Arvilly turned real eloquent. I mistrusted mebby she’d catched it from me, but Miss Meechim turned up her nose and acted dretful high-headed and said there was nothing genteel in such actions and she wouldn’t gin in a mite till that day in Vienna she had a letter that brought her nose down where it belonged, and she acted different after readin’ it and didn’t talk any more about gentility or the onbroken prosperity of the Mudd-Weakdews, and I wuz shocked myself to hear what wuz writ.
As I say, Miss Meechim read it and grew pale, the letter dropped in her lap and she trembled like a popple leaf, for it told of a dretful tragedy. It wuz writ by a friend in Sacramento and the tragedy wuz concernin’ the Mudd-Weakdews. On hearin’ of the strike, the Mudd-Weakdews had hurried home from their trip abroad and he had tried to quell the strike, but found it wouldn’t quell. He had been shot at but not killed; the shot went through his eyes, and he would be blind for life. A deadly fever had broke out in the tenements on the street back of his palace, caused, the doctors said, by the terrible onsanitary surroundings, and helped on by want and starvation. The families of his workmen had died off like dead leaves fallin’ from rotten trees in the fall. The tenements wuz not fur from the Mudd-Weakdew garden where Dorris loved to stay, who had stayed at home with a governess and a genteel relative during her parents’ 396 absence. The garden wuz full of trees, blossoms and flowering shrubs, a fountain dashed up its clear water into the air and tall white statutes stood guard over Dorris in her happy play. But some deadly germ wuz wafted from that filthy, ghastly place, over the roses and lilies and pure waters, and sweet Dorris wuz the victim.
The clear waters and fresh green lawns and fragrant posies didn’t extend fur enough back; if they had her life might have been saved, but they only went as fur as the sharp wall her pa had riz up and thought safely warded his own child from all the evils of the lower classes.
No, it didn’t go fur enough back, and sweet Dorris had to pay the penalty of her pa’s blindness and selfishness. For what duz the Book say? “The innocent shall suffer for the guilty.”
Her broken-hearted mother followed her to the grave, and it wuz on that very day, Mudd-Weakdew bein’ shut up with doctors, that the little boy wuz stolen. The discharged workman, whose little boy had died of starvation, disappeared too. He wuz said to be half-crazy and had threatened vengeance on his old employer. There wuz a story that he had been seen with a child richly dressed, and afterwards with a child dressed in the coarse clothing of the poor, embarking on a foreign ship, but the clue wuz lost, so the living trouble wuz worse to bear than the dead one.
The strike wuz ended, Capital coming out ahead; the workmen had lost, and the Mudd-Weakdews had a chance to coin more money than ever out of the half-paid labor and wretched lives of their men. They could still be exclusive and foller the star of gentility till it stood over the cold marble palace of disdainful nobility. But the wall of separation he had built up between wealth and poverty had not stood the strain; Deadly Pestilence, Triumphant Hatred and sharp-toothed Revenge had clumb over and attacked him with their sharp fangs, him and his wife, and they had to bear it.
I knowed it, I knowed that no walls can ever be built high enough to separate the sordid, neglected, wretched lives of the poor and the luxurious, pleasure-filled lives of the rich. Between the ignorant criminal classes and the educated and innocent. You may make ’em strong as the Pyramaids and high as the tower of Babel, but the passions and weaknesses of humanity will scale ’em and find a way through.
The vile air of the low lands will float over into and contaminate the pure air of the guarded pleasure gardens, and the evil germs will carry disease, crime and death, no matter how many fountains and white statutes and posies you may set up between. Envy, Discontent and Revenge will break through the walls and meet Oppression, Insolence and Injustice, and they will tear and rend each other. They always have and always will. Robert Strong, instead of buildin’ up that wall, spends his strength in tearin’ it down and settin’ on its crumblin’ ruins the white flowers of Love and Peace.
Holdin’ Oppression and Injustice back with a hard bit and makin’ ’em behave, makin’ Envy and Hatred sheath their claws some as a cat will when it is warm and happy. He tears down mouldy walls and lets the sunshine in. Pullin’ up what bad-smellin’ weeds he can in the gardens of the poor, and transplantin’ some of the overcrowded posy beds of the rich into the bare sile, makin’ ’em both look better and do better. I set store by him. But to resoom: