In the Heart of a Fool Part 64

She started to crowd between the horses, and the policemen thrust her back.

"Karl--Karl," she cried, "you come out of there; what would papa say--and you a scab."

She lifted her arms beseechingly and started toward the youth. A policeman cursed her and felled her with a club.

She lay bleeding on the street, and the strikers stood by and ground their teeth. Laura Van Dorn stooped over the woman, picked her up and helped her to walk home. But as she turned away she saw five men walk out of the ranks of the strike-breakers and join the men on the corner.

A cheer went up, and two more came.

Belgian Hall was filled with workers that night--men and women. In front of the stage at a long table sat the strike committee. Before them sat the delegates from the various "locals" and the leaders of the sevens. A thousand men and women filled the hall--men and women from every quarter of the globe. That night they had decided to admit the Jews from the Magnus paint works--the Jews whom the Russians scorned, and the Lettish people distrusted. Behind all of the delegates in a solid row around the wall stood the police, watching Grant Adams. He did not sit with the strike committee but worked his way through the crowd, talking to a group here and encouraging a man or woman there--but always restless, always fearing trouble. It was nine o'clock when the meeting opened by singing "The International." It was sung in twenty tongues, but the chorus swelled up and men and women wept as they sang.

"Oh, the Brotherhood of men Shall be the human race."

Then the delegates reported. A Greek woman told how she had been chased by men on horseback through the woods, in the Park. A Polack man showed a torn hand that had come under an ax-handle. A Frenchman told how he had been pursued by a horseman while going for medicine for his sick child. A Portuguese told how he had brought from the ranks of the strike-breakers a big fellow worker whom he knew in New Jersey. The Germans reported that every one of their men in the Valley was out and working in his garden. Over and over young girls told of insults they had received. A mania of brutality seemed to have spread through the officers of the law. A Scotch miner's daughter showed a tear in her dress made by a soldier's bayonet--

"'In fun,' he said, but I could see na joke."

In all the speeches there was a spirit of camaraderie--of fellowship, of love. "We are one blood now," a Danish miner cried, in broken English, "we are all Americans, and America will be a brotherhood--a brotherhood in the Democracy of Labor, under the Prince of Peace." A great shout arose and the crowd called:

"Grant--Grant--Brother Grant."

But he stood by the table and shook his head. After a girl picket and a woman--one a Welsh girl, the other a Manx miner's mother--had told how they were set upon in the Park by the soldiers, up rose a pale, trembling woman from among the Hungarians, her brown, blotched face and her big body made the men look down or away. She spoke in broken, uncertain English.

"We haf send to picket our men and yet our boys, and they beat them down. We haf our girls send, and they come home crying. But I say to G.o.d this evening--Oh, is there nothing for me--for me carrying child, and He whisper yais--these soldiers, he haf wife, he haf mother." She paused and shook with fear and shame. "Then I say to you--call home your man--your girl so young, and we go--we women with child--we with big bellies, filled with unborn--we go--O, my G.o.d, He say we go, and this soldier--he haf wife, he haf mother--he will see;--we--we--they will not strike us down. Send us, oh, Grant, Prince of Peace, to the picket line next morning."

Her voice broke and she sat down covering her head with her skirt and weeping in excitement.

"Let me go," cried a clear voice, as a brown-eyed Welsh woman rose. "I know ten others that will go."

"I also," cried a German woman. "Let us organize to-night. We can have two hundred child-bearing women!"

"Yes, men," spoke up a trim-looking young wife from among the gla.s.sworkers, "we of old have been sacred--let us see if capital holds us sacred now--before property."

Grant leaned over to Laura and asked, "Would it do? Wouldn't they shame us for it?"

The eyes of Laura Van Dorn were filled with tears. They were streaming down her face.

"Oh, yes," she cried, "no deeper symbol of peace is in the earth than the child-bearing woman. Let her go."

Grant Adams rose and addressed the chair: "Mr. Chairman--I move that all men and all women except those chosen by these who have just spoken, be asked to keep out of the Park to-morrow morning, that all the world may know how sacred we hold this cause and with what weapons of peace we would win it."

So it was ordered, and the crowd sang the International Hymn again, and then the Ma.r.s.eillaise, and went home dreaming high dreams.

As Grant and Laura walked from the hall, the last to leave the meeting, after the women had finished making out their list of pickets, the streets were empty and they met--or rather failed to meet, Mrs. d.i.c.k Bowman, with Mugs in tow, who crossed the street obviously to avoid Grant and his companion.

Grant and Laura, walking briskly along and planning the next day's work, pa.s.sed the smelters where the soldiers were on sentry duty. They pa.s.sed the shaft houses where Harvey militiamen were bunked and guarded by sentinels. They pa.s.sed the habiliments of war in a score of peaceful places.

"Grant," cried Laura, "I really think now we'll win--that the strike of peace will prove all that you have lived for."

"But if we fail," he replied, "it proves nothing--except perhaps that it was worth trying, and will be worth trying and trying and trying--until it wins!"

It was half past twelve. Grant Adams, standing before the Vanderbilt House, talking with Henry Fenn, was saying, "Well, Henry, one week of this--one week of peace--and the triumph of peace will be--"

A terrific explosion shut his mouth. Across the night he saw a red glare a few hundred feet away. An instant later it was dark again. He ran toward the place where the glare had winked out. As he turned a corner, he saw stars where there should have been shaft house No. 7 of the Wahoo Fuel Company's mines, and he knew that it had been destroyed. In it were a dozen sleeping soldiers of the Harvey Militia Company, and it flashed through his mind that Lida Bowman at last had spoken.

CHAPTER XLVII

IN WHICH GRANT ADAMS AND LAURA VAN DORN TAKE A WALK DOWN MARKET STREET AND MRS. NESBIT ACQUIRES A LONG LOST GRANDSON-IN-LAW

Grant Adams and Henry Fenn were among the first to arrive at the scene of the explosion. Henry Fenn had tried to stop Grant from going so quickly, thinking his presence at the scene would raise a question of his guilt, but he cried:

"They may need me, Henry--come on--what's a quibble of guilt when a life's to save?"

When they came to the pile of debris, they saw d.i.c.k Bowman coming up--barefooted, coatless and breathless. Grant and Fenn had run less than fifteen hundred feet--d.i.c.k lived a mile from the shaft house. Grant Adams's mind flashed suspicion toward the Bowmans. He went to d.i.c.k across the wreckage and said:

"Oh, d.i.c.k--I'm sorry you didn't get here sooner."

"So am I--so am I," cried d.i.c.k, craning his long neck nervously.

"Where is Mugs?" asked Grant, as the two worked with a beam over a body--the body of handsome Fred Kollander--lying near the edge of the litter.

"He's home in bed and asleep--and so's his mother, too, Grant, sound asleep."

During the first minutes after the explosion, men near by like Grant and Fenn came running to the scene of the wrecked shaft by the scores, and as Grant and d.i.c.k Bowman spoke the streets grew black with men, workmen, policemen, soldiers, citizens, men by the hundreds came hurrying up. The great siren whistles of the water and light plants began to bellow; fire bells and church bells up in Harvey began to ring, and Grant knew that the telephone was alarming the town. Ten minutes after the explosion, while Grant was ordering his men in the crowd to organize for the rescue, a militia colonel appeared, threw a cordon of men about the ruins and the police and soldiers took charge, forcing Grant and his men away. The first few moments after he had been thrust out of the relief work, Grant spent sending his men in the crowd to summon the members of the Council; then he turned and hurried to his office in the Vanderbilt House. For an hour he wrote. Henry Fenn came, and later Laura Van Dorn appeared, but he waved them both to silence, and without telling them what he had written he went with them to the hall where the Valley Council was waiting in a turmoil of excitement. It was after two o'clock. South Harvey was a military camp. Thousands of citizens from Harvey were hurrying about. As he pa.s.sed along the street, the electric lights showed him little groups about some grief-stricken parent or brother or sister of a missing militiaman. Automobiles were roaring through the streets carrying officers, policemen, prominent citizens of Harvey. Ahab Wright and Joe Calvin and Kyle Perry were in a car with John Kollander who had come down to South Harvey to claim the body of his son, Fred. Grant saw the Sands's car with Morty in it supporting a stricken soldier. The car was halted at the corner by the press of traffic, and as Grant and Laura and Henry pa.s.sed, Morty said under the din: "Grant--Grant, be careful--they are turning Heaven and earth to find your hand in this; it will be only a matter of days--maybe only hours, until they will have their witnesses hired!"

Grant nodded. The car moved on and Grant and his friends pressed through the throng to the hall where the Valley Council was waiting. There Grant stood and read what he had written. It ran thus:

"For the death by dynamite of the militiamen who perished at midnight in shaft No. 7 of the Wahoo Fuel Company's mines, I take full responsibility. I have a.s.sumed a leadership in a strike which caused these deaths. I shirk no whit of my share in this outrage. Yet I preached only peace. I pleaded for orderly conduct. I appealed to the workers to take their own not by force of arms but by the tremendous force of moral right. That ten thousand workers respected this appeal, I am exceedingly proud. That one out of all the ten thousand was not convinced of the justice of our cause and the ultimate triumph by the force of righteousness I am sorry beyond words. I call upon my comrades to witness what a blow to our cause this murder has been and to stand firm in the faith that the strike must win by ways of peace.

"Yet, whoever did this deed was not entirely to blame--however it may cripple his fellow-workers. A child mangled in the mines denied his legal damages; men clubbed for telling of their wrongs to their fellow-laborers who were asked to fill their places; women on the picket line, herded like deer through the park by Cossacks whipping the fleeing creatures mercilessly; these things inflamed the mind of the man who set off the bomb; these things had their share in the murder.

"But I knew what strikes were. I know indeed what strikes still are and what this strike may be. I sorrow with those families whose boys perished by the bomb in shaft house No. 7. I grieve with the families of those who have been beaten and broken in this strike. But by all this innocent blood--blood shed by the working people--blood shed by those who ignorantly misunderstand us, I now beg you, my comrades, to stand firm in this strike. Let not this blood be shed in vain. It may be indeed that the men of the master cla.s.s here have not descended as deeply as we may expect them to descend. They may feel that more blood must be spilled before they let us come into our own. But if blood is shed again, we must bleed, but let it not be upon our hands.

"Again, even in this breakdown of our high hopes for a strike without violence, I lift my voice in faith, I hail the coming victory, I proclaim that the day of the Democracy of Labor is at hand, and it shall come in peace and good will to all."

When he had finished reading his statement, he sat down and the Valley Council began to discuss it. Many objected to it; others wished to have it modified; still others agreed that it should be published as he had read it. In the end, he had his way. But in the hubbub of the discussion, Laura Van Dorn, sitting near him, asked:

"Grant, why do you take all this on your shoulders? It is not fair, and it is not true--for that matter."

He answered finally: "Well, that's what I propose to do."

He was haggard and careworn and he stared at the woman beside him with determination in his eyes. But she would not give up. Again she insisted: "The people are inflamed--terribly inflamed and in the morning they will be in no mood for this. It may put you in jail--put you where you are powerless."

He turned upon her the stubborn, emotional face that she rarely had seen but had always dreaded. He answered her:

"If anything were to be gained for the comrades by waiting--I'd wait."