The Coal War (29 page)

He went away from the interview, leaving her unsatisfied and miserable. She would take his word that there was nothing dishonorable in the affair; but she was sure that Mary Burke wanted Hal—how could any woman fail to want Hal? And among those “dreadful people”, as she called them, anything might happen!

[25]

Hal went for consolation to his friend Adelaide Wyatt. Adelaide had proposed a resolution in the Tuesday Afternoon Club, calling for an investigation of coal-strike outrages, and she told how she was being “cut” on account of this bold action. The ladies of Western City “society” were ablaze with anger against the strikers, who were interfering with the business of their men-folk.

“Mrs. John Curtis came to see me,” said Adelaide.

“Ah?” said Hal. This was the lady he had appealed to in Percy Harrigan's car.

“She came on a delicate errand,” added the other. “She wanted to know if I was aware of the report that you had tricked me into employing your mistress in my home.”

“By God!” cried Hal. “You don't mean it!”

“Didn't I warn you of it?”

“What did you say to her?”

“I defended you, of course, but I'm not sure if I convinced her. She may think you're deceiving me—or she may even think I'm abetting you.”

Hal had come to Adelaide with a wonderful scheme. He wanted her to visit the strike-country. She could help the strikers enormously, for the reporters would flock to her, and would print anything she said. But Adelaide made him see how impossible his project was. She was a woman living apart from her husband; in a few days Mrs. Curtis would be hearing a report that Hal had two mistresses instead of one in the tent-colony!

Yes, that was their way of fighting. If you lifted your voice in opposition to their greed and oppression, they crept upon you in the dark and shot you through with a poisoned arrow. And because you knew this, you kept silence, you shut yourself up in your own private affairs, and let your life be ruled by fear.

“I wonder why it is,” said Hal. “There seems to be so much of that nasty element in our Western City politics.”

Adelaide answered—it was one of the curious and unforeseen consequences of woman suffrage, or rather of woman suffrage granted too early, without the women having had to work for it, and develop intelligence and public spirit. “Men don't pay much attention to scandals,” she said, “but when you're dealing with women voters, there's nothing pays so well as a nasty story.”

She went on to explain that the “interests” which ruled in the city had a regular factory for that sort of campaign material. There was a certain Dr. Anna Carlton, who had what was supposed to be a medical-office, but who received a regular salary, with an expense account, out of which she paid spies and agents to seek out all manner of scandals in the lives of persons whom it was desired to threaten—politicians who would not vote as ordered, journalists who dared to be independent, labor leaders who called strikes. If there was no scandal in existence, the doctor would make one; fitting it in so carefully to the known facts of the person's character and circumstances that it could with difficulty be denied. She would start this story through a score of underground channels, and in a few days it would be everywhere whispered and believed.

Later on, Hal saw much of this bureau's operations. When magazine-writers came from the East to investigate and write up this strike, there was a scandal got ready for each of them within a week of his arrival. As Dr. Carlton could not find out much about these people, and was pushed for time, she was forced to pair off men and women indiscriminately, without any regard to their tastes. This got to be a joke among the victims; but even as one laughed over the joke, one thought of all the good, earnest people who took it all for gospel, and were thereby led to withhold their help from the strikers in their pitiful distress!

No, Adelaide could not visit the tent-colony. But there was another plan in Hal's mind—and before he told of it he went to the doors of the drawing-room, and looked outside, and then closed them carefully. “Suppose,” said he, “there were something you could do in secret?”

“What, Hal?”

“When I went down to that strike, I had my mind made up that I would not countenance violence. But now—well, I see the soldiers closing in on us, and I've had to revise my program. I don't mean to stand by and see those tent-colonies wiped out!”

“But you can't fight the state militia!”

“We're going to
have
to fight them, Adelaide!”

“But Hal, that's absurd! You'd stand no chance!”

“I'm not so sure. We outnumber them ten to one—”

“But the arms, Hal! The ammunition!”

“That's what I'm talking to you about!” There was a pause; then Hal continued, “You saw in the papers yesterday that General Wrightman has issued an order forbidding gun-stores anywhere in the state to sell arms for the strike-field.”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Well, then, if we're going to buy on a big scale, it will have to be outside the state. And we must have somebody we can trust, and whom the enemy would not suspect.”

Adelaide sat with her eyes fixed on Hal; at last she answered, quietly, “All right; when you need me for that, let me know!”

[26]

In New York and Chicago and other big cities to the East, it was becoming quite a fad for the sons and daughters of the idle rich to get themselves arrested in strike troubles. And in Western City they strove diligently to keep up with Eastern fashions. As Hal walked down the street, the members of the “younger set” whom he encountered were keen with curiosity. They “kidded” him, of course; it was a lark to greet the son of Edward S. Warner as an ex-convict and jail-bird; but then they wanted to know everything that had happened, and what it had felt like; they imagined themselves acquiring this wild and perilous kind of distinction. These members of the “younger set” went hunting in the mountains and clamored up perilous peaks; they drove racing-cars and broke the necks of themselves and others; they rode wild horses, and fought professional boxers, and ran away with chorus-girls; but here was something brand-new, the ne-plus-ultra of fashionability—to beard an old military walrus with white mustaches, and to be locked up in jail, and come to town next day and see your name on the front page of both morning papers!

There were older people, of course; and the old are conservative by nature, and cannot understand the need of youth for new sensations. A couple of ladies who met Hal on the street showed their good breeding by making no mention whatever of the shame he had brought upon his family; while others mentioned it in tones of grave reproof—old Dr. Penniman, for example, whose duty in life it was to discuss other people's conduct and morals, and who had an especial right to discuss Hal Warner's, because the young man was a member of his congregation, and had disgraced the hallowed name of St. George's.

Dr. Penniman knew all about the strike—he had read the details of it every day in the newspapers. There were fierce foreign criminals, with anarchistic ideas in their heads and daggers and bombs in their hands; there were gallant sons of good families, preserving the supremacy of the law and of the flag at deadly peril to their lives; and here was Hal Warner, showing what became of young men who no longer come to church regularly, but take up with modern infidelity and sedition. There was a fierce argument on the street—until Dr. Penniman noticed that people were staring at him, and remembered his dignity and hurried away, leaving Hal swearing at the bourgeois world and its prejudices.

More than anything else it was the newspapers! Twice a day people read these class-owned sheets, and it was as if they breathed poisoned gas. These papers had made a vulgar sensation, a scandal, out of Hal's arrest; they had suppressed his statement, his explanation—and that, of course, was as if they had cut out the brains of his action!

Suddenly, as Hal walked on, brooding, he lifted his eyes, and before him towered a great building of brown stone, with a sign across the top of it: “The Western City Herald”. Underneath this sign was a second line of words—big, so that you could not miss them, graven in stone, so that they would last forever:

“Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling-place!”

Hal had seen these words many times before, but never in his present mood, with his present knowledge. They came to him as something new and startling, incredible. He read them over and over—staring like a countryman who comes to town for the first time in his life, and is moved to awe by the great sights of the city. Suddenly an impulse laid hold of Hal Warner, and he went across the street and entered the elevator of the building.

“
Office of the Publisher
”, read the sign on one of a long row of doors; and Hal walked in, and handed his card to a clerk, and the clerk disappeared, and came back and said, “This way please”—all quite suddenly, before Hal had time to realize the consequences of this mad impulse which had seized him. He went along an inner corridor, past several doors with names on them, until the clerk opened one with the name, “Mr. Anthony Lacking”.

It was a big room, with big windows which looked out over the roof-tops of the city. Between the windows was a big desk, and at this desk sat a big man. He had been a fighting man in the early days, this “Tony” Lacking—he had come to town as a “tin-horn” gambler, and started a paper in a place where everybody had scandals, and he had shoved his way among them, black-mailing, brazening, blustering in huge headlines black and red. First he had plundered individuals, then he had plundered corporations—until at last he had discovered the final destiny of the great newspaper, which is to assist the corporations in their plundering of the public. So now this ex-gambler had a big building and an odor of prosperity, and was all for law and order and the sacred rights of privilege. But he was still the same “Tony” Lacking to all the city—a florid face and a florid mustache, a diamond on his finger, and a voice that had been made in the mountains. “Hello, Kid!” said he, when he saw Hal.

The other was not disconcerted, for though he had never happened to meet Mr. Lacking, he knew him by sight, and had heard the voice of the mountains. He took the greeting as it was meant, in good fellowship, and remarked, “Justice has accepted your invitation, Mr. Lacking.”

The other looked at him. “What the devil?” said he.

“I hope you won't fail to recognize her!” And without being invited Hal went and took a chair beside Mr. Lacking's desk. “Justice comes to make an appeal for Mrs. Bobek, a Slav woman, whose baby is dying.” And Hal continued, simply and earnestly, with the story of this poor mother and her “joy-ride”. Then, “Justice comes to make an appeal for Mike Sikoria, Mr. Lacking.” And Hal told the story of the old Slovak—not merely how he had had his arm crippled for trying to get his mail, but how he had wandered about in the coal-camps of the state, being robbed and mistreated—

“Say, Kid!” interrupted “Tony”. “Why all this sob-stuff?”

“For justice, Mr. Lacking. She has been expelled from other habitations, and she comes to make this her dwelling-place.”

The publisher of the Western City “Herald” leaned back in his chair and laughed his mountainous laugh. He knew “one on him” when he heard it! But when Hal went on to protest that he was in earnest, Mr. Lacking told him that that was not a natural condition for one of his age. When Hal started to tell what had happened to Louie the Greek—“Cut it out, sonny!” said “Tony”. “You can't wring my hard heart! I know you idle youngsters who have to blow off steam, but you can't use this paper for your devilment, and you might as well get that clear at the start. The ‘Herald' is a moral paper.”

But Hal persisted in being serious, and in trying to argue; so it became necessary for “Tony” to become emphatic. “Listen, Kid,” said he. “I sit in this room every day, and all sorts of people come to me, thinking they can pull the wool over my eyes. They want publicity for this and that, they have their grafts of one kind or another—and I have to sort them out. Your turn came sometime ago, and I looked you over and put you in the waste-basket—d'ye get me? Any time you get yourself arrested or hung, you can have your name in the ‘Herald'. I'd keep it out even then if I could, for the sake of your old father, who's a gentleman; but I can't do it—business wouldn't let me. But one thing I can see to, and that is that you don't use my columns for the defense of riot and assassination. So forget it, Kid—and run along and get yourself a girl somewhere, and drop this scheme of turning the world upside-down!”

[27]

The State Federation of Labor had called a convention to discuss the outrages in the strike-field, and this convention was to open its proceedings with a mass-meeting in the Auditorium. Hal besought his friends to attend the meeting—so that he might do his explaining wholesale, instead of here and there on street-corners! He kept the telephone busy, and he heard what several people thought of him before the day was by.

His father would come; in spite of the doctors, he would show Old Peter he was standing by his boy. But Brother Edward would not come—not even for a pretense at open-mindedness. On the other hand, Lucy May was coming—more breaking up of the home! And then came another spiritual wrestling-match in Will Wilmerding's study. It was a desperate proposition to put up to Peter Harrigan's assistant rector; but how could he say no—he who was a man of conscience, professionally that! One had a right to demand things of him which one could not demand of a businessman like Edward, or a man about town like Bob Creston!

“You see,” said Hal, “you happen to have a ‘call' here. Other people can say: ‘Such things can't happen!' But you know they have happened—because I come and say to you, ‘I have seen them!'”