Part 20 (1/2)

There was some applause at this.

Paul went on. ”As to safeguards, that bill takes away your chief safeguard--your job.”

He sat down. The jubilant audience calloused their hands noisily.

The district delegate of the miners, Jack Bowden, rose gracefully.

”Isn't it also a fact, Mr. Judson, that the Birrell-Florence mines have recently installed safety devices not required by the law?”

Paul did not know it, but he bowed agreeably. ”So I have understood.”

Pelham writhed. Even after his father's manifestly unfair speech, he had expected intellectual honesty from him. He had dodged both parts of Jensen's question. Surface brilliancy--but the questions were still unanswered. The intense disappointment in his father wracked him with physical pain.

As she felt Pelham's body commence to rise, Jane's hand clenched his arm. ”Don't do it; it will only make a scene. Let's leave.”

Ignoring the pleading grasp, he rose unsteadily. Against the walls of his chest his heart pounded irregularly; he feared for a flashed instant that it would burst its way out, and he would fall dead. Gripping the seat ahead more tightly, he found his voice. ”Mr. Speaker----”

Paul looked at him, for the moment surprised and displeased. The cautious smile reappeared faintly.

”About this question of wages. Isn't it a fact that, the smaller the dividends, the larger the wages? Both come from the same fund, the wealth produced; doesn't the prosperity of one cut against the prosperity of the other? So that, for labor to get its full product, profit must be abolished, and cooperation introduced?”

There was a gasp of surprise from the few in the audience who recognized the pale figure as the speaker's son. A scattering rattle of applause shook parts of the crowd.

Paul moistened his lips, and explained: ”The questioner asks, will not labor's prosperity come when profit has been abolished, and cooperation subst.i.tuted. There is something to be said for that as an air-spun theory. It has never worked in practice. We--all of us--must feed on our daily bread, not on economic theories,” he finished with crisp decisiveness.

There was a generous hand at this.

Pelham's quiet words to Jane whistled between clenched teeth. ”All untrue, all unfair. A thing cannot be good in theory and bad in practice. Something is wrong with a theory, if it does not take into account all facts, all reality. He can't even think honestly!”

She squeezed his hand in the darkness.

In dazed agony he sat--his father had left unperceived by the stage exit--while the delegates, their discussion carefully guided by the administration machine, voted, three to one, against the mining law on which he and Jane had built such hopeful fancies.

The summer stars hung muddily above the western horizon when he ran his car into the garage, and slipped quietly up to his room.

The rest of the Cottage was dark.

XII

Pelham avoided his father the next week. The son came late to breakfasts, his father did not return for luncheon, and in the evenings Pelham dropped by one of the clubs for dinner.

He simply could not face the parent. They had pa.s.sed, several times, on the place; they had spoken politely. But Pelham felt that this was only a courteous truce. Their ways of thinking were irreconcilable; what he regarded as his father's intellectual dishonesty, plus his own open opposition at the federation meeting, brought the conflict to a head at last.

His father was pledged, soul and brain, to things as they were. He was deaf to the call of progress, blind to what was imminent in the world around him, Pelham's emotionalized thinking told him. Paul was a Democrat, as grandfather Judson had been; he would remain one, even though he must see that the tariff issue was an outworn ruse, and that the states' rights question had been wiped out bloodily fifty years before. He was a capitalist; he would remain one, as long as a sleepily tolerant public opinion permitted this criminality in its midst.

Yes, criminality! Property was theft; Pelham was glad to find, in his new favorite, ”Erewhon,” an insistent echo of Proudhon's declaration.

The lands, the waters, and their products shaped by labor's hands, must belong to labor, to the people; no whitewas.h.i.+ng by legal t.i.tles could make the robbery justifiable. Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book.

It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, p.r.o.nounced it righteous. And his father was irretrievably part and parcel of it.