320CHAPTER XXX
GRANT ADAMS PREACHING A MESSAGE OF LOVE RAISES THE VERY DEVIL IN HARVEY
The most dramatic agency in life is time–time that escapes the staged drama. The passing years, the ceaseless chiselling of continuous events upon a soul, the reaction of a creed upon the material routine of the days, the humdrum living through of life that brings to it its final color and form–these things shape us and guide us, make us what we are, and alas, the story and the stage may only mention them. It is all very fine to say that as the years of work and aspiration passed, Grant Adams’s channel of life grew narrower. But what does that tell? Does it tell of the slow, daily sculpturing upon his character of the three big, emotional episodes of his life? To be a father in boyhood, a father ashamed, yet in duty bound to love and cherish his child; to face death in youth horribly and escape only when other men’s courage save him; to react upon that experience in a great spiritual awakening that all but touched madness; and to face unspeakable pain and terror and possible death to justify one’s fanatic consecration. Then day by day to renounce ambition, to feel no desire for those deeper things of the heart that gather about a home and the joys of a home; to be atrophied where others are quick and to be supersensitive and highstrung where others are dull; these are facts of Grant Adams’s life, but the greater facts are hidden; for they pass under the slow and inexorably moving current of life. They are that part of the living through of life that may not be staged nor told.
But something of the living through is marked on the man. Here he stands toward the close of the century that bore him–a tall, spare, red-haired, flint-visaged, wire-knit man, prematurely middle-aging in late youth. Under his high white forehead are restless blue eyes–deep, clear, challenging, 321combative blue eyes, a big nose protrudes from under the eyes that marks a willful, uncompromising creature and a big strong mouth, not finely cut, but with thick, hard lips, often chapped, that cover large irregular teeth. The face is determined and dogged–almost brutal sometimes when at rest; but when a smile lights it, a charm and grace from another being illumines the solemn countenance and Grant Adams’s heart is revealed. The face is Puritan–all Adams, dour New England Adams, and the smile Irish–from the joyous life of Mary Sands.
We may only see the face: here and there on it is the mark of the sculptor’s tool: now and then a glare or a smile reveals what deep creases and gashes the winds of the passing years have made in the soul behind the mask. Here and there, as a rising strident voice in passionate exhortation lifts, we may hear the roar of the narrowing channel into which his life is rushed with augmented force as he hurries forward into his destiny. In that tumult, family, home, ambition, his very child itself that was his first deep wellspring of love, are slipping from him into the torrent. The flood washes about him; his one idea dominates him. He is restless under it–restless even with the employment of the hour. The unions, for which he has been working for more than half a decade, do not satisfy him. His aim is perfection and mortality irritates him, but does not discourage him. For even vanity is slipping from him in the erosion of the waters rushing down their narrowing groove.
But it is only his grim flint face we see; only his high strident, but often melodiously sympathetic voice we hear; only his wiry, lank body with its stump of a right arm that stands before us. The minutes–awful minutes some of them–the hours, painful wrestling hours, the days, doubt-ridden days, and the long monotonous story of the years, we may not know. For the living through of life still escapes us, and only life’s tableau of the moment is before us.
Now whatever gloss of gayety Dr. Nesbit might put upon his opinion of Grant Adams and his work in the world, it was evident that the Doctor’s opinion of that work was not high. But it was comparatively high; for Harvey’s opinion of Grant 322Adams and his work was abysmal in its depth. He was running his life on a different motor from the motor which moved Harvey; the town was moving after a centripetal force–every one was for himself, and the devil was entitled to the hindermost. Grant Adams was centrifugal; he was not considering himself particularly and was shamelessly taking heed of the hindermost which was the devil’s by right. And so men said in their hearts, if this man wins, there will be the devil to pay. For Grant was going about the district spreading discontent. He was calling attention to the violation of the laws in the mines; he was calling attention to the need of other laws to further protect the miners and smelter men. He was going about from town to town in the Valley building up the unions and urging the men to demand more wages, either in actual money or in shorter hours, improved labor conditions, and cheaper rent and better houses from the company which housed the families of the workers.
“Why,” he asked, “should labor bear the burden of industry and take its leavings?”
“Why,” he demanded, “should capital toil not nor spin and be clothed as Solomon in his glory?”
“Why,” he argued, “should the profits of toil be used to buy more tools for toil and not more comforts for toil?”