“Neither do I. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Barry. You look at it over your right shoulder, and I’ll look at it over my left; then one of us two will have good luck anyway. It really doesn’t matter which one.”
“All right!”
Miss Chichester turned her head slowly to the left, while Barry turned his slowly to the right, and so they faced each other. Now, when a susceptible young man, and a like-minded young woman, sitting side by side in a car, in the gloaming, turn toward each other to look over their respective shoulders at a new moon, the tender light of which falls on their upturned faces, the situation becomes such that Cupid is more than likely to kick up his pudgy heels in glee. But on this occasion he never moved a muscle. It was Barry’s fault. He simply did not appreciate his privileges and opportunities. In the most matter-of-fact way he turned back, after gazing for a moment on the glimmering crescent, restored the power to his car, and as it shot ahead he quietly remarked:
“I wonder if the moon is really made of green cheese.”
“Oh, Barry!” said Miss Chichester. “You impossible man!”
The funeral of John Bradley was conducted in accordance with the will of his widow. There was no clergyman there. Nor did any one read the service for the burial of the dead as authorized by any Church. Religion had absolutely no part in this final chapter of the story of a workingman’s life and death. It was Sunday afternoon, the dead man’s fellow-workmen were free to come, and they gathered in large numbers to pay their tribute to his memory. But this was not the only purpose of their coming. They desired also by their presence to manifest their sympathy with his widow, to emphasize their disapproval of the treatment he had received from his corporate employer, and from the court that had sent him away empty handed from the only tribunal that was supposed to do justice between man and man. There were few toilers in the city who had not heard of the misfortunes of the man now dead, and few who did not believe him to have been a victim of corporate greed and of a gross miscarriage of justice.
It was largely in demonstration of their belief that they came to attend the funeral. One by one they passed by his coffin, men of his own walk in life, and looked down on his dead face. They were sober, sympathetic and silent as they looked. Some of them, who had known him well in his lifetime, were moved to tears. Not that he had been a leader among them, nor that he had been a favorite with them, nor that they had respected or cared more for him than they had for a hundred others who worked nine hours a day, smoked an ill-smelling pipe, drank a few glasses of beer of an evening, and in general lived a monotonous, unambitious, unintellectual life. So that whatever emotion they manifested beyond that ordinarily caused by the mere fact of death was due wholly to the injustice of which they believed he had been a victim, and to the unusual manner of his taking off.
Bradley’s widow, sitting near the head of the coffin with veil thrown back, watched them as they came and went. Whether or not others in the gathering marked the significance of the outpouring, she, at least, did not fail to do so. She sensed the spirit of the crowd. She saw in it a complete justification of her attitude toward the social forces that had kept her submissive and submerged, toward the power of wealth that had overridden her, toward the courts that had failed to give her justice.
She was not overwhelmed by grief. Why should she be? Bradley had never been a man to be ardently loved by any woman, much less by a woman of her mental capacity and attainments. Why she had married him was still a mystery among those who knew her. With her education, her quality of mind, her exceptional beauty, she might have had in marriage the most promising man in her circle who worked in any capacity for wages; she might, indeed, have had one of still higher social and business grade. But she chose to marry John Bradley. The reasons that govern the matrimonial choice are often inscrutable, and women are protected, by the very fact of their sex, from ever being called upon to make them known. But if Mary Bradley had, at any time, repented her choice of a husband, no one had ever heard her express such a thought. She had remained absolutely faithful and helpful to him from the beginning to the end. And, in a crude, undemonstrative way, he had appreciated her and had been good to her. He had never abused her by word or deed, not even on those infrequent occasions when he had come home in his cups. He had turned over to her his weekly wages; he had never crossed her will; he had given her of his unimportant best. What more could she have asked? So, dispassionately, superficially perhaps, she sorrowed at his death. She felt no such pangs of grief as tore her heart when her girl baby died. That death had cut into the core of her being. But the passing of any soul that one has seen familiarly, illuminating a living body however dimly, cannot fail to arouse at least some semblance of sorrow in the normal human heart. And the demonstration made by her husband’s fellow-workers touched her also. Glancing out through the open doorway she saw that the street in front of her house was full of them. Stephen Lamar came to her and asked her permission to address the people from her porch. She gave her consent willingly. Lamar was the protagonist of the workingmen of the city. He was their leader in the social revolt which was eventually to free them from the chains of capitalism, and restore to them their natural rights. Somewhere, somehow, he had become learned in the things that pertained to the struggle between the classes, he was gifted with a crude eloquence that made his speeches popular, and whenever he spoke to them, the workers heard him gladly. Now, as they saw him come out onto the porch and stand, with bared head, facing them, a murmur of approval ran through the crowd. He addressed them as “Comrades in Toil.” No one remembered ever to have seen Lamar engaged in any kind of manual labor; but, doubtless, he was doing vastly more for the workingmen by the activity of his brain and the eloquence of his tongue than he could possibly do by the labor of his hands. Moreover, as he himself reminded them occasionally, he had at one time been a day-laborer in a mill. So he had a right to address them as “Comrades in Toil.”