At this point in the conversation, Mary Burke gave voice once more to her corroding despair. How could things ever be changed? The bosses were mean-hearted, and the men were cowards and traitors. That left nobody but God to do the changing—and God had left things as they were for such a long time!
Hal was interested to hear how Edstrom dealt with this attitude. “Mary,” he said, “did you ever read about ants in Africa?”
“No,” said she.
“They travel in long columns, millions and millions of them. And when they come to a ditch, the front ones fall in, and more and more of them on top, till they fill up the ditch, and the rest cross over. We are ants, Mary.”
“No matter how many go in,” cried the girl, “none will ever get across. There's no bottom to the ditch!”
He answered: “That's more than any ant can know. Mary. All they know is to go in. They cling to each other's bodies, even in death; they make a bridge, and the rest go over.”
“I'll step one side!” she declared, fiercely. “I'll not throw meself away.”
“You may step one side,” answered the other—“but you'll step back into line again. I know you better than you know yourself, Mary.”
There was silence in the little cabin. The winds of an early fall shrilled outside, and life suddenly seemed to Hal a stern and merciless thing. He had thought in his youthful fervour it would be thrilling to be a revolutionist; but to be an ant, one of millions and millions, to perish in a bottomless ditch—that was something a man could hardly bring himself to face! He looked at the bowed figure of this white haired toiler, vague in the feeble lamplight, and found himself thinking of Rembrandt's painting, the Visit of Emmaus: the ill-lighted room in the dirty tavern, and the two ragged men, struck dumb by the glow of light about the forehead of their table-companion. It was not fantastic to imagine a glow of light about the forehead of this soft-voiced old man!
“I never had any hope it would come in my time,” the old man was saying gently. “I did use to hope my boys might see it—but now I'm not sure even of that. But in all my life I never doubted that some day the working-people will cross over to the promised land. They'll no longer be slaves, and what they make won't be wasted by idlers. And take it from one who knows, Mary—for a workingman or woman not to have that faith, is to have lost the reason for living.”