Part 58 (2/2)
”Well, George,” she said, ”I've just been stealing away from my children in the Valley for a little visit with Emma.”
”Very well, then,” said Mr. Brotherton, ”sit down a minute with me. Tell me, Laura--about children--are they worth it?”
She was a handsome woman, with youth still in her eyes and face, who sat beside George Brotherton, looking at the fire that March day.
”George--good old friend,” she said gently, ”there's nothing else in the world so worth it as children.”
She hesitated before going so deeply into her soul, perhaps picking her verbal way. ”George--no man ever degraded a woman more than I was degraded. Yet I brought Lila out of it, and I thank G.o.d for her, and I don't mind the price--not now.” She turned to look at Mr. Brotherton inquiringly as she said: ”But what I come in to talk to you about, George, was Grant. Have you noticed in the last few months--that growing--well--it's more than enthusiasm, George; it's a fanaticism.
Since he has been working on the garden plan--Grant has been getting wilder and wilder in his talk about the Democracy of labor. Have you noticed it--or am I oversensitive?”
Brotherton, poking idly in the fire, did not answer at once. At length he said:
”Grant's a zealot. He's full of this prisms, prunes and peace idea, this sweetness and light revolution, this notion of hitching their hop-dreams to these three-acre plots, and preaching non-resistance. It's coming a little fast for me, Laura--just a shade too many at times. But, on the other hand--there's Nate Perry. He's as cold-blooded a Yankee as ever swindled a father--and he's helping with the scheme. He's--”
”He has no faith in the Democracy of Labor. He hoots,” interrupted Laura. ”What he's doing is working for a more efficient lot of laboring men, so that when the time comes when the unions shall ask and get more definite control of the factories and mines, in the way of wage-setting, and price-making, they will bring some sense with their control. He's merely looking after himself--in the last a.n.a.lysis; but Grant's going mad. George, he actually believes that when this thing wins here in the Valley--the peaceful strike, the rise of labor, and the theory of non-resistance--he's going over the world, and in a few years will have labor emanc.i.p.ated. Have you heard him--that is, recently?”
”Well, yes, a week or so ago,” answered Brotherton, ”and he was going it at a pretty fair clip for a minute then. Well, say--I mean--what should we do?” he asked, drumming with the poker on the hearth. ”Laura,”
Brotherton ran his eyes from the poker until they met her frank, gray eyes, ”Grant would listen to you before he would listen to any one else on earth or in Heaven--I'm sure of that.”
”Then what shall we do?” she asked. ”We mustn't let him wreck himself--and all these people? What ought I--”
A shadow fell across the door, and in another moment there stood in the opening of the alcove the tall, lean figure of Thomas Van Dorn.
When Laura was gone, Van Dorn, after more or less polite circ.u.mlocution, began to unfold a plan of Market Street to buy the _Daily Times_ and bring Jared Thurston back to Harvey to run it in the interests of the property owners in the town and in the Valley. Incidentally he had come to warn George on behalf of Market Street that he was harboring Grant Adams, contrary to the judgment of Market Street. But George Brotherton's heart was far from Market Street; it was out on the hill with Emma, his wife, and his mouth spoke from the place of his treasure.
”Tom--tell me, as between man and man, what do you think of children?
You're sort of in the outer room of the Blue Lodge of grandfatherdom, with Lila and Kenyon getting ready for the preacher, and you ought to know, Tom--honest, man, how about it?”
A wave of self-pity enveloped the Judge. His voice broke as he answered: ”George, I haven't any little girl--she never even has spoken to me about this affair that the whole town knows about. Oh, I haven't any child at all.”
He looked a miserable moment at Brotherton, perhaps reviewing the years which they had lived and grown from youth to middle age together and growled: ”Not a thing--not a d.a.m.ned thing in it--George, in all this forty years of fighting to keep ahead of the undertaker! Not a G.o.d d.a.m.ned thing!” And so he left the Sweet Serenity of Books and Wall Paper and went back to the treadmill of life, spitting ashes from his gray lips!
And then Daniel Sands toddled in to get the five-cent cigars which he had bought for a generation--one at a time every day, and Brotherton came to Daniel with his problem.
The old man, whose palsied head forever was denying something, as if he had the a.s.sessor always in his mind, shut his rheumy eyes and answered: ”My children--bauch--” He all but spat upon their names. ”Morty--moons around reading Socialist books, with a cold in his throat and dishwater in his brains. And the other, she's married a dirty traitor and stands by him against her own flesh and blood. Ba-a-a-ch!” He showed his blue, old mouth, and cried:
”I married four women to give those children a home--and what thanks do I get? Ingrates--one a milk-sop--G.o.d, if he'd only be a Socialist and get out and throw dynamite; but he won't; he won't do a thing but sit around drooling about social justice when I want to eat my meals in peace. And he goes coughing all day and night, and grunting, and now he's wearing a pointed beard--he says it's for his throat, but I know--it's because he thinks it's romantic. And that Anne--why, she's worse,” but he did not finish the sentence. His old head wagged violently. Evidently another a.s.sessor had suddenly pounced in upon his imagination. For he shuffled into the street.
Mr. Brotherton sat by the fire, leaning forward, with his fingers locked between his knees. The warning against Grant Adams that Tom Van Dorn had given him had impressed him. He knew Market Street was against Grant Adams. But he did not realize that Market Street's att.i.tude was only a reflex of the stir in the Valley. All Market streets over the earth feel more or less acutely changes which portend in the workshops, often before those changes come. We are indeed ”members one of another,” and the very aspirations of those who dream of better things register in the latent fears of those who live on trade. We are so closely compact in our organization that a man may not even hope without crowding his neighbor. And in that little section of the great world which men knew as Market Street in Harvey, the surest evidence of the changing att.i.tude of the men in the Valley toward their work, was found not in the crowds that gathered in Belgian Hall week after week to hear Grant Adams, not in the war-chest which was filling to overflowing, not in the gardens checkered upon the hillsides, but rather in the uneasiness of Market Street. The reactions were different in Market Street and in the Valley; but it was one vision rising in the same body, each part responding according to its own impulses. Of course Market Street has its side, and George Brotherton was not blind to it. Sitting by his fire that raw March day, he realized that Market Street was never a crusader, and why.
He could see that the men from whom the storekeepers bought goods on ninety days' time, 3 per cent. off for cash, were not crusaders. When a man turned up among them with a six-months' crusade for an evanescent millennium, flickering just a few years ahead, the wholesalers of the city and the retailers of Market Street nervously began thumbing over their rapidly acc.u.mulating ”bills payable” and began using crisp, scratchy language toward the crusader.
It made Brotherton pause when he thought how they might involve and envelop him--as a family man. For as he sat there, the man's mind kept thinking of children. And his mind wandered to the thought of his wife and his home--and the little ones that might be. As his mind clicked back to Amos Adams, and to the strange family that would produce three boys as unlike as Grant and Jasper and Kenyon, he began to consider how far Kenyon had come for a youth in his twenties. And Brotherton realized that he might have had a child as old as Kenyon. Then Mr. Brotherton put his hands over his face and tried to stop the flying years.
A shadow fell, and Brotherton greeted Captain Morton, in a sunburst of mauve tailoring. The Captain pointed proudly to a necktie pin representing a horse jumping through a horseshoe, and cried: ”What you think of it? Real diamond horseshoe nails--what say?”
”Now, Captain, sit down here,” said Mr. Brotherton. ”You'll do, Captain--you'll do.” But the subject nearest the big man's heart would not leave it. ”Cap,” he said, ”what about children--do they pay?”
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