In the Heart of a Fool

The Doctor had lighted his pipe, and was puffing meditatively. He liked to hear his daughter talk. He took little stock in what she said. But when she asked him for help–he gave it to her unstinted, but often with a large, tolerant disbelief in the wisdom of her request. As she paused he turned to her quickly, “Laura–tell me, what do you make out of Grant?”

He eyed her sharply as she replied: “Father, Grant is a lonely soul without chick or child, and I’m sorry for him. He goes–”

“Well, now, Laura,” piped the little man, “don’t be too sorry. Sorrow is a dangerous emotion.”

The daughter turned her face to her father frankly and said: “I realize that, father. Don’t concern yourself about that. But I see Grant some way, eating the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, calling out to a stiff-necked generation to repent. His eyes are focussed on to-morrow. He expects an immediate millennium. But he is at least looking forward, not back. And the world back of us is so full of change, that I am sure the world before us also must be full of change, and maybe sometime we shall arrive at Grant’s goal. He’s not working for himself, either in fame or in power, or in any personal thing. He’s just following the light as it is given him to see it, here among the poor.”

The daughter lifted a face full of enthusiasm to her father. He puffed in silence. “Well, my dear, that’s a fine speech. But when I asked you about Grant I was rising to a sort of question of personal privilege. I thought perhaps I would mix around at his meeting to-night! If you think I should, just kind of stand around to give him countenance–and,” he chuckled and squeaked: “To bundle up a few votes!”

“Do, father–do–you must!”

“Well,” squeaked the little voice, “so long as I must I’m glad to know that Tom made it easy for me, by turning all of Harvey and the Valley over to Grant at the riot last night. Why, if Tom tried to stop Grant’s meeting to-night Market Street itself would mob Tom–mob the very Temple of Love.” The Doctor chuckled and returned to his own affairs. “Being on the winning side isn’t really important. But it’s like carrying a potato in your pocket for rheumatism: it gives a feller confidence. And after all, the devil’s rich and God’s poor have all got votes. And votes count!” He grinned and revived his pipe.

He was about to speak again when Laura interrupted him, “Oh, father–they’re not God’s poor, whose ever they are. Don’t say that. They’re Daniel Sands’s poor, and the Smelter Trust’s poor, and the Coal Trust’s poor, and the Glass and Cement and Steel company’s poor. I’ve learned that down here. Why, if the employers would only treat the workers as fairly as they treat the machines, keeping them fit, and modern and bright, God would have no poor!”

The Doctor rose and stretched and smiled indulgently at his daughter. “Heigh-ho the green holly,” he droned. “Well, have it your way. God’s poor or Dan’s poor, they’re my votes, if I can get ’em. So we’ll come to the meeting to-night and blow a few mouthfuls on the fires of revolution, for the good of the order!”

He would have gone, but his daughter begged him to stay and dine with her in South Harvey, before they went to the meeting. So for an hour the Doctor sat in his daughter’s office by the window, sometimes giving attention to the drab flood of humanity passing along the street as the shifts changed for evening in the mines and smelters, and then listening to the day’s stragglers who came and went through his daughter’s office: A father for medicine for a child, a mother for advice, a breaker boy for a book, a little girl from the glass works for a bright bit of sewing upon which she was working, a woman from Violet Hogan’s room with a heartbreak in her problem, a group of women from little Italy with a complaint about a disorderly neighbor in their tenement, a cripple from the mines to talk over his career, whether it should be pencils or shoe strings, or a hand organ, or some attempt at handicraft; the head of a local labor union paying some pittance to Laura, voted by the men to help her with her work; a shy foreign woman with a badly spelled note from her neighbor, asking for flower seeds and directions translated by Laura into the woman’s own language telling how to plant the seeds; a belated working mother calling for the last little tot in the nursery and explaining her delay. Laura heard them all and so far as she could, she served them all. The Doctor was vastly proud of the effective way in which she dispatched her work.

It was six o’clock, but the summer sun still was high and the traffic in the street was thick. For a time, while a woman with a child with shriveled legs was talking to Laura about the child’s education, the Doctor sat gazing into the street. When the room was empty, he exclaimed, “It’s a long weary way from the sunshine and prairie grass, child! How it all has changed with the years! Ten years ago I knew ’em all, the men and the employers. Now they are all newcomers–men and masters. Why, I don’t even know their nationalities; I don’t even know what part of the earth they come from. And such sad-faced droves of them; so many little scamps, underfed, badly housed for generations. The big, strapping Irish and Germans and Scotch and the wide-chested little Welshmen, and the agile French–how few of them there are compared with this slow-moving horde of runts from God knows where! It’s been a long time since I’ve been down here to see a shift change, Laura. Lord–Lord have mercy on these people–for no one else seems to care!”

“Amen, and Amen, father,” answered the daughter. “These are the people that Grant is trying to stir to consciousness. These are the people who–”

“Well, yes,” he turned a sardonic look upon his daughter, “they’re the boys who voted against me the last time because Tom and Dan hired a man in every precinct to spread the story that I was a teetotaler, and that your mother gave a party on Good Friday–and all because Tom and Dan were mad at me for pushing that workingmen’s compensation bill! But now I look at ’em–I don’t blame ’em! What do they know about workingmen’s compensation!” The Doctor stopped and chuckled; then he burst out: “I tell you, Laura, when a man gets enough sense to stand by his friends–he no longer needs friends. When these people get wise enough not to be fooled by Tom and old Dan, they won’t need Grant! In the meantime–just look at ’em–look at ’em paying twice as much for rent as they pay up town: gouged at the company stores down here for their food and clothing; held up by loan sharks when they borrow money; doped with aloes in their beer, and fusil oil in their whiskey, wrapped up in shoddy clothes and paper shoes, having their pockets picked by weighing frauds at the mines, and their bodies mashed in speed-up devices in the mills; stabled in filthy shacks without water or sewers or electricity which we uptown people demand and get for the same money that they pay for these hog-pens–why, hell’s afire and the cows are out–Laura! by Godfrey’s diamonds, if I lived down here I’d get me some frisky dynamite and blow the whole place into kindling.” He sat blinking his indignation; then began to smile. “Instead of which,” he squeaked, “I shall endeavor by my winning ways to get their votes.” He waved a gay hand and added, “And with God be the rest!”

Towering above a group of workers from the South of Europe–a delegation from the new wire mill in Plain Valley, Grant Adams came swinging down the street, a Gulliver among his Lilliputians. Although it was not even twilight, it was evident to the Doctor that something more than the changing shifts in the mills was thickening the crowds in the street. Little groups were forming at the corners, good-natured groups who seemed to know that they were not to be molested. And the Doctor at his window watched Grant passing group after group, receiving its unconscious homage; just a look, or a waving hand, or an affectionate, half-abashed little cheer, or the turning of a group of heads all one way to catch Grant’s eyes as he passed.

At the Captain’s vacant lot, Grant rose before a cheering throng that filled the lot, and overflowed the sidewalk and crowded far down the street. Two flickering torches flared at his head. An electric in front of the Hot Dog and a big arc-light over the door of the smelter lighted the upturned faces of the multitude. When the crowd had ceased cheering, Grant, looking into as many eyes of his hearers as he could catch, began:

“I have come to talk to Esau–the disinherited–to Esau who has forfeited his birthright. I am here to speak to those who are toiling in the world’s rough work unrequited–I am here, one of the poor to talk to the poor.”

His voice held back so much of his strength, his gaunt, awkward figure under the uncertain torches, his wide, impassioned gestures, with the carpenter’s nail claw always before his hearers, made him a strange kind of specter in the night. Yet the simplicity of his manner and the directness of his appeal went to the hearts of his hearers. The first part of his message was one of peace. He told the workers that every inch they gained they lost when they tried to overcome cunning with force. “The dynamiter tears the ground from under labor–not from under capital; he strengthens capital,” said Grant. “Every time I hear of a bomb exploding in a strike, or of a scab being killed I think of the long, hard march back that organized labor must make to retrieve its lost ground. And then,” he cried passionately, and the mad fanatic glare lighted his face, “my soul revolts at the iniquity of those who, by craft and cunning while we work, teach us the false doctrine of the strength of force, and then when we use what they have taught us, point us out in scorn as lawbreakers. Whether they pay cash to the man who touched the fuse or fired the gun or whether they merely taught us to use bombs and guns by the example of their own lawlessness, theirs is the sin, and ours the punishment. Esau still has lost his birthright–still is disinherited.”

He spoke for a time upon the aims of organization, and set forth the doctrine of class solidarity. He told labor that in its ranks altruism, neighborly kindness that is the surest basis of progress, has a thousand disintegrated expressions. “The kindness of the poor to the poor, if expressed in terms of money, would pay the National debt over night,” he said, and, letting out his voice, and releasing his strength, he begged the men and women who work and sweat at their work to give that altruism some form and direction, to put it into harness–to form it into ranks, drilled for usefulness. Then he spoke of the day when class consciousness would not be needed, when the unions would have served their mission, when the class wrong that makes the class suffering and thus marks the class line, would disappear just as they have disappeared in the classes that have risen during the last two centuries.

“Oh, Esau,” he cried in the voice that men called insane because of its intensity, “your birthright is not gone. It lies in your own heart. Quicken your heart with love–and no matter what you have lost, nor what you have mourned in despair, in so much as you love shall it all be restored to you.”

They did not cheer as he talked. But they stood leaning forward intently listening. Some of his hearers had expected to hear class hatred preached. Others were expecting to hear the man lash his enemies and many had assumed that he would denounce those who had committed the mistakes of the night before. Instead of giving his hearers these things, he preached a gospel of peace and love and hope. His hearers did not understand that the maimed, lean, red-faced man before them was dipping deeply into their souls and that they were considering many things which they had not questioned before.

When he plunged into the practical part of his speech, an explanation of the allied unions of the Valley, he told in detail something of the ten years’ struggle to bring all the unions together under one industrial council in the Wahoo Valley, and listed something of the strength of the organization. He declared that the time had come for the organization to make a public fight for recognition; that organization in secret and under cover was no longer honorable. “The employers are frankly and publicly allied,” said Grant. “They have their meetings to talk over matters of common interest. Why should not the unions do the same thing? The smelter men, the teamsters, the miners, the carpenters, the steel workers, the painters, the glass workers, the printers–all the organized men and women in this district have the same common interests that their employers have, and we should in no wise be ashamed of our organization. This meeting is held to proclaim our pride in the common ground upon which organized labor stands with organized capital in the Wahoo Valley.”

He called the rolls of the unions in the trades council and for an hour men stood and responded and reported conditions among workers in their respective trades. It was an impressive roll call. After their organization had been completed, a great roar of pride rose and Grant Adams threw out his steel claw and leaning forward cried:

“We have come to bring brotherhood into this earth. For in the union every man sacrifices something to the common good; mutual help means mutual sacrifice, and self-denial is brotherly love. Fraternity and democracy are synonymous. We must rise together by self-help. I know how easy it is for the rich man to become poor. I know that often the poor man becomes rich. But when Esau throws off the yoke of Jacob, when the poor shall rise and come into their own, the rise shall not be as individuals, but as a class. The glass workers are better paid than the teamsters; but their interests are common, and the better paid workers cannot rise except their poorly paid fellow workmen rise with them. It is a class problem and it must have a class solution.”

Grant Adams stood staring at the crowd. Then he spread out his two gaunt arms and closed his eyes and cried: “Oh, Esau, Esau, you were faint and hungry in that elder day when you drank the red pottage and sold your birthright. But did you know when you bartered it away, that in that bargain went your children’s souls? Down here in the Valley, five babies die in infancy where one dies up there on the hill. Ninety per cent. of the boys in jail come from the homes in the Valley and ten per cent. from the homes on the hill. And the girls who go out in the night, never to come home–poor girls always. Crime and shame and death were in that red pottage, and its bitterness still burns our hearts. And why–why in the name of our loving Christ who knew the wicked bargain Jacob made–why is our birthright gone? Why does Esau still serve his brother unrequited?” Then he opened his eyes and cried stridently–“I’ll tell you why. The poor are poor because the rich are rich. We have been working a decade and a half in this Valley, and profits, not new capital, have developed it. Profits that should have been divided with labor in wages have gone to buy new machines–miles and miles of new machines have come here, bought and paid for with the money that labor earned, and because we have not the machines which our labor has bought, we are poor–we are working long hours amid squalor surrounded with death and crime and shame. Oh, Esau, Esau, what a pottage it was that you drank in the elder day! Oh, Jacob, Jacob, wrestle, wrestle with thy conscience; wrestle with thy accusing Lord; wrestle, Jacob, wrestle, for the day is breaking and we will not let thee go! How long, O Lord, how long will you hold us to that cruel bargain!”

He paused as one looking for an answer–hesitant, eager, expectant. Then he drew a long breath, turned slowly and sadly and walked away.

No cheer followed him. The crowd was stirred too deeply for cheers. But the seed he had sown quickened in a thousand hearts even if in some hearts it fell among thorns, even if in some it fell upon stony ground. The sower had gone forth to sow.