In the Heart of a Fool Part 41

_Item Seven._ In Mr. Fenn's room a collection of receipts:

(a) One from the Midland Railroad Company for bra.s.s as per statement rendered.

(b) One from the Harvey Transfer Co. for one box of cutlery marked Wright & Perry, and

(c) One--the hardest receipt of all to get--from Martha Morton for six chickens as per account rendered. These receipts hang on a spindle in the little room. Under the spindle is

_Item Eight._ A bottle of whisky--full but uncorked. He is in his room but little. Sometimes he comes in late at night, and does not light the lamp to avoid seeing the bottle, but plunges into bed, and covers up his head in fear and trembling. On the day when the Peach Blow Philosopher printed his view on Heaven, Mr. Fenn, by way of personal adornment, had purchased of Wright & Perry

_Item Nine._ One new coat. He hoped and so indicated to the firm, to be able to afford a vest in the spring and perhaps trousers by summer, and because of the cutlery transaction above mentioned, the firm indicated

_Item Ten._ That Mr. Fenn's credit was good for the whole suit. But Mr. Fenn waved a proud hand and said he had

_Item Eleven._ No desire to become involved in the devious ways of high finance, and took only the coat.

But, nevertheless, no small part of his Heaven lies in the serene knowledge that the whole suit is waiting for him, carefully put aside by the head of the house until Mr. Fenn cares to call for it. That is perhaps a material Heaven but it is a part of Mr. Fenn's Heaven, and as he goes about from door to door soliciting for sewing, the knowledge that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous--even on two meals a day and in a three-dollar-a-month room.

And now that we may balance up the Heaven account in these books, we should come to some conclusion as to what Heaven is. Let us call it, for the sake of our hypothesis, the most work one can do for the least self-interest, and let it go at that and get on with the story. For this story has to do with large and real affairs. It must not dally here with the sordid affairs of a lady who certainly was no better than she should be and of a gentleman who was as the hereinbefore mentioned receipts will show, much worse than he might have been.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

THE ODD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE BROTHERTON IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT

Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valley. In May a young gentleman in a high hat and a suit of exquisite gray twill cut with a long frock coat, appeared at the Hotel Sands--and took the bridal suite on the second floor. He brought letters to the Traders' Bank and from the Bank took letters to the smelters, and with a notebook in hand the young man in exquisite gray twill went about for three or four days smiling affably, and asking many questions. Then he left and in due course--that is to say, in a fortnight--Mr. Sands called the managing officials of all the smelters into his back room and read them a letter from a New York firm offering to trade stock in a holding company, taking over smelters of the cla.s.s and kind in the Wahoo Valley for the stocks and bonds of the Harvey Smelters Company. The letterhead was so awe-inspiring and the proposition was so convincing by reason of the terror inherent in the letterhead that the smelters went into the holding company, and thereafter the managing officials who had been men of power and consequence in Harvey became clerks. About the same time the coal properties went the same way, and the cement concerns saw their finish as individual competing concerns. The gla.s.s factories were also gobbled up. So when the Fourth of July came and the youngest Miss Morton, under great protest, but at her father's stern command, wrapped an American flag about her--and sang the "Star Spangled Banner" to the Veterans of Persifer F. Smith Post of the G.A.R. in Sands'

Park, the land of the free and the home of the brave in Harvey was somewhat abridged.

Daniel Sands felt the abridgement more than any one else. For a generation he had been a spider, weaving his own web for his own nest.

All his webs and filaments and wires and pipes and cables went out and brought back things for him to dispose of. He was the center of the universe for himself and for Harvey. He was the beginning and the end.

His bank was the first and the last word in business and in politics in that great valley. What he spun was his; what he drew into the web was his. When he invited the fly into his parlor, it was for the delectation of the spider, not to be pa.s.sed on to some other larger web and fatter spider. But that day as he sat, a withered, yellow-skinned, red-eyed, rattle-toothed, old man with a palsied head that never stopped wagging, as he sat under his skull cap, blinking out at a fat, little world that always had been his prey, Daniel Sands felt that he had ceased to be an end, and had become a means.

His bank, his mines, his smelters, even his munic.i.p.al utilities, all were slipping from under his control. He could feel the pull of the rope from the outside around his own foot. He could feel that he was not a generator of power. He was merely a pumping station, gathering up all the fat of the little land that once was his, and pa.s.sing it out in pipes that ran he knew not where, to go to some one else--he knew not whom. True, his commissions came back, and his dividends came back, and they were rich and sweet, and worth while. But--he was shocked when he found courage to ask it--if they did not come back, what could he do?

He was part of a great web--a little filament in one obscure corner, and he was spinning a fabric whose faintest plan he could not conceive.

This angered him, and the spider spat in vain rage. The power he loved was gone; he was the mere sh.e.l.l of a spider; he was dead. Some man might come into the bank to-morrow and take even the semblance of his power from him. They might, indeed, shut up every mill, close every mine, lock every factory, douse the fire in every smelter in the Wahoo Valley, and the man who believed he had opened the mills, dug the mines, builded the factories and lighted the smelter fires with all but his own hands, could only rage and fume, or be polite and pretend it was his desire.

The town that he believed that he had made out of sunshine and prairie gra.s.s, for all he could do, might be condemned as a bat roost, and the wires and cables, that ran from his desk all over the Wahoo Valley, might grow rusty and jangle in the prairie winds, while the pipes rotted under the sunflowers and he could only make a wry face. Spiders must have some instinctive constructive imagination to build their marvelous webs; surely this old spider had an imagination that in Elizabeth's day would have made him more than a minor poet. Yet in the beginning of the Twentieth Century he felt himself a bound prisoner in his decaying web.

So he showed his blue mouth, and red eyelids in fury, and was silent lest even his shadow should find how impotent a thing he was.

But he knew that one man knew. "How about your politics down here?"

asked the affable young man in exquisite gray twill, when he closed the gas-works deal. And Dan'l Sands said that until recently he and Dr.

Nesbit had been cronies, but that some way the Doctor had been getting high notions, and hadn't been around the bank lately. The young man in the exquisite gray twill asked a few questions, catalogued the Doctor, and then said:

"This man Van Dorn, it appears, is local attorney for all the mines and smelters--he hasn't the reform bug, has he?"

The old spider grinned and shook his head.

"All right," said the polite young man in the exquisite gray twill, as he picked up his gray, high hat, and flicked a speck of dust from his exquisite gray frock coat, "I'll take matters of politics up with him."

So the spider knew that the servant had been put over the master, and again he opened his mouth in malice, but spoke no word.

And thus it was that Judge Thomas Van Dorn formed a strong New York connection that stood him in stead in after years. For the web that the old spider of Market Street had been weaving all these years, was at its strongest but a rope of sand compared with the steel links of the chain that was wrapped about the town, with one end in the Judge's hand, but with the chain reaching out into some distant, mysterious hawser that moved it with a power of which even the Judge knew little or nothing.

So he was profoundly impressed, and accordingly proud, and added half an inch to the high-knee action of his strut. He felt himself a part of the world of affairs--and he was indeed a part. He was one of a thousand men who, whether they knew it or not, had been bought, body and soul--though the soul was thrown in for good measure in the Judge's case--to serve the great, greedy spider of organized capital at whatever cost of public welfare or of private faith. He was indeed a man of affairs--was Thomas Van Dorn--a part of a vast business and political cabal, that knew no party and no creed but dividends and still more dividends, impersonal, automatic, soulless--the materialization of the spirit of commerce.

And strangely enough, just as Tom Van Dorn worshiped the power that bought him, so the old spider, peering through the broken, rotting meshes of what was once his web, felt the power to which it was fastened, felt the power that moved him as a mere p.a.w.n in a game whose direction he did not conceive; and Dan'l Sands, in spite of his silent rage, worshiped the power like a groveling idolater.

But the worm never lacks for a bud; that also is a part of G.o.d's plan.

Thus, while the forces of egoism, the powers of capital, were concentrating in a vast organization of socialized individualism, the other forces and powers of society which were pointing toward a socialized altruism, were forming also. There was the man in the exquisite gray twill, harnessing Judge Van Dorn and Market Street to his will; and there was Grant Adams in faded overalls, harnessing labor to other wheels that were grinding another grist. Slowly but persistently had Grant Adams been forming his Amalgamation of the Unions of the valley. Slowly and awkwardly his unwieldy machinery was creaking its way round. In spite of handicaps of opposing interests among the men of different unions, his Wahoo Valley Labor Council was shaping itself into an effective machine. If the shares of stock in the mills and the mines and the smelters all ran their dividends through one great hopper, so the units of labor in the Valley were connected with a common source of direction. G.o.d does not plant the organizing spirit in the world for one group; it is the common heritage of the time. So the sinister power of organized capital loomed before Market Street with its terrible threat of extinction for the town if the town displeased organized capital; so also rose in the town a dread feeling of uneasiness that labor also had power. The personification of that power was Grant Adams. And when the young man in exquisite gray twill had become only a memory, Tom Van Dorn squarely faced Grant Adams. Market Street was behind the Judge. The Valley was back of Grant. For a time there was a truce, but it was not peace. The truce was a time of waiting; waiting and arming for battle.

During the year of the truce, Nathan Perry was busy. Nathan Perry saw the power that was organizing about him and the Independent mine among the employers in the district, and intuitively he felt the resistlessness of the power. But he did not shrink. He advised his owners to join the combination as a business proposition. But his advice was a dead fly fed to the old spider's senile vanity. For Daniel Sands had been able to dictate as a part of his acceptance of the proposition, this one concession: That the Independent mine be kept out of the agreement. Nathan Perry suspected this. But most of his owners were game men, and they decided not even to apply for admission to the organization. They found that the young man's management of the mine was paying well; that the labor problem was working satisfactorily; that the safety devices, while expensive, produced a feeling of good-will among the men that was worth more even in dividends than the interest on the money.

But after he had warned his employers of the wrath to come, Nathan Perry did not spend much time in unavailing regret at their decision. He was, upon the whole, glad they had made it. And having a serious problem in philology to work out--namely, to discover whether Esperanto, Chinese or Dutch is the natural language of man, through study of the conversational tendencies of Daniel Kyle Perry, the young superintendent of the Independent mine gave serious thought to that problem.

Then, of course, there was that other problem that bothered Nathan Perry, and being an engineer with a degree of B. S., it annoyed him to discover that the problem wouldn't come out straight. Briefly and popularly stated, it is this: If you have a boiler capacity of 200 pounds per square inch and love a girl 200 pounds to the square inch, and then the Doctor in his black bag brings one fat, sweaty, wrinkled baby, and you see the girl in a new and sweeter light than ever before, see her in a thousand ways rising above her former stature to a wonderful womanhood beyond even your dreams--how are you going to get more capacity out of that boiler without breaking it, when the load calls for four hundred pounds? Now these problems puzzled the young man, living at that time in his eight-room house with a bath, and he sat up nights to work them. And some times there were two heads at work on the sums, and once in a while three heads, but the third head talked a various language, whose mild and healing sympathy stole the puzzle from the problem and began chewing on it before they were aware. So Nathan put the troubles of the mine on the hook whereon he hung his coat at night, and if he felt uneasy at the trend of the day's events, his uneasiness did not come to him at home. He had heard it whispered about--once by the men and once in a directors' meeting--that the clash with Grant Adams was about to come. If Nathan had any serious wish in relation to the future, it was the ardent hope that the clash would come and come soon.

For the toll of death in the Wahoo Valley was cruel and inexorable. The mines, the factories, the railroads, the smelters, all were death traps, and the maimed, blind and helpless were cast out of the great industrial hopper like chaff. Every little neighborhood had its cripple. From the mines came the blind--whose sight was taken from them by cheap powder; from the railroad yards came the maimed--the handless, armless, legless men who, in their daily tasks had been crushed by inferior car couplings; the smelters sent out their sick, whom the fumes had poisoned, and sometimes there would come out a charred trunk that had gone into the great molten vats a man. The factories took hands and forearms, and sometimes when an accident of unusual horror occurred in the Valley, it would seem like a place of mourning. The burden of all this bloodshed and death was upon the laborers. And more than that,--the burden of the widows and orphans also was upon labor. Capital charged off the broken machinery, the damaged buildings, the worn-out equipment to profit and loss with an easy conscience, while the broken men all over the Valley, the damaged laborers, the worn-out workers, who were thrown to the sc.r.a.p heap in maturity, were charged to labor. And labor paid this bill, chiefly because capital was too greedy to provide safe machinery, or sanitary shops, or adequate tools!

Nathan Perry, first miner, then pit-boss and finally superintendent, and always member of Local Miners' Union No. 10, knew what the men were vaguely beginning to see and think. When some man who had been to court to collect damages for a killed or crippled friend, some man who had heard the Judge talk of the a.s.sumed risk of labor, some man who had heard lawyers split hairs to cheat working men of what common sense and common justice said was theirs, when some such man cried out in hatred and agony against society, Nathan Perry tried to counsel patience, tried to curb the malice. But in his heart Nathan Perry knew that if he had suffered the wrongs that such a man suffered, he too would be full of wrath and cla.s.s hatred.

Sometimes, of course, men rose from the pit. Foremen became managers, managers became superintendents, superintendents became owners, owners became rich, and society replied--"Look, it is easy for a man to rise."

Once at lunch time, sitting in the shaft house, Nathan Perry with his hands in his dinner bucket said something of the kind, when Tom Williams, the little Welsh miner, who was a disciple and friend of Grant Adams, cried:

"Yes--that's true. It is easy for a man to rise. It was easy for a slave to escape from the South--comparatively easy. But is it easy for the cla.s.s to rise? Was it easy for the slaves to be free? That is the problem--the problem of lifting a whole cla.s.s--as your cla.s.s has been lifted, young fellow, in the last century. Why, over in Wales a century ago, a mere tradesman's son like you--was--was n.o.body. The middle cla.s.ses had nothing--that is, nothing much. They have risen. They rule the world now. This century must see the rise of the laboring cla.s.s; not here and there as a man who gets out of our cla.s.s and then sneers at us, and pretends he was with us by accident--but we must rise as a cla.s.s, boy--don't you see?"

And so, working in the mine, with the men, Nathan Perry completed his education. He learned--had it ground into him by the hard master of daily toil--that while bread and b.u.t.ter is an individual problem that no laborer may neglect except at his peril, the larger problems of the conditions under which men labor--their hours of service, their factory surroundings, their shop rights to work, their relation to accidents and to the common diseases peculiar to any trade--those are not individual problems. They are cla.s.s problems and must be solved--in so far as labor can solve them alone, not by individual struggle but by cla.s.s struggle.

So Nathan Perry came up out of the mines a believer in the union, and the closed shop. He felt that those who would make the cla.s.s problem an individual problem, were only r.e.t.a.r.ding the day of settlement, only hindering progress.

Rumor said that the truce in the Wahoo Valley was near an end. Nathan Perry did not shrink from it. But Market Street was uneasy. It seemed to be watching an approaching cyclone. When men knew that the owners were ready to stop the organization of unions, the cloud of unrest seemed to hover over them. But the clouds dissolved in rumor. Then they gathered again, and it was said that Grant Adams was to be gagged, his Sunday meetings abolished or that he was to be banished from the Valley. Again the clouds dissolved. Nothing happened. But the cloud was forever on the horizon, and Market Street was afraid. For Market Street--as a street--was chiefly interested in selling goods. It had, of course, vague yearnings for social justice--yearnings about as distinct as the desire to know if the moon was inhabited. But as a street, Market Street was with Mrs. Herd.i.c.ker--it never talked against the cash drawer. Market Street, the world over, is interested in things as they are. The _statuo quo_ is G.o.d and _laissez faire_ is its profit! So Market Street murmured, and buzzed--and then Market Street also organized to worship the G.o.d of things as they are.

But Mr. Brotherton of the Brotherton Book & Stationery Company held aloof from the Merchants' Protective a.s.sociation. Mr. Brotherton at odd times, at first by way of diversion, and then as a matter of education for his growing business, had been glancing at the contents of his wares. Particularly had he been interested in the magazines. Moreover, he was talking. And because it helped him to sell goods to talk about them, he kept on talking.

About this time he affected flowing negligee bow ties, and let his thin, light hair go fluffy and he wrapped rather casually it seemed, about his elephantine bulk, a variety of loose, baggy garb, which looked like a circus tent. But he was a born salesman--was Mr. Brotherton. He plastered literature over Harvey in carload lots.

One day while Mr. Brotherton was wrapping up "Little Women" and a "Little Colonel" book and "Children of the Abbey" that Dr. Nesbit was buying for Lila Van Dorn, the Doctor piped, "Well, George, they say you're getting to be a regular anarchist--the way you're talking about conditions in the Valley?"

"Not for a minute," answered Mr. Brotherton. "Why, man, all I said was that if the old spider kept making the men use that cheap powder that blows their eyes out and their hands off, and their legs off, they ought to unionize and strike. And if it was my job to handle that powder I'd tie the old devil on a blast and blow him into hamburger." Mr.

Brotherton's rising emotions reddened his forehead under his thin hair, and pulled at his wind. He shook a weary head and leaned on a show case.

"But I say, stand by the boys. Maybe it will make a year of bad times or maybe two; but what of that? It'll make better times in the end."

"All right, George--go in. I glory in your s.p.u.n.k!" chirped the Doctor as he put Lila's package under his arm. "Let me tell you something," he added, "I've got a bill I'm going to push in the next legislature that will knock a hole in that doctrine of the a.s.sumed risk of labor, you can drive a horse through. It makes the owners pay for the accidents of a trade, instead of hiding behind that theory, that a man a.s.sumes those risks when he takes a job."

The Doctor put his head to one side, c.o.c.ked one eye and cried: "How would that go?"