselves, of course—like we do now. Bricklayers striking against shoemakers and both striking against carpenters, and all of 'em striking against the honest farmer and the farmer striking back, because every one of 'em wants all he can get for his labour and wants to pay as little as he has to for the other fellow's labour. One big union, my eye! Socialists are jokes. You never saw two of 'em yet that could agree on anything for ten minutes—except that they want something for nothing."