In the Heart of a Fool
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Flicks of fire were swirling down the passage, and the roar of the flames came nearer and Grant fancied he could hear the crackle of it. Chopini was on his knees clutching at the crevices in the wall; Hogan and Dooley dug with their hands into the chinks, then four men were on their feet, with the burden, and in the blackness, hands within the wall reached out and took the man from those outside. The hands reached out and felt other hands and pulled them up, and five, six men stood upon their feet and were pulled, scrambling and trembling and reeling, into the room. The blackness outside became a lurid glare. The flickering lamp inside showed them that one man was outside. Grant Adams stood faint and trembling, leaning against a wall of the room; the room and the men whirled about him and he grew sick at the stomach. But with a powerful effort he gathered himself, and lunged to the hole in the rising wall. He was trying to pull himself up when Dooley pulled him down, and went through the hole like a cat. Hogan followed Dooley and Evans followed Hogan. “Here he is, right at the bottom,” called Hogan, and in an instant the feet of Casper Herdicker, then the sprawling legs, then the body and then the head with the closed eyes and gaping mouth came in, and then three men slowly followed him. Grant, revived by the water from the puddle under him, stood and saw the last man–Dennis Hogan–crawl in. Then Grant, seeing Hogan’s coat was afire, looked out and saw flames dancing along the timbers, and a spark with a gust of smoke was sucked into the room by some eddy of the current outside. In a last spurt of terrible effort the hole in the wall was closed and plastered with mud and the men were sealed in their tomb.
It was but a matter of minutes before the furnace was raging outside. The men in the room could hear it crackle and roar, and the mud in the chinks steamed. The men daubed the chinks again and again.
As the fire roared outside, the men within the room fancied–and perhaps it was the sheer horror of their situation that prompted their fancy–that they could hear the screams of men and mules down the passage toward the main bottom. After an hour, when the roar ceased, they were in a great silence. And as the day grew old and the silence grew deep and the immediate danger past, they began to wait. As they waited they talked. At times they heard a roaring and a crash and they knew that the timbers having burned away, the passages and courses were caving in. By their watches they knew that the night was upon them. And they sat talking nervously through the night, fearing to sleep, dreading what each moment might bring. Lamp after lamp burned out in turn. And still they sat and talked. Here one would drowse–there another lose consciousness and sink to the ground, but always men were talking. The talk never ceased. They were ashamed to talk of women while they were facing death, so they kept upon the only other subjects that will hold men long–God and politics. The talk droned on into morning, through the forenoon, into the night, past midnight, with the thread taken from one man sinking to sleep by another waking up, but it never stopped. The water that seeped into the puddle on the floor moistened their lips as they talked. There was no food save in two lunch buckets that had been left in the room by fleeing miners, and thus went the first day.
The second day the Welsh tried to sing–perhaps to stop the continual talk of the Irish. Then the Italian sang something, Casper Herdicker sang the “Marseillaise” and the men clapped their hands, in the twilight of the last flickering lamp that they had. After that Grant called the roll at times and those who were awake felt of those who were asleep and answered for them, and a second day wore into a third.
By the feeling of the stem of Grant Adams’s watch as he wound it, he judged that they had lived nearly four days in the tomb. Little Mugs Bowman was crying for food, and his father was trying to comfort him, by giving him his shoe leather to chew. Others rolled and moaned in their sleep, and the talk grew unstable and flighty.
Some one said, “Hear that?” and there was silence, and no one heard anything. Again the talk began and droned unevenly along.
“Say, listen,” some one else called beside the first man who had heard the sound.
Again they listened, and because they were nervous perhaps two or three men fancied they heard something. But one said it was the roar of the fire, another said it was the sound of some one calling, and the third said it was the crash of a rock in some distant passageway. The talk did not rise again for a time, but finally it rose wearily, punctuated with sighs. Then two men cried:
“Hear it! There it is again!”
And breathless they all sat, for a second. Then they heard a voice calling, “Hello–hello?” And they tried to cheer.
But the voice did not sound again, and a long time passed. Grant tried to count the minutes as they ticked off in his watch, but his mind would not remain fixed upon the ticking, so he lost track of the time after three minutes had passed. And still the time dragged, the watch kept ticking.
Then they heard the sound again, clearer; and again it called. Then Dick Bowman took up a pick, called:
“Watch out, away from the wall, I’m going to make a hole.”
He struck the wall and struck it again and again, until he made a hole and they cried through it:
“Hello–hello–We’re here.” And they all tried to get to the hole and jabber through it. Then they could hear hurrying feet and voices calling, and confusion. The men called, and cried and sobbed and cheered through the hole, and then they saw the gleam of a lantern. Then the wall crumbled and they climbed into the passage. But they knew, who had heard the falling timbers and the crashing rocks, for days, that they were not free.
The rescuers led the imprisoned miners down the dark passage; Grant Adams was the last man to leave the prison. As he turned an angle of the passage, a great rock fell crashing before him, and a head of dirt caught him and dragged him under. His legs and body were pinioned. Dennis Hogan in front heard the crash, saw Grant fall, and stood back for a moment, as another huge rock slid slowly down and came to rest above the prostrate man. For a second no one moved. Then one man–Ira Dooley–slowly crept toward Grant and began digging with his hands at the dirt around Grant’s legs. Then Casper Herdicker and Chopini came to help. As they stood at Grant’s head, quick as a flash, the rock fell and the two men standing at Grant’s head were crushed like worms. The roof of the passage was working wickedly, and in the flickering light of the lanterns they could see the walls shudder. Then Dick Bowman stepped out. He brought a shovel from a room opening on the passage, and Evan Davis and Tom Williams and Jamey McPherson with shovels began working over Grant, who lay white and frightened, watching the squirming wall above and blowing the dropping dirt from his face as it fell.
“Mugs, come here,” called Dick Bowman. “Take that shovel,” commanded the father, “and hold it over Grant’s face to keep the dirt from smothering him.” The boy looked in terror at the roof dropping dirt and ready to fall, but the father glared at the son and he obeyed. No one spoke, but four men worked–all that could stand about him. They dug out his body; they released his legs, they freed his feet, and when he was free they helped him up and hurried him down the passage which he had traversed four days ago. Before they turned into the main bottom room, he was sick with the stench. And as he turned into that room, where the cage landed, he saw by the lantern lights and by the flaring torches held by a dozen men, a great congregation of the dead–some piled upon others, some in attitudes of prayer, some shielding their comrades in death, some fleeing and stricken prone upon the floor, some sitting, looking the foe in the face. Men were working with the bodies–trying to sort them into a kind of order; but the work had just begun.
The weakened men, led by their rescuers, picked their way through the corpses and went to the top in a cage. Far down in the shaft, the daylight cut them like a knife. And as they mounted higher and higher, they could hear the murmur of voices above them, and Grant could hear the sobs of women and children long before he reached the top. The word that men had been rescued passed out of the shaft house before they could get out of the cage, and a great shout went up.
The men walked out of the shaft house and saw all about them, upon flat cars, upon the dump near the shaft, upon buildings around the shaft house, a great crowd of cheering men and women, pale, drawn, dreadful faces, illumined by eager eyes. Grant lifted his eyes to the crowd. There in a carriage beside Henry Fenn, Grant saw Margaret staring at him, and saw her turn pale and slide down into her husband’s arms, as she recognized Grant’s face among those who had come out of death. Then he saw his father and little Kenyon in the crowd and he dashed through the thick of it to them. There he held the boy high in the air, and cried as the little arms clung about his neck.
The great hoarse whistles roared and the shrill siren whistles screamed and the car bells clanged and the church bells rang. But they did not roar and scream and peal and toll for money and wealth and power, but for life that was returned. As for the army of the dead below, for all their torture, for all their agony and the misery they left behind for society to heal or help or neglect–the army of the dead had its requiem that New Year’s eve, when the bells and whistles and sirens clamored for money that brings wealth, and wealth that brings power, and power that brings pleasure, and pleasure that brings death–and death?–and death?
The town had met death. But no one even in that place of mourning could answer the question that the child heard in the bells. And yet that divine spark of heroism that burns unseen in every heart however high, however low–that must be the faltering, uncertain light which points us to the truth across the veil through the mists made by our useless tears.
And thus a New Year in Harvey began its long trip around the sun, with its sorrows and its joys, with its merry pantomime and its mutes mourning upon the hearse, with its freight of cares and compensations and its sad ironies. So let us get on and ride and enjoy the journey.
CHAPTER XVII
A CHAPTER WHICH INTRODUCES SOME POSSIBLE GODS
When Grant Adams had told and retold his story to the reporters and had eaten what Dr. Nesbit would let him eat, it was late in the afternoon. He lay down to sleep with the sun still shining through the shutters in his low-ceiled, west bed room. Through the night his father sat or slept fitfully beside him and when the morning sun was high, and still the young man slept on, the father guarded him, and would let no one enter the house. At noon Grant rose and dressed. He saw the Dexters coming down the road and he went to the door to welcome them. It seemed at first that the stupor of sleep was not entirely out of his brain. He was silent and had to be primed for details of his adventure. He sat down to eat, but when his meal was half finished, there came bursting out of his soul a flame of emotion, and he put down his food, turned half around from the table, grasped the edges of the board with both hands and cried as a fanatic who sees a vision:
“Oh, those men,–those men–those wonderful, beautiful souls of men I saw!–those strong, fearless. Godlike men!–there in the mine, I mean. Evan Davis, Dick Bowman, Pat McCann, Jamey McPherson, Casper Herdicker, Chopini–all of them; yes, Dennis Hogan, drunk as he is sometimes, and Ira Dooley, who’s been in jail for hold-ups–I don’t care which one–those wonderful men, who risked their lives for others, and Casper Herdicker and Chopini, who gave their lives there under the rock for me. My God, my God!”
His voice thrilled with emotion, and his arms trembled as his hands gripped the table. Those who heard him did not stop him, for they felt that from some uncovered spring in his being a section of personality was gushing forth that never had seen day. He turned quietly to the wondering child, took him from his chair and hugged him closely to a man’s broad chest and stroked the boyish head as the man’s blue eyes filled with tears. Grant sat for a moment looking at the floor, then roughed his red mane with his fingers and said slowly and more quietly, but contentiously:
“I know what you don’t know with all your religion, Mr. Dexter; I know what the Holy Ghost is now. I have seen it. The Holy Ghost is that divine spark in every human soul–however life has smudged it over by circumstance–that rises and envelopes a human creature in a flame of sacrificial love for his kind and makes him joy to die to save others. That’s the Holy Ghost–that’s what is immortal.”
He clenched his great hickory fist and hit the table and lifted his face again, crying: “I saw Dennis Hogan walk up to Death smiling that Irish smile. I saw him standing with a ton of loose dirt hanging over him while he was digging me out! I saw Evan Davis–little, bow-legged Evan Davis–go out into the smoke alone–alone, Mr. Dexter, and they say Evan is a coward–he went out alone and brought back Casper Herdicker’s limp body hugged to his little Welsh breast like a gorilla’s–and saved a man. I saw Dick Bowman do more–when the dirt was dropping from the slipping, working roof into my mouth and eyes, and might have come down in a slide–I lay there and watched Dick working to save me and I heard him order his son to hold a shovel over my face–his own boy.” Grant shuddered and drew the child closer to him, and looked at the group near him with wet eyes. “Ira Dooley and Tom Williams and that little Italian went on their bellies, half dead from the smoke, out into death and brought home three men to safety, and would have died without batting an eye–all three to save one lost man in that passage.” He beat the table again with his fist and cried wildly: “I tell you that’s the Holy Ghost. I know those men may sometimes trick the company if they can. I know Ira Dooley spends lots of good money on ‘the row’; I know Tom gambles off everything he can get his hands on, and that the little Dago probably would have stuck a knife in an enemy over a quarter. But that doesn’t count.”
The young man’s voice rose again. “That is circumstance; much of it is surroundings, either of birth or of this damned place where we are living. If they cheat the company, it is because the company dares them to cheat and cheats them badly. If they steal, it is because they have been taught to steal by the example of big, successful thieves. I’ve had time to think it all out.
“Father–father!” cried Grant, as a new wave of emotion surged in from the outer bourne of his soul, “you once said Dick Bowman sold out the town and took money for voting for the Harvey Improvement bond steal. But what if he did? That was merely circumstance. Dick is a little man who has had to fight for money all his life–just enough money to feed his hungry children. And here came an opportunity to get hold of–what was it?–a hundred dollars–” Amos Adams nodded. “Well, then, a hundred dollars, and it would buy so much, and leading citizens came and told him it was all right–men we have educated with our taxes and our surplus money in universities and colleges. And we haven’t educated Dick; we’ve just taught him to fight–to fight for money, and to think money will do everything in God’s beautiful world. So Dick took it. That was the Dick that man and Harvey and America made, father, but I saw the Dick that God made!” He stopped and cried out passionately, “And some day, some day all the world must know this man–this great-souled, common American–that God made!”
Grant’s voice was low, but a thousand impulses struggled across his features for voice and his eyes were infinitely sad as he gazed at the curly, brown hair of the child in his arms playing with the buttons on his coat.
The minister looked at his wife. She was wet-faced and a-tremble, and had her hands over her eyes. Amos Adams’s old, frank face was troubled. The son turned upon him and cried:
“Father–you’re right when you say character makes happiness. But what do you call it–surroundings–where you live and how you live and what you do for a living–environment! That’s it, that’s the word–environment has lots and lots to do with character. Let the company reduce its dividends by giving the men a chance at decent living conditions, in decent houses and decent streets, and you’ll have another sort of attitude toward the company. Quit cheating them at the store, and you’ll have more honesty in the mines; quit sprinkling sour beer and whiskey on the sawdust in front of the saloons to coax men in who have an appetite, and you’ll have less drinking–but, of course, Sands will have less rents. Let the company obey the law–the company run by men who are pointed out as examples, and there’ll be less lawlessness among the men when trouble comes. Why, Mr. Dexter, do you know as we sat down there in the dark, we counted up five laws which the company broke, any one of which would have prevented the fire, and would have saved ninety lives. Trash in the passage leading to the main shaft delayed notifying the men five minutes–that’s against the law. Torches leaking in the passageway where there should have been electric lights–that’s against the law. Boys–little ten-year-olds working down there–cheap, cheap!” he cried, “and dumping that pine lumber under a dripping torch–that’s against the law. Having no fire drill, and rusty water plugs and hose that doesn’t reach–that’s against the law. A pine partition in an air-chute using it as a shaft–that’s against the law. Yet when trouble comes and these men burn and kill and plunder–we’ll put the miners in jail, and maybe hang them, for doing as they are taught a thousand times a week by the company–risking life for their own gain!”
Grant Adams rose. He ran his great, strong, copper-freckled hands through his fiery hair and stood with face transfigured, as the face of one staring at some phantasm. “Oh, those men–they risked their lives–Chopini and Casper Herdicker gave their lives for me. Father,” he cried, “I am bought with a price. These men risked all and gave all for me. I am theirs. I have no other right to live except as I serve them.” He drew a deep breath; set his jaw and spoke with all the force he could put into a quiet voice: “I am dedicated to men–to those great-souled, brave, kind men whom God has sent here for man to dwarf and ruin. They have bought me. I am theirs.”
The minister put the question in their minds:
“What are you going to do, Grant?”
The fervor that had been dying down returned to Grant Adams’s face.
“My job,” he cried, “is so big I don’t know where to take hold. But I’m not going to bother to tell those men who sweat and stink and suffer under the injustices of men, about the justice of God. I’ve got one thing in me bigger’n a wolf–it’s this: House them–feed them, clothe them, work them–these working people–and pay them as you people of the middle classes are housed and fed and paid and clad, and crime won’t be the recreation of poverty. And the Lord knows the work of the men who toil with their hands is just as valuable to society as preaching and trading and buying and selling and banking and editing and lawing and doctoring, and insuring and school teaching.”
He stood before the kitchen stove, a tall, awkward, bony, wide-shouldered, loose-wired creature in the first raw stage of full-blown manhood. The red muscles of his jaw worked as his emotions rose in him. His hands were the hands of a fanatic–never still.
“I’ve been down into death and I’ve found something about life,” he went on. “Out of the world’s gross earnings we’re paying too much for superintendence, and rent and machines, and not enough for labor. There’s got to be a new shake-up. And I’m going to help. I don’t know where nor how to begin, but some way I’ll find a hold and I’m going to take it.”
He drew in a long breath, looked around and smiled rather a ragged, ugly smile that showed his big teeth, all white and strong but uneven.
“Well, Grant,” said Mrs. Dexter, “you have cut out a big job for yourself.” The young man nodded soberly.
“Well, we’re going to organize ’em, the first thing. We talked that over in the mine when we had nothing else to talk about–but God and our babies.”
In the silence that followed, Amos Adams said: “While you were down there of course I had to do something. So after the paper was out, I got to talking with Lincoln about things. He said you’d get out. Though,” smiled the old man sheepishly and wagged his beard, “Darwin didn’t think you would. But anyway, they all agreed we should do something for the widows.”
“They have a subscription paper at George Brotherton’s store–you know, Grant,” said Mr. Dexter.
“Well–we ought to put in something, father,–all we’ve got, don’t you think?”
“I tried and tried to get her last night to know how she felt about it,” mused Amos. “I’ve borrowed all I can on the office–and it wouldn’t sell for its debts.”
“You ought to keep your home, I think,” put in Mrs. Dexter quickly, who had her husband’s approving nod.
“They told me,” said the father, “that Mary didn’t feel that way about it. I couldn’t get her. But that was the word she sent.”
“Father,” said Grant with the glow in his face that had died for a minute, “let’s take the chance. Let’s check it up to God good and hard. Let’s sell the house and give it all to those who have lost more than we. We can earn the rent, anyway.”
Mrs. Dexter looked significantly at Kenyon.
“No, that shouldn’t count, either,” said Grant stubbornly. “Dick Bowman didn’t let his boy count when I needed help, and when hundreds of orphaned boys and girls and widows need our help, we shouldn’t hold back for Kenyon.”
“Grant,” said the father when the visit was ended and the two were alone, “they say your father has no sense–up town. Maybe I haven’t. I commune with these great minds; maybe they too are shadows. But they come from outside of me.” He ran his fingers through his graying beard and smiled. “Mr. Left brings me things that are deeper and wiser than the things I know–it seems to me. But they all bear one testimony, Grant; they all tell me that it’s the spiritual things and not the material things in this world that count in the long run, and, Grant, boy,” the father reached for his son’s strong hand, “I would rather have seen the son that has come back to me from death, go back to death now, if otherwise I never could have seen him. They told me your mother was with you. And now I know some way she touched your heart out there in the dark–O Grant, boy, while you spoke I saw her in your face–in your face I saw her. Mary–Mary,” cried the weeping old man, “when you sent me back to the war you looked as he looked to-day, and talked so.”
“Father,” said Grant, “I don’t know about your Mr. Left. He doesn’t interest me, as he does you, and as for the others–they may be true or all a mockery, for anything I know. But,” he exclaimed, “I’ve seen God face to face and I can’t rest until I’ve given all I am–everything–everything to help those men!”
Then the three went out into the crisp January air–father and son and little Kenyon bundled to the chin. They walked over the prairies under the sunshine and talked together through the short winter afternoon. At its close they were in the timber where the fallen leaves were beginning to pack against the tree trunks and in the ravines. The child listened as the wind played upon its harp, and the rhythm of the rising and falling tide of harmony set his heart a-flutter, and he squeezed his father’s fingers with delight. A redbird flashing through the gray and brown picture gave him joy, and when it sang far down the ravine where the wind organ seemed to be, the child’s eyes brimmed and he dropped behind the elders a few paces to listen and be alone with his ecstasy. And so in the fading day they walked home. The quail piped for the child, and the prairie chicken pounded his drum, and in the prairie grass the slanting sun painted upon the ripples across the distant, rolling hills many pictures that filled the child’s heart so full that he was still, as one who is awed with a great vision. And it was a great vision that filled his soul: the sunset with its splendors, the twilight hovering in the brown woods, the prairie a-quiver with the caresses of the wind, winter-birds throbbing life and ecstasy into the picture, and above and around it all a great, warm, father’s heart symbolizing the loving kindness of the infinite to the child’s heart.