The Friendly Road Part 21

"I seen the big hand in the sky," he said, "I seen it as clear as daylight."

He said he saw at last what Socialism meant. One day he went home from a strikers' meeting--one of the last, for the men were worn out with their long struggle. It was a bitter cold day, and he was completely discouraged. When he reached his own street he saw a pile of household goods on the sidewalk in front of his home. He saw his wife there wringing her hands and crying. He said he could not take a step further, but sat down on a neighbour's porch and looked and looked. "It was curious," he said, "but the only thing I could see or think about was our old family clock which they had stuck on top of the pile, half tipped over. It looked odd and I wanted to set it up straight. It was the clock we bought when we were married, and we'd had it about twenty years on the mantel in the livin'-room. It was a good clock," he said.

He paused and then smiled a little.

"I never have figured it out why I should have been able to think of nothing but that clock," he said, "but so it was."

When he got home, he found his frail daughter just coming out of the empty house, "coughing as though she was dyin'." Something, he said, seemed to stop inside him. Those were his words: "Something seemed to stop inside 'o me."

He turned away without saying a word, walked back to strike headquarters, borrowed a revolver from a friend, and started out along the main road which led into the better part of the town.

"Did you ever hear o' Robert Winter?" he asked.

"No," said I.

"Well, Robert Winter was the biggest gun of 'em all. He owned the mills there and the largest store and the newspaper--he pretty nearly owned the town."

He told me much more about Robert Winter which betrayed still a curious sort of feudal admiration for him, and for his great place and power; but I need not dwell on it here. He told me how he climbed through a hemlock hedge (for the stone gateway was guarded) and walked through the snow toward the great house.

"An' all the time I seemed to be seein' my daughter Margy right there before my eyes coughing as though she was dyin'."

It was just nightfall and all the windows were alight. He crept up to a clump of bushes under a window and waited there a moment while he drew out and c.o.c.ked his revolver. Then he slowly reached upward until his head cleared the sill and he could look into the room. "A big, warm room," he described it.

"Comrade," said he, "I had murder in my heart that night."

So he stood there looking in with the revolver ready c.o.c.ked in his hand.

"And what do you think I seen there?" he asked.

"I cannot guess," I said.

"Well," said Bill Hahn, "I seen the great Robert Winter that we had been fighting for five long months--and he was down on his hands and knees on the carpet--he had his little daughter on his back--and he was creepin'

about with her--an' she was laughin'."

Bill Hahn paused.

"I had a bead on him," he said, "but I couldn't do it--I just couldn't do it."

He came away all weak and trembling and cold, and, "Comrade," he said, "I was cryin' like a baby, and didn't know why."

The next day the strike collapsed and there was the familiar stampede for work--but Bill Hahn did not go back. He knew it would be useless. A week later his frail daughter died and was buried in the paupers field.

"She was as truly killed," he said, "as though some one had fired a bullet at her through a window."

"And what did you do after that?" I asked, when he had paused for a long time with his chin on his breast.

"Well," said he, "I did a lot of thinking them days, and I says to myself: 'This thing is wrong, and I will go out and stop it--I will go out and stop it.'"

As he uttered these words, I looked at him curiously--his absurd flat fur hat with the moth-eaten ears, the old bulging overcoat, the round spectacles, the scarred, insignificant face--he seemed somehow transformed, a person elevated above himself, the tool of some vast incalculable force.

I shall never forget the phrase he used to describe his own feelings when he had reached this astonishing decision to go out and stop the wrongs of the World. He said he "began to feel all clean inside."

"I see it didn't matter what become o' me, and I began to feel all clean inside."

It seemed, he explained, as though something big and strong had got hold of him, and he began to be happy.

"Since then," he said in a low voice, "I've been happier than I ever was before in all my life. I ain't got any family, nor any home--rightly speakin'--nor any money, but, comrade, you see here in front of you, a happy man."

When he had finished his story we sat quiet for some time.

"Well," said he, finally, "I must be goin'. The committee will wonder what's become o' me."

I followed him out to the road. There I put my hand on his shoulder, and said:

"Bill Hahn, you are a better man than I am."

He smiled, a beautiful smile, and we walked off together down the road.

I wish I had gone on with him at that time into the city, but somehow I could not do it. I stopped near the top of the hill where one can see in the distance that smoky huddle of buildings which is known as Kilburn, and though he urged me, I turned aside and sat down in the edge of a meadow. There were many things I wanted to think about, to get clear in my mind.

As I sat looking out toward that great city, I saw three men walking in the white road. As I watched them, I could see them coming quickly, eagerly. Presently they threw up their hands and evidently began to shout, though I could not hear what they said. At that moment I saw my friend Bill Hahn running in the road, his coat skirts flapping heavily about his legs. When they met they almost fell into another's arms.

I suppose it was so that the early Christians, those who hid in the Roman catacombs, were wont to greet one another.

So I sat thinking.

"A man," I said to myself, "who can regard himself as a function, not an end of creation, has arrived."

After a time I got up and walked down the hill--some strange force carrying me onward--and came thus to the city of Kilburn.

CHAPTER X. I AM CAUGHT UP INTO LIFE

I can scarcely convey in written words the whirling emotions I felt when I entered the city of Kilburn. Every sight, every sound, recalled vividly and painfully the unhappy years I had once spent in another and greater city. Every mingled odour of the streets--and there is nothing that will so surely re-create (for me) the inner emotion of a time or place as a remembered odour--brought back to me the incidents of that immemorial existence.

For a time, I confess it frankly here, I felt afraid. More than once I stopped short in the street where I was walking, and considered turning about and making again for the open country. Some there may be who will feel that I am exaggerating my sensations and impressions, but they do not know of my memories of a former life, nor of how, many years ago, I left the city quite defeated, glad indeed that I was escaping, and thinking (as I have related elsewhere) that I should never again set foot upon a paved street. These things went deep with me. Only the other day, when a friend asked me how old I was, I responded instantly--our unpremeditated words are usually truest--with the date of my arrival at this farm.

"Then you are only ten years old!" he exclaimed with a laugh, thinking I was joking.

"Well," I said, "I am counting only the years worth living."

No; I existed, but I never really lived until I was reborn, that wonderful summer here among these hills.

I said I felt afraid in the streets of Kilburn, but it was no physical fear. Who could be safer in a city than the man who has not a penny in his pockets? It was rather a strange, deep, spiritual shrinking. There seemed something so irresistible about this life of the city, so utterly overpowering. I had a sense of being smaller than I had previously felt myself, that in some way my personality, all that was strong or interesting or original about me, was being smudged over, rubbed out.

In the country I had in some measure come to command life, but here, it seemed to me, life was commanding me and crushing me down. It is a difficult thing to describe: I never felt just that way before.

I stopped at last on the main street of Kilburn in the very heart of the town. I stopped because it seemed necessary to me, like a man in a flood, to touch bottom, to get hold upon something immovable and stable.