“Well, now, Laura,” piped the little man, “don’t be too sorry. Sorrow is a dangerous emotion.”
The daughter turned her face to her father frankly and said: “I realize that, father. Don’t concern yourself about that. But I see Grant some way, eating the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, calling out to a stiff-necked generation to repent. His eyes are focussed on to-morrow. He expects an immediate millennium. But he is at least looking forward, not back. And the world back of us is so full of change, that I am sure the world before us also must be full of change, and maybe sometime we shall arrive at Grant’s goal. He’s not working for himself, either in fame or in power, or in any personal thing. He’s just following the light as it is given him to see it, here among the poor.”
The daughter lifted a face full of enthusiasm to her father. He puffed in silence. “Well, my dear, that’s a fine speech. But when I asked you about Grant I was rising to a sort of question of personal privilege. I thought perhaps I would mix around at his meeting to-night! If you think I should, just kind of stand around to give him countenance–and,” he chuckled and squeaked: “To bundle up a few votes!”
“Do, father–do–you must!”
“Well,” squeaked the little voice, “so long as I must I’m glad to know that Tom made it easy for me, by turning all of Harvey and the Valley over to Grant at the riot last night. Why, if Tom tried to stop Grant’s meeting to-night Market Street itself would mob Tom–mob the very Temple of Love.” The Doctor chuckled and returned to his own 434affairs. “Being on the winning side isn’t really important. But it’s like carrying a potato in your pocket for rheumatism: it gives a feller confidence. And after all, the devil’s rich and God’s poor have all got votes. And votes count!” He grinned and revived his pipe.
He was about to speak again when Laura interrupted him, “Oh, father–they’re not God’s poor, whose ever they are. Don’t say that. They’re Daniel Sands’s poor, and the Smelter Trust’s poor, and the Coal Trust’s poor, and the Glass and Cement and Steel company’s poor. I’ve learned that down here. Why, if the employers would only treat the workers as fairly as they treat the machines, keeping them fit, and modern and bright, God would have no poor!”
The Doctor rose and stretched and smiled indulgently at his daughter. “Heigh-ho the green holly,” he droned. “Well, have it your way. God’s poor or Dan’s poor, they’re my votes, if I can get ’em. So we’ll come to the meeting to-night and blow a few mouthfuls on the fires of revolution, for the good of the order!”
He would have gone, but his daughter begged him to stay and dine with her in South Harvey, before they went to the meeting. So for an hour the Doctor sat in his daughter’s office by the window, sometimes giving attention to the drab flood of humanity passing along the street as the shifts changed for evening in the mines and smelters, and then listening to the day’s stragglers who came and went through his daughter’s office: A father for medicine for a child, a mother for advice, a breaker boy for a book, a little girl from the glass works for a bright bit of sewing upon which she was working, a woman from Violet Hogan’s room with a heartbreak in her problem, a group of women from little Italy with a complaint about a disorderly neighbor in their tenement, a cripple from the mines to talk over his career, whether it should be pencils or shoe strings, or a hand organ, or some attempt at handicraft; the head of a local labor union paying some pittance to Laura, voted by the men to help her with her work; a shy foreign woman with a badly spelled note from her neighbor, asking for flower seeds and directions translated by Laura into the woman’s own language telling how to plant the seeds; a belated working 435mother calling for the last little tot in the nursery and explaining her delay. Laura heard them all and so far as she could, she served them all. The Doctor was vastly proud of the effective way in which she dispatched her work.
It was six o’clock, but the summer sun still was high and the traffic in the street was thick. For a time, while a woman with a child with shriveled legs was talking to Laura about the child’s education, the Doctor sat gazing into the street. When the room was empty, he exclaimed, “It’s a long weary way from the sunshine and prairie grass, child! How it all has changed with the years! Ten years ago I knew ’em all, the men and the employers. Now they are all newcomers–men and masters. Why, I don’t even know their nationalities; I don’t even know what part of the earth they come from. And such sad-faced droves of them; so many little scamps, underfed, badly housed for generations. The big, strapping Irish and Germans and Scotch and the wide-chested little Welshmen, and the agile French–how few of them there are compared with this slow-moving horde of runts from God knows where! It’s been a long time since I’ve been down here to see a shift change, Laura. Lord–Lord have mercy on these people–for no one else seems to care!”
“Amen, and Amen, father,” answered the daughter. “These are the people that Grant is trying to stir to consciousness. These are the people who–”