The Air Trust Part 32

Thus pondered Gabriel, in the gloom of his harsh cell, branded with crime and writhing in the agony of soul that only those who love hopelessly can ever know.

And Catherine, what of her? What were her thoughts, emotions, inspirations as--seeming to live in a dream, with Gabriel's eloquence and the new vision of a better, saner, kindlier world shining through her soul--she made her way back to the dingy hotel where now, shabby as it was, she felt she had no right to stay, while others, homeless, walked the brutal streets?

Who shall know them? Who shall tell? A blind man, suddenly made to see, can find no words to express the wonder and bright glory of that sudden sight. A deaf man, regaining his lost sense, cannot describe the sudden burst of sound that fills the new, strange world wherein he finds himself. So, now, this cultured, gently bred woman, for the first time in her life understanding the facts, glimpsing the tragedy and grasping the answer to it all, felt that no words could compa.s.s her strange exultation and enlargement.

"It--it's like a chrysalis emerging into the form of a light, swift b.u.t.terfly!" she pondered, as, back in her room once more, she prepared to write two letters. "Just for the present, I can't understand it all.

I don't know, yet, whether I'm worthy to be a Socialist, to be one of that company of earnest, n.o.ble men and women striving for life and liberty and joy for all the world. But with the help of the man I trust and honor and believe in, and--and love--perhaps I may yet be. G.o.d grant it may be so!"

She thought, a few minutes more, her face lighted by an inner radiance that made its beauty spiritual and pure and calm. Then, having somewhat composed her thoughts, she wrote this letter to Maxim Waldron:

My Dear Wally:

I am writing you without date or place, just as I shall write my father, because whatever happens, I insist that you two let me go my way in peace, without trying to find, or hamper, or importune me. My mind is fully made up. Nothing can change it. We have come to the parting of the ways, forever.

Though I may feel bitterly toward you for what I now understand as your harsh and cruel att.i.tude toward the world, and the role you play as an exploiter of human labor, I shall not reproach you. You simply cannot see these things as I have come to see them since my feet have been set upon the road toward Socialism. Don't start, Wally--that's the truth. Perhaps I'm not much of a Socialist yet, because I don't know much about it. But I am learning, and shall learn. My teacher is the best one in the world, I'm sure; and added to this, all my natural energy and innate radicalism have flamed into activity with this new thought. So, you see, the past is even more effectively buried than ever. How could anything ever be possible, now, between you and me?

Cease to think of me, Wally. I am gone out of your life, for all time, as out of that whole circle of false, insincere, wicked and parasitic existence that we call "society." That other world, where you still are, shall see me no more. I have found a better and a n.o.bler kind of life; and to this, and to all it implies, I mean to be forever faithful. I beg you, never try to find me or to answer this.

Good-bye, then, forever.

Catherine.

After having read this over and sealed it, she wrote still another:

Dear Father:

It is hard to write these words to you. I owe you a debt of grat.i.tude and love, in many ways; yet, after all, your will and mine conflict. You have tried to force me to a union abhorrent and impossible to me. My only course is this--independence to think, and act, and live as I, no longer a child but a grown woman, now see fit.

I shall never return to you, father. Life means one thing to you, another to me. You cannot change; I would not, now, for all the world. I must go my way, thinking my own thoughts, doing my own work, living up to my own ideals, whatever these may be. Your money cannot lure me back to you, back to that old, false, sheltered, horrible life of ease and idleness and veiled robbery! The skill you have given me as a musician will open out a way for me to earn my own living and be free. For this I thank you, and for much else, even as I say good-bye to you for all time.

I have written Wally. He will tell you more about me, and about the change in my views and ambitions, which has taken place. Do not think harshly of me, father, and I will try to forgive you for the burden I now know you have laid upon the aching shoulders of this sad, old world.

And now, good-bye. Though you have lost a daughter, you may still rejoice to know that that daughter has found peace and joy and vast outlets for the energies of her whole heart and soul and being, in working for Socialism, the n.o.blest ideal ever conceived by the mind of man.

Farewell, father; and think sometimes, not too unkindly, of

Your

Kate.

One week after these letters were mailed, "Tiger" Waldron, fanning the fires of the old man's terrible rage, had decided Flint to disinherit Catherine and to name him, Waldron, as his executor. Gabriel's fervent wish that she might be penniless, was granted.

On the very day this business was put through, practically delivering the Flint interests into Waldron's hands in the case of the old man's death, a verdict was reached in Gabriel's case, at Rochester.

This case, crammed through the calendar, ahead of a large jam of other business, proved how well unlimited funds can grease the wheels of Law.

It proved, also, that in the face of infinitely-subsidized witnesses, lawyers, judge and jurymen, black becomes white, and a good deed is written down a crime.

Catherine, working incognito, co-operated with the Socialist defense, and did all that could be humanely done to have the truth made known, to overset the ma.s.s of perjury and fraud enmeshing Gabriel, and to force his acquittal.

As easily might she have bidden the sea rise from its bed and flood the dry and arid wastes of old Sahara. Her voice and that of the Socialists, their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain. A solid battery of capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other means--particularly including the majority of the priests and clergy--swamped the man and d.a.m.ned him and doomed him from the first word of the trial.

Money flowed in floods. Perjury overran the banks of the River of Corruption. Herzog branded the man a thief and fire-eater. Dope-fiends and harlots from the Red-Light district, "madames" and pimps and hangers-on, swore to the white-slave activities of this man, who never yet in all his four and twenty years had so much as entered a brothel.

Forged papers fixed past crimes and sentences on him. By innuendo and direct statement, dynamitings, arsons, violence and rioting in many strikes were laid at his door. His Socialist activities were dragged in the slime of every gutter; and his Party made to suffer for evil deeds existing only in the foul imagination of the prosecuting attorneys. The finest "kept" brains in the legal profession conducted the case from start to finish; and not a juryman was drawn on the panel who was not, from the first, sworn to convict, and bought and paid for in hard cash.

After three days--days in which Gabriel plumbed the bitterest depths of h.e.l.l and drank full draughts of gall and wormwood--the verdict came.

Came, and was flashed from sea to sea by an exulting press; and preached on, and editorialized on, and gloated over by Flint and Waldron and many, many others of that ilk--while Catherine wept tears that seemed to drain her very heart of its last drops of blood.

At last she knew the meaning of the Cla.s.s Struggle and her terrible father's part in it all. At last she understood what Gabriel had so long understood and now was paying for--the fact that h.e.l.l hath no fury like Capitalism when endangered or opposed.

The Price! Gabriel now must pay it, to the full. For that foul verdict, bought with gold wrung from the very blood and marrow of countless toilers, opened the way to the sentence which Judge Harpies regretted only that he could not make more severe--the sentence which the detectives and the prison authorities, well "fixed," counted on making a death-sentence, too.

"Gabriel Armstrong, stand up!"

He arose and faced the court. A deathlike stillness hushed the room, crowded with Socialists, reporters, emissaries of Flint, private detectives and hangers-on of the System. Heavily veiled, lest some of her father's people recognize her, Catherine herself sat in a back seat, very pale yet calm.

"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say, why sentence should not be p.r.o.nounced upon you?"

Gabriel, also a little pale, but with a steadfast and fearless gaze, looked at the legal prost.i.tute upon the bench, and shook his head in negation. He deigned not, even, to answer this kept puppet of the ruling cla.s.s.

Judge Harpies frowned a trifle, cleared his throat, glanced about him with pompous dignity; and then, in a sonorous and impressive tone--his best a.s.set on the bench, for legal knowledge and probity were not his--announced:

"_It is the judgment of this court that you do stand committed to pay a fine of three thousand dollars into the treasury of the United States, and to serve five years at hard labor in the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta!_"

CHAPTER XXVII.

BACK IN THE SUNLIGHT.

Four years and two months from the day when this iniquitous verdict fell from the lips of the "bought and paid for" judge, a st.u.r.dily built and square jawed man stood on the steps of the Atlanta Penitentiary and, for the first time in all these weary months and years, faced the sun.

Pale with the prison-pallor that never fails to set its seal on the victims of a diseased society, which that society retaliates upon by shutting away from G.o.d's own light and air, this man stood there on the steps, a moment, then advanced to meet a woman who was coming toward him in the August glare. As he removed his cheap, convict-made cap, one saw his finely shaped head, close cropped with the infamous prison badge of servitude. Despite the shoddy miserable prison-suit that the prost.i.tuted government had given him--a suit that would have made Apollo grotesque and would have marked any man as an ex-convict, thus heavily handicapping him from the start--Gabriel Armstrong's poise and strength still made themselves manifest.

And the smile as they two, the woman and he, came together and their hands clasped, lighted his pale features with a ray brighter than that of the blistering Southern sunshine flooding down upon them both.

"I knew you'd come, Catherine," said he, simply, his voice still the same deep, vibrant, earnest voice which, all that time ago, had thrilled and inspired her at the hour of her great conversion. Still were his eyes clear, level and commanding; and through his splendid body, despite all his jailers had been able to do, coursed an abundant life and strong vitality.

Gabriel had served his time with consummate skill, courage and intelligence. Like all wise men, he had recognized _force majeure_, and had submitted. He had made practically no infractions of the prison rules, during his whole "bit." He had been quiet, obedient and industrious. His work, in the brush factory, had always been well done; and though he had consistently refused to bear tales, to spy, to inform or be a stool-pigeon--the quickest means of winning favor in any prison--yet he had given no opportunity for savagery and violence to be applied to him. Not even Flint's eager wish to have his jailers force him into rebellion had succeeded. Realizing to the full the sort of tactics that would be used to break, and if possible to kill him, Gabriel had met them all with calm self-reliance and with a generalship that showed his brain and nerves were still unshaken. On their own ground he had met these brutes, and he had beaten them at their own game.

Their attempt to make a "dope" out of him had ignominiously failed. He had detected the morphine they had cleverly mixed with his water; and, after his drowsiness and weird dreams had convinced him of the plot, had turned the trick on it by secretly emptying this water out and by drinking only while in the shop, where he could draw water from the faucet. The cell guards' intelligence had been too limited to make them inquire of the brush shop guards about his habits. Also, Gabriel, had feigned stupefaction while in the cell. Thus he had simulated the effects of the drug, and had really thrown his tormentors off the track.

For months and months they were convinced that they were weakening his will and destroying his mentality, while as a matter of fact his reasoning powers and determination never had been more keen.

By bathing as often as possible, by taking regular and carefully planned calisthenics, by reading the best books in the prison library, by attention to every rule of health within his means, and by allowing himself no vices, not even his pipe, Gabriel now was emerging from the Bastile of Capitalism in a condition of mind and body so little impaired that he knew a few weeks would entirely restore him. The good conduct allowance, or "copper," which they had been forced to allow him for exemplary conduct, had cut ten months off his sentence. And now in mid-August of 1925, there he stood, a free man again, with purpose still unshaken and with a woman by his side who shared his high ambition and asked no better lot than to work with him toward the one great aim--Socialism!

Now, as these two walked side by side along the sunbaked street of the sweltering Southern town, Gabriel was saying: