Common Cause

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

39

  Such advantage as the bee may boast over the butterfly is proverbially supposed to inhere in its industrious habits. But Miss Marcia Ames, now adopting the schedule of the bee at its busiest, found her earlier butterfly proclivities of advantage in that they had put her in touch with certain flowers of Fenchester’s social world with which the harder-worked honey-collector might not have been so familiar. Visiting these upon her proselytizing errand, this enterprising flitter, still trailing clouds of glory from her butterflyhood, left behind her the fructifying pollen of the Great Idea. In one respect—to carry the entomological metaphor a step farther—she was like a moth rather than either the butterfly or the bee, since her good works, to be effective, must needs be carried on in the dusk of a semi-secrecy.

  Behold our bee, now, hovering about the garden of that ancient but still lively wasp, Madam Dorothea Taylor, until bidden to alight and state her errand, whereof the venerable one, having already received some hint from her friend, Letitia Pritchard, is alertly suspicious. Accepting the invitation, the visiting bee leads up diplomatically to the first point of risk, the name of Jeremy Robson.

  “A slanderer!” rasps the wasp. “A character-robber. A rag-tag and bob-tail cheap-and-nasty politician!”

  The bee goes on with her musical, conciliatory, and soothing song, and presently mentions The Guardian.

  “Don’t name the rag to me!” blares the enraged wasp. “A filthy sheet! The poison of asps! A mud-slinger! A tool of that torch-and-scaffold, anarchistic harlequin, Martin Embree.”

  “Have you read it lately?” queries the bee.

  “God forbid! I wouldn’t endure a copy in the house.”

  “How fortunate,” hums the bee sweetly, “that I brought only small portions of one or two copies.”

  Cleverly stimulating the other’s curiosity, our cunning bee succeeds in persuading her to look at the clipping wherein Martin Embree, Emil Bausch, and the Kaiser stand forth wreathed in the olive of a mock-pacifism. Now is the wasp’s angry voice hushed, as she peruses this and follows it with the now famous “hyphen” editorial, and the political quittance of Martin Embree.

  “He appears to have lost none of his venom,” observes the reader, “though he is now turning it against his own kind.”

  “They are not his own kind!” The bee for the moment forgets that she is committed to the soft footing of diplomacy. “I will not hear it said that they are his own kind! We are his own kind: we Americans!”

  “Hoity-toity and here’s a to-do!” cries the aged wasp. “Are we, indeed? Not I, you minx! That gullible old fool, Selden Dana, has been preaching from the same text. He wheedled me into withdrawing my libel suit against the young backbiter. Why I was silly enough to do so, I don’t know. Now, what are you asking me to do?”

  “Help,” answers the visiting bee, and sets forth a general outline of her plan.

  “Boycott,” observes the shrewd old wasp, after turning it over in her mind.

  “Oh, not in the least!” disclaims the bee. “That would be illegal.”

  “Pooh! Who cares for laws! Boycott it is, against any merchant who won’t support The Guardian. Isn’t it?”

  “It might appear—”

  “Appear! Don’t hem-and-haw with me, Miss Pert. I can hire Dana to do that. You’re asking the women of this city to boycott the stores that boycott The Guardian.”

  “Dear me, no!” returns the bee demurely. “We are only suggesting a practical method of showing appreciation of Mr. Rob—of The Guardian’s patriotic course. And if you will join our little association and bring your Red Cross work down with you for a few minutes each morning, that is all we ask of you.”

  “Of me! There’s the point. Me! I’ve been libeled and slandered and traduced and held up to public scorn,” sizzles the wasp (who had, since the withdrawal of the suit, enjoyed one last reading of Judge Dana’s comprehensive complaint with stimulating influence upon her style), “and now you have the assurance to ask me to rush to the aid of this reckless young muck-raker. It’s absurd! It’s outrageous! It’s an impudence! It’s an imposition! It’s—it’s—I’ll do it.”

  “I knew you would,” softly says the bee (who hadn’t known anything of the sort, and has, indeed, dreaded this visit above all others). “I do not think you will ever be sorry.”

  “I hope you won’t,” retorts the wasp vigorously and significantly. “That’s a dangerous character, that young Robson. Have a care of him!”

  Having made captive her most difficult subject, the missionary bee now descends upon one hardly less difficult, Mrs. Vernam Merserole, wife (and, if rumor be correct, head of the house) of the “nickel-in-the-slot” rector. Mrs. Merserole, looking meek, according to her practice, but stubborn, according to her character, harks back to past injuries, and talks darkly of defamers of character as one might say “persecutors of the saints.”

  “That was before we were at war, Mrs. Merserole,” her caller reminds her.

  Mrs. Merserole looks up quickly from her clasped hands. “You think that today Mr. Robson would not make an unprincipled attack upon—upon a clergyman who did nothing more than his duty?”

  Diplomatic though her errand be, Marcia will not pass this challenge to her truthfulness. “I do not say that. Nor do I admit that what he wrote was unprincipled. He wrote what he believed. He would do that again tomorrow. But I do know that he is a broader and more charitable man than he was then.”

  “War does not change men’s characters, Miss Ames,” says the rector’s wife austerely.

  “Then God help the men!” bursts out Marcia. “And God help the country!”

  “Why, my dear!” says the older woman, shaken by the girl’s vehemence. “You think it does? Perhaps you’re right. Yes; I think you’re right. But Mr. Robson—”

  “Mrs. Merserole,” breaks in Marcia with apparent irrelevance, “I have heard that your boy picked out the aviation service because it is the most dangerous, and that you told him that he had done what you would choose him to do.”

  The other does not reply. But her lips quiver, and her tightly clasped fingers press in on each other. Marcia lays her warm, strong little hand over them.

  “You have done a great thing like that. And now I ask you to do a little thing. To forget an old injury.”

  “But Mr. Merserole—he feels toward The Guardian—I cannot express it to you,” falters the other.

  “The Guardian is a forlorn hope,” returns Marcia. “Mr. Robson is sacrificing it and with it all his ambitions and his future for the sake of a principle. That is his part in the war; the only part he can play.”

  “Is it? I had heard otherwise.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “That he persuaded a doctor to declare him unfit.”

  “That is a lie,” declares Marcia calmly, and gives the facts. “Who told you the lie?” she asks, at the close of the recital.

  The other hesitates. “Mrs. Robert Wanser,” she says, at length. “I will speak to the rector about your plan,” she adds, and, by her tone, Marcia knows that she has won another recruit.

  So from house to house flits the busy bee, arguing here, pleading there, feeling her way cautiously in doubtful places and always imposing secrecy until the organization shall be completed; enlisting trustworthy lieutenants,—Miss Pritchard; little Anne Serviss, vice-president of the senior class at Old Central; Magnus Laurens’s daughter, who comes down from the country to hot and dusty Fenchester to help; Miss Abbie Rappelje, sister of the Professor of Economics; Mrs. Montrose Clark; and, chiefest of all, the wary and wily Judge Selden Dana, . . . who, by the way, is working out a little scheme of his own all the time, in which Marcia is no more than a pawn, and without saying a word to her about it. Trust Dana for that!

  While these processes were moving more or less bumpily on their appointed course outside The Guardian office, those wheels within wheels, upon which Andrew Galpin had philosophically animadverted, were whirling at an accelerated pace inside. The postponeme
nt of The Fair Dealer’s publication day had been a blow to certain developing plans in The Guardian’s press-room. When a labor leader has sedulously fomented ill-feeling, worked it almost to the point of explosion, promised the malcontents another job at increased pay if they strike to order on a certain date, and then had that date unavoidably postponed, his position becomes difficult and his next step doubtful. Such was the situation in the press-room of The Guardian. It was accentuated by the fact that The Guardian’s editor had taken to editorializing quite frankly upon certain developments in the labor world outside, thereby furnishing extra incentive to the waiting strikers, for, radical though he was, Jeremy held himself as free to criticize labor as capital when he deemed it in the wrong. In fact he was in the midst of a mid-afternoon editorial for the morrow on “Labor and the War,” when he came out of the fog of mental toil into a sensation of something wrong, something lacking. The presses had stopped. Surely it wasn’t time for the run to be over! No; his watch marked four-ten.

  From above sounded the scuffling of feet; a door opened and a furious, hard-breathing voice shouted an oath. Now there was a hubbub of voices, dull in the distance, and the floor shook lightly under some impact. Jeremy got to his feet, shaking and sweating. To such a condition of nerves had the overwork and overstrain of the last few weeks reduced him. He forced himself toward the door—when, with a roar and a clack, the presses took up their rhythm again, making sweet music for the relief of his beleaguered mind.

  He returned to his editorial. But the savor of the work had gone. He was too deeply preoccupied with what had happened upstairs. That was Galpin’s department; he made it a practice not to interfere. Yet, until the last run was off the presses and the machinery was silenced, he sat, intent and speculating.

  The clang of a gong sounded outside. From his window he caught a glimpse of a departing ambulance. Was there some connection between that and the turmoil above? The men had not come down, though it was past time. He decided to go to the press-room and investigate.

  On the top step he stopped short. Somebody was making a speech. Surely that was Nick Milliken’s voice—Milliken, who had been threatened with arrest if he returned! Milliken’s voice and Milliken’s propaganda, for he was saying:

  “Someday we’ll own this stick-in-the-mud old plant, all of us together. We’ll own it and run it for the common good and the common profit. Someday we’ll own all production, and run it for the common good and the common profit! That’ll come. But that ain’t our job now, comrades. We’ve got something else on hand, first.”

  The editor and owner of the plant, thus cavalierly committed to common control, laid his hand on the knob of the door, but paused to hear the speaker’s next words:

  “Now about this strike: I’m for the strike. I’m for any strike—at the right time. But this ain’t the time. Lemme give you a little parable, comrades.”

  Jeremy sat upon the top step and listened to the parable of Milliken, the Socialist. When it was over he tiptoed quietly down the stairs and into his own office. There he lay in wait until he heard the meeting break up and the tramp of descending feet. Standing sentry, he intercepted the speaker and called him into the sanctum.

  “Will you come back to the job?” said Jeremy.

  “Sure!” returned the other. He was spent and haggard, but his eyes were alight with triumph. “I was never off it.”

  “I heard your speech—part of it—enough so I knew I had you wrong.”

  “It did the business. The strike’s spoiled.”

  “Off?”

  “Might as well be. There’ll be six or seven Germans quit. But they can’t do much without Girdner. He’s the one that’s been playing merry hell with the whole show.”

  “Where’s Girdner?”

  “Hospital.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He fell downstairs,” said Milliken casually but happily.

  “Oh! Unassisted?”

  “He threw me out of the meeting. Easy picking for him. You’d be surprised to see how quick he hustled me through the door,” said the other regretfully. “He might have hurt me bad; I wouldn’t be surprised. He was real rough with me. Then, just as we got to the top of the stairs, one of my arms took to flopping round kind of general, and he got hit on the jaw. Queer how things come back to you!” observed the white-haired Socialist, with surpassing innocence. “It never came into my mind till then that I once spent two years in a fighters’ stable.”

  “I see,” said. Jeremy thoughtfully. “No—I don’t know. I thought you Socialists—”

  “I thought you capitalists—” interrupted the other with instant retort.

  Jeremy laughed.

  “I guess you were an American before you were a Socialist.”

  “When I can’t be both I’ll quit being either,” answered the other fiercely.

  “I do see!” said the other. “You’re in that same trench with Judge Dana, where it makes no difference who or what a man is so long as he fights on the level and to a finish.”

  “I guess I am—comrade!” said Milliken, the Socialist.

  40

  Something queer happened to young Mr. Jeremy Robson on the night of July 10th. Despite a lumpy sensation in the back of his neck and his habitual effect of being absolutely fagged out by the day’s work, he had gone to bed with the resilient assurance of youth that he would awake refreshed and fit in the morning. Instead, he woke up feeling aged beyond the power of the mind to grasp: a mere crumbling ruin, compared to which the pyramid of Cheops was a parvenu and the Druidic altars of Stonehenge the mushroom growth of a paltry yesterday. Worse than this, there was a dregsy, bitter taste in his soul. It grew and spread; and presently as he lay miserably wondering at it, developed into a gall-and-worm-wood loathing of the circumstanding world’s activities, but particularly of his work, the purposeless, futile, inexorable toil of The Guardian, daily re-galvanized into the appearance of life, but in reality doomed to swift and hopeless dissolution.

  For a moment his thoughts turned from hatred to Marcia. A receding vision, “the lands of Dream among,” hopelessly beyond the reach of a Failure. Inexpressibly old, Mr. Jeremy Robson wrote “Finis” upon the scroll of his fate and sat up in bed the better to contemplate the wreckage which had been himself. Immediately things began to revolve in his head. Wheels. Andrew Galpin’s wheels. Wheels of all sizes and brutally distorted shapes whirling in counter-directions with an imbecile and nauseous suavity, weaving into unendurable patterns the warp and woof of his comprehensive hatred.

  “Bosh!” said Jeremy Robson. He stood up and promptly fell down.

  “Too much pressure,” pronounced Doc Summerfield, arriving at speed. “You stop, young man, or you’ll be stopped.”

  “Give me something to steady me up,” begged Jeremy. “I’ve got to go to the office today!”

  “Have you?” returned the physician grimly. “Drink this.”

  Sleep descended powerfully upon Jeremy, blotting out hatreds and worries and all other considerations for the time. It held him in its toils for successive days and nights; how many he could not have told. Once he woke up, quite clear in his head, and looked out across a broad piazza, through elms and shrubbery upon the crested lake, and was about to congratulate himself upon his recovery (though he could not quite figure out to what pleasant spot he had been translated) when Mrs. Montrose Clark came into the room—which was, of course, delirium—and asked him how he felt and whether he was hungry. Later Doc Summerfield arrived, declined to explain, said, “Drink this” (he was always and forever saying, “Drink this”) “and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  So, on the morrow—or it might have been the following century for all Jeremy knew—Doc Summerfield came back and delivered a syncopated monologue:

  “Yes. You are at Mr. Montrose Clark’s cottage . . . No; you certainly can’t go home. Don’t be a jackass! . . . No; the paper hasn’t gone up. It’s doing very well without you . . . No; of course you’
re not going down to the office. Don’t be a fool! . . . Heart? No; it isn’t your heart. It’s nerves. Overwork. That’s all. Don’t be a ninny . . . Certainly you’ll be all right. In a few days, if you’ll behave yourself and not act like a blithering simpleton . . . Drink this.”

  What seemed to Jeremy so long and uncertain a period was, in reality, only a little over a week. Came a day when the Montrose Clarks sent him out for a ride with their chauffeur, otherwise unattended, and he prevailed upon that guileless youth to take him to the office.

  “Don’t wait. I’ll telephone,” said he, and made for his den.

  At first, as he entered, he felt a qualm of nausea. This passed, to be succeeded by a dull languor. He shook this off and, finding that wheels no longer revolved within his head when he tried to think, he decided that he was fit for work. Pursuing this theory, he settled to his work-table when the door burst open and Andrew Galpin rushed in.

  “Where the devil—” he began and started back as from an apparition. “For the love of Mike!” he shouted. “Where did you come from?”

  “The Montrose Clark cottage.”

  “Go back! Get out! You ought to be in bed.”

  “I have been. I’m tired of it.”

  “What would Doc Summerfield say?”

  “The usual thing: ‘Drink this.’ What do you suppose he’d say to you?”

  The general manager was red, perspiring, and disheveled, and there was a vague, wild, and incomprehensible gleam in his eye.

  “Me? What’s he got to do with me?”

  “How do I know? You don’t look—well, normal.”

  “Don’t I!” retorted his subordinate with some heat. “Then just lemme tell you that I’m the only normal gink left in the business. I’m sane; that’s what’s the matter with me! That’s what makes me look so queer and feel so lonely.”

  “You’d have to prove it to me,” retorted his chief. “That’s because you’ve got it, too. Only yours takes a different form from the rest. Go back to bed, Boss. But first, where’s that file of special contracts?”