The Conflict Part 35

VII

Impulse was the dominant strain in Selma Gordon's character--impulse and frankness. But she was afraid of Victor Dorn as we all are afraid of those we deeply respect--those whose respect is the mainstay of our self-confidence. She was moving toward him to pour out the violence that was raging in her on the subject of this flirtation of Jane Hastings. The spectacle of a useless and insincere creature like that trifling with her deity, and being permitted to trifle, was more than she could endure. But Victor, dropping listlessly to his chair and reaching for his pencil, was somehow a check upon her impetuousness.

She paused long enough to think the sobering second thought. To speak would be both an impertinence and a folly. She owed it to the cause and to her friend Victor to speak; but to speak at the wrong time and in the wrong way would be worse than silence.

Said he: "I was finishing this when she came. I'll be done in a minute. Please read what I've written and tell me what you think."

Selma took up the loose sheets of ma.n.u.script and stood reading his inaugural of the new New Day. As she read she forgot the petty matter that had so agitated her a moment before. This salutatory--this address to the working cla.s.s--this plan of a campaign to take Remsen City out of the hands of its exploiters and despoilers and make it a city fit for civilized residence and worthy of its population of intelligent, progressive workingmen--this leading editorial for the first number was Victor Dorn at his greatest and best. The man of action with all the enthusiasm of a dreamer. The shrewd, practical politician with the outlook of a statesman. How honest and impa.s.sioned he was; yet how free from folly and cant. Several times as she read Selma lifted her eyes to look at him in generous, worshipful admiration. She would not have dared let him see; she would not have dared speak the phrases of adoration of his genius that crowded to her lips. How he would have laughed at her--he who thought about himself as a personality not at all, but only as an instrument.

"Here's the rest of it," said he, throwing himself back in his chair and relighting his pipe.

She finished a moment later, said as she laid the ma.n.u.script on the table: "That's the best you've ever done."

"I think so," agreed he. "It seems to me I've got a new grip on things. I needed a turn such as your friend Davy Hull gave me.

Nothing like rivalry to spur a man on. The old crowd was so stupid--cunning, but stupid. But Hull injects a new element into the struggle. To beat him we've got to use our best brains."

"We've got to attack him," said Selma. "After all, he is the enemy.

We can't let him disarm us by an act of justice."

"No, indeed," said Victor. "But we'll have to be careful. Here's what I'm going to carry on the first page."

He held up a sheet of paper on which he had written with a view to effective display the names of the four most offensive local corporations with their contribution--$25,000 each--to the campaign fund of the Citizens' Alliance. "Under it, in big type," proceeded he, "we'll carry a line asking, 'Is the Citizens' Alliance fooling these four corporations or is it fooling the people?' I think that will be more effective than columns of attack."

"We ought to get that out on wall-bills and dodgers," suggested Selma, "and deluge the town with it once or twice a week until election."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Victor. "I'll make a practical politician of you yet."

Colman and Harbinger and Jocelyn and several others of the League leaders came in one at a time, and the plan of campaign was developed in detail. But the force they chiefly relied upon was the influence of their twelve hundred men, their four or five thousand women and young men and girls, talking every day and evening, each man or woman or youth with those with whom he came into contact. This "army of education" was disciplined, was educated, knew just what arguments to use, had been cautioned against disputes, against arousing foolish antagonisms. The League had nothing to conceal, no object to gain but the government of Remsen City by and for its citizens--well paved, well lighted, clean streets, sanitary houses, good and clean street car service, honest gas, pure water, plenty of good schools--that first of all. The "reform crowd"--the Citizens' Alliance--like every reform party of the past, proposed to do practically the same things. But the League met this with: "Why should we elect an upper cla.s.s government to do for us what we ought to do for ourselves? And how can they redeem their promises when they are tied up in a hundred ways to the very people who have been robbing and cheating us?"

There were to be issues of the New Day; there were to be posters and dodgers, public meetings in halls, in squares, on street corners. But the main reliance now as always was this educated "army of education"--these six thousand missionaries, each one of them in resolute earnest and bent upon converting his neighbors on either side, and across the street as well. A large part of the time the leaders could spare from making a living was spent in working at this army, in teaching it new arguments or better ways of presenting old arguments, in giving the enthusiasm, in talking with each individual soldier of it and raising his standard of efficiency. Nor could the employers of these soldiers of Victor Dorn's complain that they shirked their work for politics. It was a fact that could not be denied that the members of the Workingmen's League were far and away the best workers in Remsen City, got the best pay, and earned it, drank less, took fewer days off on account of sickness. One of the sneers of the Kelly-House gang was that "those Dorn cranks think they are aristocrats, a little better than us common, ordinary laboring men." And the sneer was not without effect. The truth was, Dorn and his a.s.sociates had not picked out the best of the working cla.s.s and drawn it into the League, but had made those who joined the League better workers, better family men, better citizens.

"We are saying that the working cla.s.s ought to run things," Dorn said again and again in his talks, public and private. "Then, we've got to show the community that we're fit to run things. That is why the League expels any man who shirks or is a drunkard or a crook or a bad husband and father."

The great fight of the League--the fight that was keeping it from power--was with the trades unions, which were run by secret agents of the Kelly-House oligarchy. Kelly and the Republican party rather favored "open shop" or "scab" labor--the right of an American to let his labor to whom he pleased on what terms he pleased. The Kelly orators waxed almost tearful as they contemplated the outrage of any interference with the ancient liberty of the American citizen. Kelly disguised as House was a hot union man. He loathed the "scab." He jeered at the idea that a laborer ought to be at the mercy of the powerful employer who could dictate his own terms, which the laborers might not refuse under stress of hunger. Thus the larger part of the "free" labor in Remsen City voted with Kelly--was bought by him at so much a head. The only organization it had was under the Kelly district captains. Union labor was almost solidly Democratic--except in Presidential elections, when it usually divided on the tariff question.

Although almost all the Leaguers were members of the unions, Kelly and House saw to it that they had no influence in union councils. That is, until recently Kelly-House had been able to accomplish this. But they were seeing the approaching end of their domination. The "army of education" was proving too powerful for them. And they felt that at the coming election the decline of their power would be apparent--unless something drastic were done.

They had attempted it in the riot. The riot had been a fizzle--thanks to the interposition of the personal ambition of the until then despised "holy boy," David Hull. Kelly, the shrewd, at once saw the mark of the man of force. He resolved that Hull should be elected. He had intended simply to use him to elect Hugo Galland judge and to split up the rest of the tickets in such a way that some Leaguers and some reformers would get in, would be powerless, would bring discredit and ridicule upon their parties. But Hull was a man who could be useful; his cleverness in upsetting the plot against Dorn and turning all to his advantage demonstrated that. Therefore, Hull should be elected and pa.s.sed up higher. It did not enter his calculations that Hull might prove refractory, might really be all that he professed; he had talked with Davy, and while he had underestimated his intelligence, he knew he had not misjudged his character. He knew that it was as easy to "deal"

with the Hull stripe of honest, high minded men as it was difficult to "deal" with the Victor Dorn stripe. Hull he called a "sensible fellow"; Victor Dorn he called a crank. But--he respected Dorn, while Hull he held in much such esteem as he held his cigar-holder and pocket knife, or Tony Rivers and Joe House.

When Victor Dorn had first begun to educate and organize the people of Remsen City, the boss industry was in its early form. That is, Kelly and House were really rivals in the collecting of big campaign funds by various forms of blackmail, in struggling for offices for themselves and their followers, in levying upon vice and crime through the police.

In these ways they made the money, the lion's share of which naturally fell to them as leaders, as organizers of plunder. But that stage had now pa.s.sed in Remsen City as it had pa.s.sed elsewhere, and the boss industry had taken a form far more difficult to combat. Kelly and House no longer especially cared whether Republican party or Democratic won. Their business--their source of revenue--had ceased to be through carrying elections, had become a matter of skill in keeping the people more or less evenly divided between the two "regular" parties, with an occasional fake third party to discourage and bring into contempt reform movers and to make the people say, "Well, bad as they are, at least the regulars aren't addle-headed, d.a.m.n fools doing nothing except to make business bad." Both Kelly and House were supported and enriched by the corporations and by big public contracting companies and by real estate deals. Kelly still appropriated a large part of the "campaign fund." House, in addition, took a share of the money raised by the police from dives. But these sums were but a small part of their income, were merely pin money for their wives and children.

Yet--at heart and in all sincerity Kelly was an ardent Republican and House was a ferocious Democrat. If you had asked either what Republican and Democrat meant he would have been as vague and unsatisfactory in his reply as would have been any of his followers bearing torch and oilcloth cape in political processions, with no hope of gain--beyond the exquisite pleasure of making a shouting a.s.s of himself in the most public manner. But for all that, Kelly was a Republican and House a Democrat. It is not a strange, though it is a profoundly mysterious, phenomenon, that of the priest who arranges the trick mechanism of the G.o.d, yet being a devout believer, ready to die for his "faith."

Difficult though the task was of showing the average Remsen City man that Republican and Democrat, Kelly and House, were one and the same thing, and that thing a blood-sucking, blood-heavy leech upon his veins--difficult though this task was, Victor Dorn knew that he had about accomplished it, when David Hull appeared. A new personality; a plausible personality, deceptive because self-deceiving--yet not so thoroughly self-deceived that it was in danger of hindering its own ambition. David Hull--just the kind of respectable, popular figurehead and cloak the desperate Kelly-House conspiracy needed.

How far had the "army of education" prepared the people for seeing through this clever new fraud upon them? Victor Dorn could not judge.

He hoped for the best; he was prepared for the worst.

The better to think out the various problems of the new situation, complicated by his apparent debt of grat.i.tude to Davy, Victor went forth into the woods very early the next morning. He wandered far, but ten o'clock found him walking in the path in the strip of woods near the high road along the upper side of the park. And when Jane Hastings appeared, he was standing looking in the direction from which she would have to come. It was significant of her state of mind that she had given small attention to her dress that morning. Nor was she looking her best in expression or in color. Her eyes and her skin suggested an almost sleepless night.

He did not advance. She came rapidly as if eager to get over that embarra.s.sing s.p.a.ce in which each could see the other, yet neither could speak without raising the voice. When she was near she said:

"You think you owe something to Davy Hull for what he did?"

"The people think so," said he. "And that's the important thing."

"Well--you owe him nothing," pursued she.

"Nothing that would interfere with the cause," replied he. "And that would be true, no matter what he had done."

"I mean he did nothing for you," she explained. "I forgot to tell you yesterday. The whole thing was simply a move to further his ambition.

I happened to be there when he talked with father and enlisted him."

Victor laughed. "It was your father who put it through. I might have known!"

"At first I tried to interpose. Then--I stopped." She stood before him with eyes down. "It came to me that for my own sake it would be better that you should lose this fall. It seemed to me that if you won you would be farther out of my reach." She paused, went steadily on: "It was a bad feeling I had that you must not get anything except with my help. Do you understand?"

"Perfectly," said he cheerfully. "You are your father's own daughter."

"I love power," said she. "And so do you. Only, being a woman, I'd stoop to things to get it, that a man--at least your sort of man--would scorn. Do you despise me for that? You oughtn't to. And you will teach me better. You can make of me what you please, as I told you yesterday. I only half meant it then. Now--it's true, through and through."

Victor glanced round, saw near at hand the bench he was seeking. "Let's sit down here," said he. "I'm rather tired. I slept little and I've been walking all morning. And you look tired, also."

"After yesterday afternoon I couldn't sleep," said she.

When they were seated he looked at her with an expression that seemed to say: "I have thrown open the windows of my soul. Throw open yours; and let us look at each other as we are, and speak of things as they are." She suddenly flung herself against his breast and as he clasped her she said:

"No--no! Let's not reason coldly about things, Victor. Let's feel--let's LIVE!"

It was several minutes--and not until they had kissed many times--before he regained enough self-control to say: "This simply will not do, Jane. How can we discuss things calmly? You sit there"--he pushed her gently to one end of the bench--"and I'll sit at this end. Now!"

"I love you, Victor! With your arms round me I am happy--and SO strong!"

"With my arms round you I'm happy, I'll admit," said he. "But--oh, so weak! I have the sense that I am doing wrong--that we are both doing wrong."

"Why? Aren't you free?"

"No, I am not free. As I've told you, I belong to a cause--to a career."

"But I won't hinder you there. I'll help you."

"Why go over that again? You know better--I know better." Abruptly, "Your father--what time does he get home for dinner?"

"He didn't go down town to-day," replied Jane. "He's not well--not at all well."

Victor looked baffled. "I was about to propose that we go straight to him."