Part 36 (1/2)
He smiled and patted his daughter's hair and rose to go back to work.
The girl plucked at his coat and said: ”Now sit down, father, I want to talk to you,” she hesitated. ”It's about Mr. Brotherton. You know he's been coming out here for years and I thought he was coming to see me, and now Martha thinks he comes to see her, and Martha always stays there and so does Ruth, and if he is coming to see me--” she stopped. Her father looked at her in astonishment. ”Why, father,” she went on,--”why not? I'm twenty-five, and Martha's twenty-two and even Ruth is seventeen--he might even be coming to see Ruth,” she added bitterly.
”Yes, or Epaminondas--the cat--eh?” cut in the old man. Then he added, indignantly, ”Well, how about this singing Jasper Adams--who's he coming to see? Or Amos--he comes around here sometimes Sat.u.r.day night after G.
A. R. meeting, with me--what say? Would you want us all to clear out and leave you the front room with him?” demanded the perturbed Captain.
Then the father put his arm about his child tenderly: ”Twenty-five years old--twenty-five years--why, girl, in my time a girl was an old maid laid on the shelf at twenty-five--and here you are,” he mused, ”just thinking of your first beau and here I am needing your mother worse than I ever did in my life. Law-see' girl--how do I know what to do--what say?” But he did know enough to draw her to him and kiss her and sigh.
”Well--maybe I can do something--maybe--we'll see.” And then she left him and he went to his work. And as he worked the thought struck him suddenly that if he could put one of his sprockets in the Judge's automobile where he had seen a chain, that it would save power and stop much of the noise. So as he worked he dreamed that his sprocket was adopted by the makers of the new machines, and that he was rich--exceedingly rich and that he took the girls to visit the Ohio kin, and that Emma had her trip to the Grand Canyon, that Martha went to Europe and that Ruthie ”took vocal” of a teacher in France whose name he could not p.r.o.nounce.
As he hammered away at his bench he heard a shuffling at the door and looking up saw Dr. Nesbit in the threshold.
”Come in, Doctor; sit down and talk,” shrilled the Doctor before the Captain could speak, and when the Doctor had seated himself upon the box by the workbench, the Captain managed to say: ”Surely--come right in, I'm kind of lonesome anyhow.”
”And I'm mad,” cried the Doctor. ”Just let me sit here and blow off a little to my old army friend.”
”Well--well, Doctor, it's queer to see you hot under the collar--eh?”
The Doctor began digging out his pipe and filling it, without speaking.
The Captain asked: ”What's gone wrong? Politics ain't biling? what say?”
”Well,” returned the Doctor, ”you know Laura works at her kindergarten down there in South Harvey, and she got me to pa.s.s that hours-of-service law for the smelter men at the extra session last summer. Good law!
Those men working there in the fumes shouldn't work over six hours a day--it will kill them. I managed by trading off my hide and my chances of Heaven to get a law through, cutting them down to eight hours in smelter work. Denny Hogan, who works on the slag dump, is going to die if he has to do it another year on a ten-hour s.h.i.+ft. He's been up and down for two years now--the Hogans live neighbors to Laura's school and I've been watching him. Well,” and here the Doctor thumped on the floor with his cane, ”this Judge--this vain, strutting peac.o.c.k of a Judge, this cat-chasing Judge that was once my son-in-law, has gone and knocked the law galley west so far as it affects the slag dump. I've just been reading his decision, and I'm hot--good and hot.”
The Captain interrupted:
”I saw Violet Hogan and the children--dressed like princesses, walking out to-day--past the Judge's house--showing it to them--what say? My, how old she looks, Doctor!”
”Well--the d.a.m.ned villain--the infernal scoundrel--” piped the Doctor.
”I just been reading that decision. The men showed in their lawsuit that the month before the law took effect the company, knowing the law had been pa.s.sed, went out and sold their switch and sold the slag dump, to a fake railroad company that bought a switch engine and two or three cars, and incorporated as a railroad, and then--the same people owning the smelter and the railroad, they set all the men in the smelter that they could working on the slag dump, so the men were working for the railroad and not for the smelter company and didn't come within the eight hour law. And now the Judge stands by that farce; he says that the men working there under the very chimney of the smelter on the slag dump where the fumes are worst, are not subject to the law because the law says that men working for the smelters shall not work more than eight hours, and these men are working for a cheating, swindling subterfuge of a railroad. That's judge-made law. That's the kind of law that makes anarchists. Law!” snorted the Doctor, ”Law!--made by judges who have graduated out of the employ of corporations--law!--is just what the Judge on the bench dares to read into the statute. I tell you, Cap, if the doctors and engineers and preachers were as subservient to greed and big money as the lawyers are, we would soon lose our standing. But when a lawyer commits some flagrant malpractice like that of Tom Van Dorn's--the lawyers remind us that the courts are sacred inst.i.tutions.”
The Doctor's pipe was out and in filling it again, he jabbed viciously at the bowl with his knife, and in the meantime the Captain was saying:
”Well, I suppose he found the body of the decisions leaning that way, Doc--you know Judges are bound by the body of the law.”
”The body of the law--yes, d.a.m.n 'em, I've bought 'em to find the body of the law myself.”
The Doctor sputtered along with his pipe and cried out in his high treble--”I never had any more trouble buying a court than a Senator. And lawyers have no shame about hiring themselves to crooks and notorious lawbreakers. And some lawyers hire themselves body and soul to great corporations for life and we all know that those corporations are merely evading the laws and not obeying them; and lawyers--at the very top of the profession--brazenly hire out for life to that kind of business.
What if the top of the medical profession was composed of men who devoted themselves to fighting the public welfare for life! We have that kind of doctors--but we call them quacks. We don't allow 'em in our medical societies. We punish them by ostracism. But the quack lawyers who devote themselves to skinning the public--they are at the head of the bar. They are made judges. They are promoted to supreme courts. A d.a.m.n nice howdy-do we're coming to when the quacks run a whole profession. And Tom Van Dorn is a quack--a hair-splitting, owl-eyed, venal quack--who doles out the bread pills of injustice, and the strychnine stimulants of injustice and the deadening laudanum of injustice, and falls back on the body of the decisions to uphold him in his quackery. Justice demands that he take that fake corporation, made solely to evade the law, and shake its guts out and tell the men who put up this job, that he'll put them all in jail for contempt of court if they try any such shenanigan in his jurisdiction again. That would be justice. This--this decision--is humbug and every one knows it. What's more--it may be murder. For men can't work on that slag dump ten hours a day without losing their lives.”
The captain tapped away at his sprocket. He had his own ideas about the sanct.i.ty of the courts. They were not to be overthrown so easily. The Doctor snorted: ”Burn their bodies, and blear their minds, and then wail about our vicious lower cla.s.ses--I'm getting to be an anarchist.”
He prodded his cane among the debris on the floor and then he began to twitch the loose skin of his lower face and smiled. ”Thank you, Cap,” he chirped. ”How good and beautiful a thing it is to blow off steam in a barn to your old army friend.”
The Captain looked around and smiled and the Doctor asked: ”What was that you were saying about Violet Hogan?”
”I said I saw her to-day and she looked faded and old--she's not so much older than my Emma--eh?”
”Still,” said the Doctor, ”Violet's had a tough time--a mighty tough time; three children in six years. The last one took most of her teeth; young horse doctor gave her some dope that about killed her; she's done all the cooking, was.h.i.+ng, scrubbing and made garden for the family in that time--up every morning at five, seven days in the week to get breakfast for Dennis--Emma would look broken if she'd had that.” The Doctor paused. ”Like her mother--weak--vain--puts all of Denny's wages on the children's backs--Laura says Violet spends more on frills for those kids than we spend for groceries--and Violet goes around herself looking like the Devil before breakfast.” The Doctor rested his chin on his cane. ”Remember her mother--Mrs. Mauling--funny how it breeds that way. The human critter, Cap, is a curious beast--but he does breed true--mostly.” The Doctor loafed, whistling, around the work shop, prodding at things with his cane, and wound up leaning against one end of the bench.