The next day was Sunday. As she dressed she tried to decide whether she would go to church or not, and concluded that she would not. There were a number of books, she thought rebelliously, which would prove more profitable than Arnold's sermon. So, after breakfast, she made herself comfortable by the window in the library, and began one—one of the many, incidentally, which Good had sent to her. She saw him infrequently, but his books came constantly, and she often wondered if he appreciated the subtle compliment he paid her with each one of what she knew must be a slender treasure. They came spasmodically, as if he rushed them to her when some fancy was hot in his mind. There would be a poem, with characteristic comment all around the margins of the page, and an injunction on the fly leaf to "skip the rest"; or a ponderous volume of economics, with the information that it was poppycock, save for a paragraph on page 266. Sometimes it would be only a pencilled scrap of paper, with an amusing anecdote thereon, or just an illuminating epigram. He seemed to wish to share with her the pleasures of his mind. No one had ever shown that wish to her before.
The volume in her hand had come from him only a day or two before. It was thick and heavy and very austerely bound. It surprised her to see that it was new. He seldom sent her new books. She glanced idly through the pages before she happened to note the title. Then her whole manner changed. It was as if someone had spoken to her sharply. The words burned themselves into her consciousness. The small gilt letters shouted like live things. "Proceedings of the Congressional Committee of Inquiry into the Conditions Obtaining in the Algoma Mine Fields."
As she went on from the title to the contents, her indolent apathy changed rapidly to intent immersion. Occasionally her fingers clinched involuntarily and her eyebrows knitted. Once she even dropped the book and covered her eyes with her hands. It was a terrible narrative which unfolded itself before her, made more terrible by the emotionless dispassion of the telling. It was a story of bribery and corruption, of murder begetting murder, with the stupid folly of more murder as its cure, of the weakest and most helpless paying the price, of race hatred, of greed,—the whole nauseous catalogue of human frailties was laid before her, with less feeling than the Homeric catalogue of ships.
As her imagination took fire, it seemed to her that the poison of selfishness, festering in a far-away hole in the ground, had oozed out and over the land, marking its slimy trail in legislatures, in churches, in the homes of the highest, until, finally, it had reached her own library. She grew sick and faint as the pestilential tale expanded, and horror was piled upon horror.
The indictment made one thing clear. Algoma was not a mere morbid growth, to be extirpated by force, but an evidence of disease: and a disease, not of individuals or of classes, but of a civilisation. The roots of that disease were not, as a circular from a mine manager had said, in the "tyrannous labour unions." They went far deeper than that. They were in her own heart and brain. They were in the hearts and brains of every man and woman in the world.
It was the explanation of the mine owners, she knew, that they fought for "the right of the American workman to work for whom, what and when he pleased." It was the defence of the miners that they fought for the power of organisation.
Both quarrels were just, she felt with a terrible sense of hopelessness: both demanded the right to rule. Both would fight to the death for that right. It was folly to hope for an equal division of power. The line was too fine, too fluctuating. One or the other must lose. Talk of concessions, of improvement of conditions, only obscured the issue. She put herself momentarily in the place of the employers, the men of her class, the men she knew: and her jaw hardened. Freedom was the essence of American life. She would never permit those who took her bread to dictate what and how she should give it. She would fight to the end for her freedom.
Then, resolutely, she put herself in the place of those who demanded that she yield that freedom. Unconsciously her fingers clenched. She saw quite clearly that "freedom" took on a different meaning then. It became "tyranny." These creatures who came up out of the earth to burn and destroy, who flouted law and the rights of property, were but fragments of mankind's never-ending fight for liberty. Though, in their groping progress toward the goal, they wallowed in blood and folly, destroying the good with the bad, murdering the saints with the sinners, none the less were they a part of the blundering march of democracy.
Algoma was but an outpost of a struggle that was universal. The crust of convention and pretence had burst through momentarily, and the seething cauldron, full of the molten future, was exposed to frightened eyes.
As the hours passed, a new point of view took form in Judith's mind, and things which had always been quite clear now seemed not clear at all. She had never been more thoroughly muddled in her life, but she realised with a sense of satisfaction that the very confusion of her mind indicated the wiping away of those specious answers to all questions which had been an absolute preventive against any real speculation. Her slate was blank. There was room for new writing.