Robert Airley was not a coward, but he was miserably poor, and poverty is apt to be cowardice when it is not desperation.
He held his tongue while the ore of the Penamunic mine was being brought to the surface. He loved his young wife, who was miserable away from the friendly faces and merry little shops of her native town, and he adored the rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, noisy boy to whom she had given birth; life was sweet to him despite his poverty; he did not dare provoke William Massarene, who was already lord of Kerosene township and of much else besides. It was bitter to him to think that had he only possessed enough wit to know what that shining dust on the grass-roots had meant he would have been a rich and fortunate man. But he could not retrieve his foolish unhappy error; and when William Massarene made the Main Trunk Line from Kerosene by way of Issouri to Chicago, over four thousand miles of swamp and scrub, he meekly accepted the place of platelayer on the new railway which was offered him at the great man’s instigation.
“You see I don’t forget old friends,” said Massarene with a cynical grin.
But for his wife and his little boy at home dependent on himself for their bread, Robert Airley would have killed him then and there.
From that day he had never been able to get away from that vile city of Kerosene, which spread and spread in its brick and mortar hideousness between him and the country, which multiplied its churches and its counting-houses, which had its gambling hells next door to its Methodist chapels, which was black and stinking and smoke-befouled, and filled all day and all night with the oaths of men and the cries of beasts, the throbbing of engines, the shrieking of steam, the bleating of sheep, the screaming of women, the lowing of tortured oxen, the howling of kidnapped dogs—that thrice-accursed cancer on the once fair breast of the dear earth!
What he would have given that he had never pulled up that grass with those shining atoms in the earth at its roots, but had lived, ever so hardly, on his own ground, at Penamunic, under the rough winds and the torrid suns and the driving snows, toiling like the oxen, hungering like the swine, chased by forest fires, pursued by rolling floods, but free at least in the untainted air, and away from that infernal curse which men dare to call civilization.
Absorbed in his own thoughts, he walked on now along the footpath which runs parallel with the Ladies’ Mile; jostling the smart people he passed, who drew away from his contact as though he had been a leper. He was wondering if he could trust his nerve, and rely on his hand, to do what he had come to do.
William Massarene was at that moment in the lobby of the House of Commons conversing with the Conservative Whip.
He was beginning to be appreciated by the Unionist, and he had always been feared. Of course they still ridiculed him to themselves for his accent, his ambitions, his antecedents, and his snobbism, but they knew that he was valuable to them, and he had a hard sound grip of certain practical questions which made members, and ministers too, listen when he was on his legs. In public life of any kind he showed always a certain rude power in him which enabled him to hold his own with the men who surrounded him, whoever they might be.
He was grievous and terrible to the patricians of the Party, but the patricians have learned in the last twenty years that they must pocket their pride to keep their heads above water; politically and socially, Tory democracy has to lie down with strange bed-fellows.