The Walking Delegate Part 15

But Mrs. Petersen was upon him instantly. "Brother! Brother!" She seized his hands again in both hers, and looked at him with glowing eyes.

"Brother, may G.o.d bless you!"

Tom blinked his eyes again. "Good-night," he said.

Petersen stepped forward and without a word took Tom's arm. The grasp was lighter than when they had come up. Again Tom was glad of the guidance of that hand as they felt their way down the shivering stairs, and out through the tunnel.

"Good-night," he said once more, when they had gained the street.

Petersen gripped his hand in awkward silence.

Chapter IX

RUTH ARNOLD

Ruth Arnold was known among her friends as a queer girl. Neither the new ones in New York nor the old ones of her birth town understood her "strange impulses." They were constantly being shocked by ideas and actions which they considered, to phrase it mildly, very unusual. The friends in her old home were horrified when she decided to become a stenographer. Friends in both places were horrified when, a little less than a year before, it became known she was going to leave the home of her aunt to become Mr. Driscoll's secretary. "What a fool!" they cried.

"If she had stayed she might have married ever so well!" Mrs. Baxter had entreated, and with considerable elaboration had delivered practically these same opinions. But Ruth was obstinate in her queerness, and had left.

However, only a few weeks before, Mrs. Baxter had had a partial recompense for Ruth's disappointing conduct. She had noted the growing intimacy between Mr. Berman, who was frequently at her house, and Ruth, and by delicate questioning had drawn the calm statement from her niece that Mr. Berman had asked her in marriage.

"Of course you said 'yes,'" said Mrs. Baxter.

Ruth had not.

"My child! Why not?"

"I don't love him."

"What of that?" demanded her aunt, who loved her husband. "Love will come. He is educated, a thorough gentleman, and has money. What more do you want in a husband? And your uncle says he is very clever in business."

Thus brought to bay, Ruth had taken her aunt into the secret that her refusal had not been final and that Mr. Berman had given her six months in which to make up her mind. This statement was Mrs. Baxter's partial recompense. "Then you'll marry him, Ruth!" she declared, and kissed her lightly.

Ruth understood herself no better than did her friends. She was not conscious that she had in a measure that rare endowment--the clear vision which perceives the things of life in their true relation and at their true value, plus the instinct to act upon that vision. It was the manifestations of this instinct that made her friends call her queer.

Her instinct, however, did not hold her in sole sway. Her training had fastened many governing conventions upon her, and she was not always as brave as her inward promptings. Her actions made upon impulse were usually in accord with this instinct. Her actions that were the result of thought were frequently in accord with convention.

It was her instinct that had impelled her to ask Tom to call. It was convention that, on Sunday afternoon, made her await his coming with trepidation. She was genuinely interested in the things for which Tom stood, and her recent-born admiration of him was sincere. Nevertheless his approaching visit was in the nature of an adventure to her. This workingman, transferred from the business world to the social world, might prove himself an embarra.s.sing impossibility. Especially, she wondered, with more than a little apprehension, how he would be dressed.

She feared a flaming necktie crawling up his collar, and perhaps in it a showy pin; or a pair of fancy shoes; or a vest of a.s.sertive pattern; or, perhaps, hair oil!

When word was brought her by a maid that Tom was below, she gave an order that he was to wait, and put on her hat and jacket. She did not know him well enough to ask him to her room. She could not receive him in the parlor common to all the boarding-house. Her instinctive self told her it would be an embarra.s.sment to him to be set amid the gossiping crowd that gathered there on Sunday afternoon. Her conventional self told her that, if he were but a tenth as bad as was possible, it would be more than an embarra.s.sment for her to sit beside him amid those curious eyes. The street was the best road out of the dilemma.

He was sitting in the high-backed hall chair when she came down. "Shall we not take a walk?" she asked. "The day is beautiful for February."

Tom acceded gratefully. He had glanced through the parted portieres into the parlor, and his minutes of waiting had been minutes of consternation.

The first thing Ruth noted when they came out into the light of the street was that his clothes were all in modest taste, and she thrilled with relief. Mixed with this there was another feeling, a glow of pleasure that he was vindicating himself to her conventional part.

Ruth lived but a few doors from Central Park. As they started across Central Park West a big red automobile, speeding above the legal rate, came sweeping down upon them, tooting its arrogant warning. Tom jerked Ruth back upon the sidewalk. She glared at the bundled-up occupants of the scurrying car.

"Don't it make you feel like an anarchist when people do that?" she gasped.

"Not the bomb-throwing sort."

"Why not? When people do that, I've got just one desire, and that's to throw a bomb!"

"What good would a bomb here or there do? Or what harm?" Tom asked humorously. "What's the use trying to destroy people that're already doomed?"

Ruth was silent till they gained the other side of the street. "Doomed?

What do you mean?" she then asked.

"Every dog has his day, you know. Them rich people are having theirs.

It's a summer day, and I guess it's just about noon now. But it's pa.s.sing."

Ruth had learned during her conversation with him on the previous Tuesday that a large figurative statement such as this was likely to have a great many ideas behind it, so she now proceeded to lead him to the ideas' expression. The sun, drawing good-humoredly from his summer's store, had brought thousands to the Park walks, and with genial presumption had unb.u.t.toned their overcoats. The bare gray branches of bush and tree glinted dully in the warm light, as if dreamfully smiling over the budding days not far ahead. But Tom had attention for the joy of neither the sun nor his dependents. He thought only of what he was saying, for he had been led to speech upon one of his dearest subjects.

Though he had left school at thirteen to begin work, he had attended night school for a number of years, had belonged to a club whose chief aim was debating, had read a number of solid books and had done a great deal of thinking for himself. As a result of his reading, thinking and observation he had come into some large ideas concerning the future of the working cla.s.s. In the past, he now said to Ruth, cla.s.ses had risen to power, served their purpose, and been displaced by new cla.s.ses stimulated by new ideas. The capitalist cla.s.s was now in power, and was performing its mission--the development and centralization of industries. But its decline would be even more rapid than its rise. It would be succeeded by the working cla.s.s. The working cla.s.s was vast in numbers, and was filled with surging energy. Its future domination was certain.

"And you believe this?" Ruth queried when he came to a pause.

"I know it."

"Admitting that all these things are coming about--which I don't--don't you honestly think it would be disastrous to the general interest for the workingman to come into power?"

"You mean we would legislate solely in our own interests? What if we did? Hasn't every cla.s.s that ever came into power done that? Anyhow, since we make up nine-tenths of the people we'd certainly be legislating in the interests of the majority--which can't always be said now. And as for our ability to run things, I'd rather have an honest fool than a grafter that knows it all. But if you mean we're a pretty rough lot, and haven't much education, I guess you're about right. How can we help it?

We've never had a chance to be anything else. But think what the working cla.s.s was a hundred years ago! Haven't we come up? Thousands of miles!

That's because we've been getting more and more chances, like chances for an education, that used to belong only to the rich. And our chances are increasing. Another hundred years and we won't know ourselves. We'll be fit for anything!"

"I see you're very much of a dreamer."

"Dreamer? Not at all! If you were to look ahead and say in a hundred years from now it'll be 2000, would you call that a dream?"

"Hardly!" Ruth admitted with a smile.

"Well, what I'm telling you is just as certain as the pa.s.sage of time.

I'm anything but a dreamer. I believe in a present for the working cla.s.s as well as a future. I believe that we, if we work hard, have the right, now, to-day, to a comfortable living, and with enough over to give our children as good an education as the children of the bosses; and with enough to buy a few books, see a little of the world, and to save a little so we'll not have ahead of us the terrible fear that we and our families may starve when we get too old to work. That's the least we ought to have. But we lack an almighty lot of having it, Miss Arnold.

"Take my own trade--and we're a lot better off than most workingmen--we get three seventy-five a day. That wouldn't be so bad if we made it three hundred days a year, but you know we don't average more than six months' work. Less than seven hundred dollars a year. What can a man with a family do in New York on seven hundred dollars a year? Two hundred for rent, three hundred for food, one hundred for clothes.

There's six hundred gone in three lumps. Twenty-five cents a day left for heat, light, education, books, amus.e.m.e.nt, travel, street-car fare,--and to save for your old age!

"And then our trade's dangerous. I think half of our men are killed. If you saw the obituary list that's published monthly of all the branches of our union in the country, you'd think so, too! Every other name--crushed, or something broke and he fell. Only the other day on a steel bridge near Pittsburg a piece of rigging snapped and ten men dropped two hundred feet. They landed on steel beams in a barge anch.o.r.ed below--and were pulp. And after the other names, it's pneumonia or consumption. D'you know what that means? It means exposure at work.

Killed by their work!... Well, that's our work,--and we get seven hundred a year!

"And then our work takes the best part of our lives, and throws us away.

So long as we're strong and active, we can be used. But the day we begin to get a little stiff--if we last that long!--we're out of it. It may be at forty. We've got to learn how to do something else, or just wait for the end. There's our families. And you know how much we've got in the bank!

"Well, that's how it is in our union. Is seven hundred a year enough?--when we risk our lives every day we work?--when we're fit for work only so long as we're young men? We're human beings, Miss Arnold.