Youth Challenges Part 36

"If you keep the boss waiting--" said the boy, ominously.

Bonbright walked painfully to Lightener's office.

"Well?" said Lightener.

"I can do it--I'll harden to it," Bonbright said.

"Huh!... Take off those overalls.... Boy, go to Mr. Foote's locker and fetch his things...."

"Am--am I discharged?"

"No," said Lightener, bestowing no word of commendation. Men had little commendation from him by word of mouth. He let actions speak for him.

When he gave a man a task to perform that man knew he was being complimented.... But he knew it in no other way.

"That's the way a laborer feels," said Lightener.... "You got it multiplied. That's because you had to jam his whole life's experience into a day...."

"Poor devils!" said Bonbright.

"I'm going to put you in the purchasing department--after that, if you make good--into the sales end.... Able to go ahead to-day?"

"Yes."

"Before you amount to a darn as a business man you've got to know how to buy.... That's the foundation. You've got to be able to buy right.

Then you've got to learn how to make. Selling is easiest of all--and there are darn few real salesmen. If you can buy, you can do anything."

"I--I would rather stay out of the shops, Mr. Lightener. The men--found out who I was...I'd like to stay there till they--forget it."

"You'll go where I put you. Men enough in the purchasing department.

Got a tame anarchist there, I hear, and a Mormon, and a Hindu, and a single-taxer. All kinds. After hours. From whistle to whistle they BUY."

Lightener took Bonbright personally to his new employment and left him.

But Bonbright was not satisfied. Once before he had sought contact with men who labored, and he had landed in a cell in police headquarters.

That had been mere boyish curiosity to find what it was all about. Now his desire to know was real. He had been--very briefly, it is true--one of them. Now he wanted to know. He wanted to know how they thought, and why they thought that way. He wanted to understand their att.i.tude toward themselves, toward one another, toward the cla.s.s they largely denominated as Capital. He had caught s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation--interesting to him, but none had talked to him. He wanted to get on a footing with them which would permit him to listen, and to talk. He wanted to hear arguments. He wanted to go into their homes and see their wives and find out what their wives thought.... All this had been brought to him by a few days in overalls. He had no idea that Lightener had intended it should be brought to him....

However, that must lie in the future; his present business was to do as he was told and to earn his wages. He must earn his wages, for he had a family to support.... It was his first experience with the ever-present fear of the wage earner--the fear of losing his job.

But he determined to know the men, and planned accordingly. With that end in view, instead of lunching with men in his department, he went to the little hash house across the road to drink vile coffee and rub elbows with laborers in greasy overalls. He would go there every day; he would seek other opportunities of contact.... Now that he felt the genuine, sympathetic hunger for an understanding of them and their problems, he would not rest until it was his....

CHAPTER XXIV

Bonbright found himself a layman in a department of specialists. On all sides of him were men who knew all about something, a few who knew a great deal about several things, and a man or two who appeared to have some knowledge of every element and article that went into a motor car.

There was a man who knew leather from cow to upholstery, and who talked about it lovingly. This man had the ability to make leather as interesting as the art of Benvenuto Cellini. Another was a specialist in hickory, and thought and talked spokes; another was a reservoir of dependable facts about rubber; another about gray iron castings; another about paints and enamels, and so on. In that department it would not have been impossible to compile an encyclopedia.

It was impossible that Bonbright should not have been interested. It was not business, it was a fascinating, enthralling debating society, where the debates were not of the "Resolved that the world would be better" sort, but were as to the essential qualities of concrete things. It was practical debate which saved money and elevated the standards of excellence.

The department had its own laboratories, its own chemists, its own engineers. Everything was tested. Two articles might appear to the layman equal in virtue; careful examination by experts might not disclose a difference between them, but the skill of the chemist would show that this article was a tenth of one per cent, less guilty of alloy than that, or that the breaking strength of this was a minute fraction greater than that.... So decisions were reached.

Bonbright was to learn that price did not always rule. He saw orders given for carloads of certain supplies which tested but a point or two higher than its rival--and sold for dollars more a ton. Thousands of dollars were paid cheerfully for those few points of excellence. ...

Here was business functioning as he did not know business could function. Here business was an art, and he applied himself to it like an artist. Here he could lay aside that growing discontent, that dissatisfaction, that was growing upon him. Here, in the excitement of distinguishing the better from the worse, he could forget Ruth and the increasingly impracticable condition of his relations with her.

He had come to a realization that his game of make-believe would not march. He realized that Ruth either was his wife or she was not.... But he did not know what to do about it. It seemed a problem without a solution, and it was--for him. Its solution did not lie in himself, but in his wife. Bonbright could not set the thing right; his potentiality lay only for its destruction. Three courses lay open to him; to a.s.sert his husbandship; to send Ruth home to her mother; or to put off till to-morrow and to-morrow and still another to-morrow. Only in the last did hope reside, and he clung to hope....

He tried to conceal his unrest, his discontent, his rebellion against the thing that was, from Ruth. He continued to be patient, gentle. ...

He did not know how she wept and accused herself because of that gentleness and patience. He did not know how she tried to compel love by impact of will--and how she failed. But he did come to doubt her love. He could not do otherwise. Then he wondered why she had married him, and, reviewing the facts of his hurried marriage, he wondered the more with bitterness and heartache. Against his will his affairs were traveling toward a climax. The approaching footsteps of the day when something must happen were audible on the path.

The day after his installation in the purchasing department he lunched at the little hash house across the street. Sitting on his high stool, he tried to imagine he was a part of that sweating, gulping crowd of men, that he was one of them, and not an outsider, suspected, regarded with unfriendly looks.

Behind him a man began to make conversation for Bonbright's ears. It had happened before.

"The strike up to the Foote plant's on its last legs," said the man, loudly.

"So I hear," answered another.

"Infernal shame. If it was only the closed-shop question I dunno's I'd feel so. We're open shop here--but we git treated like human bein's....

Over there--" The man shrugged his shoulders. "Look at the way they've fought the strike. Don't blame 'em for fightin' it. Calc'late they had to fight it, but there's fightin' and fightin'. ... Seems like this Foote bunch set out to do the worst that could be done--and they done it."

"Wonder when it 'll peter out--the strike?"

"Back's busted now. Nothin's holding it up but that man Dulac. There's a man for you! I've knowed labor leaders I didn't cotton to nor have much confidence in---fellers that jest wagged their tongues and took what they could get out of it. But this Dulac--he's a reg'lar man. I've listened to him, and I tell you he means what he says. He's in it to git somethin' for the other feller.... But he can't hold out much longer."

It was true; Dulac could not hold out much longer. That very noon he was fighting with his back against the wall. In Workingman's Hall he was making his last fierce fight to hold from crumbling the resolution of the strikers who still stood by their guns.... He threw the fire of his soul into their dull, phlegmatic faces. It struck no answering spark. Never before had he spoken to men without a consciousness of his powers, without pose, without dramatics. Now he was himself, and more dramatic, more compelling than ever before. ... He pleaded, begged, flayed his audience, but it did not respond to his pleadings nor writhe under the whip of his words. It was apathetic, stolid. In its weary heart it knew what it was there to do, and it would do it in spite of Dulac.... He would not admit it. He would not submit to defeat. He talked on and on, not daring to stop, for with the stoppage of his harangue he heard the death of the strike. It lived only with his voice.

In the body of the hall a man, haggard of face, arose.

"'Tain't no use, Mr. Dulac," he said, dully. "We've stuck by you--"

"You've stuck by yourselves," Dulac cried.

"Whatever you say.... But'tain't no use. We're licked. Hain't no use keepin' up and stretchin' out the sufferin'.... I hain't the least of the sufferers, Mr. Dulac--my wife hain't with me no more." The dull voice wabbled queerly. "There's hunger and grief and sufferin'--willin'ly endured when there was a chance--but there hain't no chance.... 'Tain't human to ask any more of our wimmin and children.... It's them I'm a-thinkin' of, Mr. Dulac... and on account of them I say this strike ought to quit. It's got to quit, and I demand a vote on it, Mr. Dulac."

"Vote!... Vote!... Vote!..." roared up to Dulac from all over the hall.... It was the end. He was powerless to stay the rush of the desire of those weary men for peace.

Dulac turned slowly around, his back to the crowd, walked to a chair, and, with elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. There was a silence, as men looked at him and appreciated his suffering. They appreciated his suffering because they appreciated the man, his honesty to their cause, and to his work. He had been true to them. For himself he would gain nothing by the success of the strike--for them he would have gained much.... It was not his loss that bowed his head, but their loss--and they knew it. He was a Messiah whose mission had failed.

The vote was put. There was no dissenting voice. The strike was done, and Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was victor.

Men cl.u.s.tered about Dulac, wringing his hands, speaking words of comfort with voices that broke, and the number of those who turned away with tears was greater than of those whose eyes could remain dry.

Dulac spoke. "We'll try again--men.... We'll start to get ready--to-day--for another--fight."

Then, hurriedly, blindly, he forced his way through them and made his way out of the hall. Grief, the heaviness of defeat, was all that he could feel now. Bitterness would come in its time.

Dulac was a soul without restraints, a soul in eternal uproar. His life had been one constant kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks, and when they hurt his feet he was not schooled to stifle the cry of pain. He could not endure patiently and in silence; the tumult of his suffering must have an outlet.