Together Part 80

Teddy Bliss looked chagrined. His side had been ruled against.

"They'll be sure to reverse the decision on appeal," he whispered consolatorily to his employer's wife. "An exception has been taken."

That was apparently the opinion of those concerned who were grouped about the judge's desk. There was no consternation, merely a slight movement as if to free muscles cramped by one position, a word or two among counsel.

The great Brinkerhoff still wore that placid look of contemplation, as if he were thinking of the new tulip bulbs he had imported from Holland for his house up the Hudson. He was not aroused even when one of his fellow-counsel asked him a question. He merely removed his gla.s.ses, wiped them reflectively, and nodded to his colleague benignantly. He knew, as the others knew, that the case would be appealed from the verdict of the jury to a higher court, and very likely would turn up ultimately in the highest court of all at Washington, where after the lapse of several years the question at issue would be argued wholly on technicalities, and finally decided according to the psychological peculiarities of the various personalities then composing the court. The residuum of justice thus meted out to his clients--if they were not successful before in maintaining their contention--would not affect these honorable gentlemen appreciably. The corporation would pay the legal expenses of the protracted litigation, and hand the bill on to the public ultimately, and the people by their taxes would pay their share of this row.... He put on his gla.s.ses and resumed his meditation.

"Court is adjourned." At last! Isabelle stood up eagerly, anxious to catch her husband's attention. He was talking with the lawyers. The young clerk went up to him and touched his elbow, and presently Lane came down the room in the stream of reporters and lawyers bent on getting to luncheon. It was neither the place nor the time that Isabelle would have preferred for meeting her husband after their long separation. There was so much in her heart,--this meeting meant so much, must be so much for them both in all the future years. The familiar solid figure, with the reserved, impa.s.sive face came nearer; Lane reached out his hand. There were lines about the mouth, and his hair seemed markedly gray.

"John!" was all she could say.

"Glad to see you, Isabelle!" he replied. "Sorry I couldn't meet you at the station. Everything all right?"

It was his usual kindly, rather short-hand manner with her.

"Yes," she said, "everything is all right." She felt as if all the significance of her act had been erased.

"You know your mother hasn't come back from the Springs," he added, "but they are expecting you at the house."

"Can't we go somewhere and have luncheon together? I want so much to see you!" she urged.

"I wish I might, but I have these lawyers on my hands--must take them to the club for luncheon. Sorry I shall be kept here until late in the afternoon. I will put you in a cab." And he led the way to the elevator. As always he was kind and considerate. But in his equable manner was there also some touch of coldness, of aloofness from this wife, who had taken this curious opportunity to come into his affairs?

"Thank you," she faltered, as he looked down the street for a cab.

"Couldn't I go somewhere about here for luncheon and come back afterwards to the court-room? I should like to wait for you."

"Why, if you want to," he replied, looking at her with surprise. And as if divining a reason for her agitation, he said: "You mustn't mind what the papers say. It won't amount to anything, either way it goes."

"I think I'll stay," she said hurriedly.

"Very well. I will call Bliss to take you to a hotel."

He beckoned to the waiting young man, and while Mr. Bliss was finding a cab, Lane said to his wife:--

"You are looking very well. The country has done you good?"

"Yes! I am very well,--all well!" She tried to smile buoyantly. "I don't expect ever to be ill again."

He received this as a man accustomed to the vagaries of woman's health, and said, "That's good!"

Then he put her into the cab, gave some instructions to the young man, and raised his hat. His manner was perfect to her, and yet Isabelle went to her luncheon with the bubbling Mr. Bliss sad at heart. She was such an outsider, such a stranger to her husband's inner self! That it was to be expected, her own fault, the result of the misspent years of married life made it none the easier to bear....

Mr. Teddy Bliss exercised his best connoisseurship in selecting the dishes from the printed broadside put before him at the hotel restaurant, consulting Isabelle frequently as to her tastes, where the desire to please was mingled with the pride of appearing self-possessed. Having finally decided on tomato bisque aux crutons, prairie chicken, grilled sweet potatoes, salad and peche Melba, which was all very much to his liking, he dropped the card and looked at Isabelle with a broad smile. The world and its affairs still had an irrepressible zest and mirthful aspect to young Mr. Bliss.

"You're likely to hear some or-a-tory this afternoon, Mrs. Lane," he scoffed. "The district attorney is a Southerner, and he's going to spread himself when he makes his plea, you can believe. It's his chance to get talked about from San Francisco to Washington.... Of course it don't cut any ice what he says, but the papers will play it up large, and that's what they are after, the government. You see"--he waxed confidential--"the government's got to save its face somehow after all the talk and the dust they have raised. If they can secure a conviction,--oh, just a nominal fine (you know there is no prison penalty),--why, it'll be good campaign material this fall. So they fixed on the A. and P. as a shining mark for their shot. And you know there's a good deal of feeling, especially in this state, against railroads."

"I see!" In spite of herself Isabelle was amused at the naive a.s.surance the young man had given her that nothing serious could happen to her husband,--not imprisonment! Mr. Bliss's point of view about the famous case was evidently that of the railroad office, tinged with a blithe sporting interest in a legal sc.r.a.p. The ill-paid government attorneys trying the case were a lot of "light-weight mits," put up against the best "talent" in the country employed by the powerful corporation to protect itself; in short, a sure thing for the railroad in the final knockout if not in the first round.

"It was bad, their getting in those Pleasant Valley Company books," he remarked less exuberantly. "But it won't make any difference in the end.

The papers have made the most of that evidence already."

"Why do you suppose the newspapers are so bitter against the road?"

"They aren't, the best of them; they know too much what's good for them.

They just print the record of the trial. As for the sensational ones, you see it's this way,--they don't care, they haven't any convictions. It is just a matter of business for them. Slamming the corporations suits their readers. The people who buy most of the papers like to have the prosperous cla.s.ses slammed. Most people are envious; they want the other fellow's roll,--isn't that so? They think they are as good as the best, and it makes 'em sick to see the other fellow in his automobile when they are earning fifteen or eighteen per! They don't stop to consider that it's brains that makes the diff."

"So it is merely envy that produces all this agitation?"

"I am not saying that the corporations are philanthropic inst.i.tutions," Mr.

Bliss continued didactically; "of course they aren't. They are out for business, and every man knows what that means. I suppose they do a good many tough things if they get the chance--same as their critics. What of it? Wouldn't the little fellow do the same thing, if he could,--had the chance? ... What would this country be to-day without the corporations, the railroads? Without the Atlantic and Pacific, right here in St. Louis? And all the work of those men they are prosecuting and fining and trying to put into jail? Why, if the President had his way, he'd lock up every man that had enough sense and snap in him to do things, and he'd make this country like a Methodist camp meeting after the shouting is over! There's no sense to it."

Isabelle laughed at the young man's vigorous defence of "our" side. It seemed useless to attempt to pick flaws in his logic, and it would hardly become her as the wife of his "boss" to betray that she was not wholly convinced of his accuracy.

"Besides, why can't the government let bygones be bygones? Every one knows that the roads did some queer things in the old days. But why rake up old crimes and make a mess? I say let's have a clean slate and begin over....

But if they keep on legislating and howling against corporations, like some of these trust-busting state legislatures, we'll have a panic sure thing, and that will do the business for the reformers, won't it now?"

This, as Isabelle realized, was, in the popular language of Mr. Teddy Bliss, her husband's point of view, the philosophy of the ruling cla.s.s, imbibed by their dependents. As the young man turned from expounding the business situation to his succulent bird, Isabelle had time for reflection.

This young man was sucking his views about honesty, business morality, from the Atlantic and Pacific, from her husband. One of Renault's sentences came to her, "We all live in large part on a borrowed capital of suggested ideas, motives, desires." And the corollary: "Each is responsible not only for the capital that he borrows from others,--that it should really be the right idea for him,--but also for the capital he lends,--the suggestions he gives to others--possibly less stable minds. For thus by borrowing and lending ideas is created that compulsive body of thought throughout the universe on which we all act."

Her husband was on trial for that which he had borrowed and thus made his own, as well as for that which he had pa.s.sed on into life--to Mr. Teddy Bliss, for example.

CHAPTER LXXI

The government attorney had already begun his argument when Isabelle, escorted by Teddy Bliss, returned to the court-room. The district attorney was a short, thick-set, sallow-faced man, with bushy gray hair growing in the absurd "Pompadour" fashion, and a homely drooping mustache. Another "bounder," thought Isabelle, one of the hungry outsiders, not in fee to the corporations, who hired only the best lawyers. Perhaps he was aware of his position there in the dingy court-room before the trained gladiators of his profession--and also before his country! The lawyers for the defendants lolling in their chairs settled themselves placidly to see what this humble brother would make of the business. Mr. Brinkerhoff's eyelids drooped over his gentle eyes, as if to shut out all distractions of sense from his brain. The thick-set district attorney frequently sc.r.a.ped his throat and repeated the phrase, "if it please your honor." He had a detestable nasal whine, and he maltreated the accents of several familiar words. The culture of letters and vocal delivery had evidently not been large in the small inland college where he had been educated. These annoying peculiarities at first distracted Isabelle's attention, while the lawyer labored through the opening paragraphs of his argument. In the maze of her thoughts, which had jumped across the continent to the little mountain village, there fell on her ears the words, "In a land of men born free and equal before the law."

Was it the tone of unexpected pa.s.sion vibrating through those ancient words, or the idea itself that startled her like an electric shock? That pathetic effort of our ancestors to enact into const.i.tutional dogma the poetic dream of a race! "Born free and equal"!--there was nothing more absurd, more contrary to the daily evidence of life, ever uttered. Isabelle fancied she saw a soft smile play over the benign face of Mr. Brinkerhoff, as if he too had been struck by the irony of the words. But to the district attorney they did not seem to be a mere poetic aspiration, nor a catch phrase with which to adorn his speech; they voiced a real idea, still pulsating with pa.s.sionate truth. From this moment Isabelle forgot the lawyer's nasal intonation, his uncultivated delivery.

He stood there, so it seemed, as the representative of the mute millions which make the nation to defend before the court their cause against the rapacious acts of the strong. This great railroad corporation, with its capital of three hundred and seventy-five millions of dollars in stocks and bonds (a creature, nevertheless, of the common public, called into existence by its necessities and chartered by its will), had taken upon itself to say who should dig coal and sell it from the lands along its lines. They and their servants and allies had, so the charge ran, seized each individual man or a.s.sociation of men not allied to them, and throttled the life in them--specifically refusing them cars in which to transport their coal, denying them switching privileges, etc.... The government, following its duty to protect the rights of each man and all men against the oppression of the few, had brought this suit to prohibit these secret practices, to compel rest.i.tution, to punish the corporation and its servants for wrong done.... "The situation was, if your honor please, as if a company of men should rivet a chain across the doors of certain warehouses of private citizens and should prevent these citizens from taking their goods out of their warehouses or compel them to pay toll for the privilege of transacting their lawful business.... And the government has shown, if it please your honor, that this Pleasant Valley Coal Company is but a creature of the defendant corporation, its officers and owners being the servants of the railroad company, and thereby this Pleasant Valley Coal Company has enjoyed and now enjoys special privileges in the matter of transportation, cars, and switching facilities. The government has further shown that the Atlantic and Pacific, by its servant, John Lane...."

At this point the railroad counsel looked interested; even the serene Mr.

Brinkerhoff deigned to unclose his eyes. For the district attorney, having disposed of his oratorical flourish of trumpets, had got down to the facts of the record and what they could be made to prove. In the close argument that followed, Isabella's thoughts went back to that trumpet phrase,--"all men born free and equal." Slowly there dawned in her an altogether new comprehension of what this struggle before her eyes, in which her husband was involved, meant. Nay, what human life itself, with all its noisy discord, meant!

Their forerunners, the fathers of the people, held the theory that here at last, in this broad, rich, new land, men should struggle with one another for the goods of life on an equal basis. Man should neither oppress nor interfere with man. Justice at last to all! The struggle should be ordered by law so that men might be free to struggle and equal in their rights. To all the same freedom to live, to enjoy, to become! So these fathers of the republic had dreamed. So some still dreamed that human life might be ordered, to be a fair, open struggle--for all.

But within a brief century and a quarter the fallacy of this aspiration had become ridiculously apparent. "Born free and equal!" Nothing on this globe was ever so born. The strong who achieved, the weak who succ.u.mbed--both knew the nonsense of it. Free and equal,--so far as men could maintain freedom and equality by their own force,--that was all!

(There was that man who begged John to give him cars. Poor thing! he could not maintain his right.)

And every man who complained at the oppression of another either oppressed some one or would so oppress him, if he had the chance and the power. It was, of course, the business of the law to police the fight,--the game had its rules, its limits, which all must obey, when not too "destructive." But essentially this new land of liberty and hope was like all other human societies,--a mortal combat where the strong triumphed and the weak went under in defeat.... That was what the array of brilliant counsel employed by the Atlantic and Pacific really represented. "Gentlemen, you can't block us with silly rules. We must play this game of life as it was ordered by G.o.d it should be played when the first protoplasm was evolved.... And really, if it were not for us, would there be any game for you little fellows to play?"

Egotism, the curse of egotism! This was stark male egotism,--the instinct for domination. And defendants and plaintiffs were alike in spirit, struggling for position in the game. The weaker ones--if they had the hold--would pluck at the windpipe of their oppressors....

So while the attorney for the people spoke on about rate-sheets and schedules A and B, and bills of lading from the Pleasant Valley Company (marked "exhibits nine and ten"), the woman in the court-room began to comprehend dimly the mystery behind this veil of words. Every man felt instinctively this spirit of fight,--the lively young clerk at her side as well as the defendant before the bar, her husband; the paid writers for Mr.

Gossom's patriotic magazine as well as the President and his advisers,--all had it in their blood. It was the spirit of our dominating race, fostered through the centuries,--the spirit of achievement, of conquest. Mr.

Gossom's clever writers, the President, and the "good element" generally, differed from their opponents only in manner and degree. "Gently, gently, gentlemen," they called. "Play according to the rules of the game. Don't bang all the breath out of your adversary's body when you have him by the throat. Remember, gentlemen, to give every one his turn!"