“And what is the name of your story?” Mrs. Denton asked, and before he could tell her she said, “Oh, yes; I forgot,” and he knew that they must have talked of it together. He wondered if Miss Hughes had read it “Talking of names,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think my sister’s got the queerest one: Peace. Isn’t it a curious name?”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Ray. “The Spanish give it a great deal, I believe.”
“Do they? It was a name that mother liked; but she had never heard of it, although there were so many Faiths, Hopes, and Charities. She died just a little while after Peace was born, and father gave her the name.”
Ray was too young to feel the latent pathos of the lightly treated fact “It’s a beautiful name,” he said again.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Denton, “and it’s so short you can’t nick it There can’t be anything shorter than Peace, can there?”
“Truce,” Ray suggested, and this made them laugh.
The young girl rose and went to the window, and began looking over the plants in the pots there. Ray made bold to go and join her.
“Are you fond of flowers?” she asked gently, and with a seriousness as if she really expected him to say truly.
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought,” he answered, thinking how pretty she was, now he had her face where he could see it fully. Her hair was of the indefinite blonde tending to brown, which most people’s hair is of; her sensitive face was cast in the American mould that gives us such a high average of good looks in our women; her eyes were angelically innocent When she laughed, her lip caught on her upper teeth, and clung there; one of the teeth was slightly broken; and both these little facts fascinated Ray. She did not laugh so much as Mrs. Denton, whose talk she let run on with a sufferance like that of an older person, though she was the younger. She and Ray stood awhile there playing the game of words in which youth hides itself from its kind, and which bears no relation to what it is feeling. The charm of being in the presence of a lovely and intelligent girl enfolded Ray like a caressing atmosphere, and healed him of all the hurts of homesickness, of solitude. Their talk was intensely personal, because youth is personal, and they were young; they thought that it dealt with the different matters of taste they touched on, but it really dealt with themselves, and not their preferences in literature, in flowers, in cats, in dress, in country and city. Ray was aware that they were discussing these things in a place very different from the parlors where he used to enjoy young ladies’ society in Midland; it was all far from the Midland expectation of his career in New York society. He recalled how, before the days of his social splendor in Midland, he had often sat and watched his own mother and sisters about their household work, which they did for themselves, while they debated the hopes and projects of his future, or let their hearts out in jest and laughter. Afterwards, he would not have liked to have this known among the fashionable people in Midland, with whom he wished to be so perfectly comme il faut.
From time to time Mrs. Denton dropped the cat out of her lap, and ran out to pull the wire which operated the latch of the street door; and then Ray heard her greeting some corner and showing him into the front room, where presently he heard him greeting her father. At last there was a sound below as of some one letting himself in with a latch-key, and then came the noises of the perambulator wheels bumping from step to step as it was pulled up. Mrs. Denton sat still, and kept on talking to Ray, but her sister went out to help her husband; and reappeared with a sleeping twin in her arms, and carried it into the room adjoining. The husband, with his pale face flushed from his struggle with the perambulator, came in with the other, and when he emerged from the next room again, Mrs. Denton introduced him to Ray.
“Oh, yes,” he said; “I saw you with Mr. Kane.” He sat down a moment at the other window, and put his bare head out for the air. “It has grown warm,” he said.
“Was the Park very full?” his wife asked.
“Crowded. It’s one of their last chances for the year.”
“I suppose it made you homesick.”
“Horribly,” said the husband, with his head still half out of the window. He took it in, and listened with the tolerance of a husband while she explained him to Ray.
“My husband’s so homesick for the old Family place — it was a pretty place! — that he almost dies when he goes into the Park; it brings it all back so. Are you homesick, too, Mr. Ray?”
“Well, not exactly for the country,” said Ray “I’ve been homesick for the place I came from — for Midland, that is.”
“Midland?” Denton repeated. “I’ve been there. I think those small cities are more deadly than New York. They’re still trying to get rid of the country, and New York is trying to get some of it back. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be a city, big or little, on the whole continent.” He did not wait for any reply from Ray, but he asked his wife, “Who’s come?”
She mentioned a number of names, ten or twelve, and he said, “We’d better go in,” and without further parley he turned toward the curtained avenue to the front room.
XVI.
IN the front room the little assemblage had the effect of some small religious sect The people were plainly dressed in a sort of keeping with their serious faces; there was one girl who had no sign of a ribbon or lace about her, and looked like a rather athletic boy in her short hair and black felt hat, and her jacket buttoned to her throat She sat with her hands in the side pockets of her coat, and her feet pushed out beyond the hem of her skirt There were several men of a foreign type, with beards pointed and parted; an American, who looked like a school-master, and whose mouth worked up into his cheek at one side with a sort of mechanical smile when he talked, sat near a man who was so bald as not to have even a spear of hair anywhere on his head. The rest were people who took a color of oddity from these types; a second glance showed them to be of the average humanity; and their dress and its fashion showed them to be of simple condition. They were attired with a Sunday consciousness and cleanliness, though one gentleman, whose coat sleeves and seams were brilliant with long use, looked as if he would be the better for a little benzining, where his moustache had dropped soup and coffee on his waistcoat; he had prominent eyes, with a straining, near-sighted look.
Kane sat among them with an air at once alert and aloof; his arms were folded, and he glanced around from one to another with grave interest They were all listening, when Ray came in, to a young man who was upholding the single-tax theory, with confidence and with eagerness, as something which, in its operation, would release the individual energies to free play and to real competition. Hughes broke in upon him:
“That is precisely what I object to in your theory. I don’t want that devil released. Competition is the Afreet that the forces of civilization have bottled up after a desperate struggle, and he is always making fine promises of what he will do for you if you will let him out. The fact is he will do nothing but mischief, because that is his nature. He is Beelzebub, he is Satan; in the Miltonic fable he attempted to compete with the Almighty for the rule of heaven; and the fallen angels have been taking the consequence ever since. Monopoly is the only prosperity. Where competition is there can be finally nothing but disaster and defeat for one side or another. That is self-evident Nothing succeeds till it begins to be a monopoly. This holds good from the lowest to the highest endeavor — from the commercial to the aesthetic, from the huckster to the artist. As long, for instance, as an author is young and poor” — Ray felt, looking down, that the speaker’s eye turned on him—” he must compete, and his work must be deformed by the struggle; when it becomes known that he alone can do his kind of work, he monopolizes and prospers in the full measure of his powers; and he realizes his ideal unrestrictedly. Competition enslaves, monopoly liberates. We must, therefore, have the greatest possible monopoly; one that includes the whole people economically as they are now included politically. Try to think of competition in the political administration as we now have it in the indus
trial. It isn’t thinkable! Or, yes! They do have it in those Eastern countries where the taxes are farmed to the highest bidder, and the taxpayer’s life is ground out of him.”
“I think,” said the school-masterly-looking man, “we all feel this instinctively. The trusts and the syndicates are doing our work for us as rapidly as we could ask.”
A voice, with a German heaviness of accent, came from one of the foreigners. “But they are not doing it for our sake, and they mean to stop distinctly short of the whole-people trust. As far back as Louis Napoleon’s rise we were expecting the growth of the corporate industries to accomplish our purposes for us. But between the corporation and the collectivity there is a gulf — a chasm that has never yet been passed.”
“We must bridge it!” cried Hughes.
A young man, with a clean-cut, English intonation, asked, “Why not fill it up with capitalists?”
“No,” said Hughes, “our cause should recognize no class as enemies.”
“I don’t think it matters much to them whether we recognize them or not, if we let them have their own way,” said the young man, whose cockney origin betrayed itself in an occasional vowel and aspirate.
“We shall not let them have their own way unless it is the way of the majority, too,” Hughes returned.
“From my point of view they are simply and purely a part of the movement, as entirely so as the proletariat.”
“The difficulty will be to get them to take your point of view,” the young man suggested.
“It isn’t necessary they should,” Hughes answered, “though some of them do already. Several of the best friends of our cause are capitalists; and there are numbers of moneyed people who believe in the nationalization of the telegraphs, railroads, and expresses.”
“Those are merely the first steps,” urged the young man, “which may lead now’ere.”
“They are the first steps,” said Hughes, “and they are not to be taken over the bodies of men. We must advance together as brothers, marching abreast, to the music of our own heart-beats.”
“Good!” said Kane. Ray did not know whether he said it ironically or not. It made the short-haired girl turn round and look at him where he sat behind her.
“We, in Russia,” said another of the foreign-looking people, “have seen the futility of violence. The only force that finally prevails is love; and we must employ it with those that can feel it best — with the little children. The adult world is hopeless; but with the next generation We may do something — everything. The highest office is the teacher’s, but we must become as little children if we would teach them, who are of the kingdom of heaven. We must begin by learning of them.”
“It appears rather complicated,” said the young Englishman, gayly; and Ray heard Kane choke off a laugh into a kind of snort.
“Christ said He came to call sinners to repentance,” said the man who would have been the better for benzining. “He evidently thought there was some hope of grown-up people if they would cease to do evil.”
“And several of the disciples were elderly men,” the short-haired girl put in.
“Our Russian friend’s idea seems to be a version of our Indian policy,” said Kane. “Good adults, dead adults.”
“No, no. You don’t understand, all of you,” the Russian began, but Hughes interrupted him.
“How would you deal with the children?”
“In communities here, at the heart of the trouble, and also in the West, where they could be easily made self-supporting.”
“I don’t believe in communities,” said Hughes. “If anything in the world has thoroughly failed, it is communities. They have failed all the more lamentably when they have succeeded financially, because that sort of success comes from competition with the world outside. A community is an aggrandized individual; it is the extension of the egoistic motive to a large family, which looks out for its own good against other families, just as a small family does. I have had enough of communities. The family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work, or by starving to death. But this great family — the real human family — must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing its roots and its branches out under and over them, till they have no longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of the whole field of production and distribution.”
“Very slowly,” said the young Englishman; and he laughed.
The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray, at times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could get those queer zealots into a book, they would be amusing material, though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk; he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.
“Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it possible that you have not thought of them?”
Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said, hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, “No, I have never thought of them at all.”
“It is time you did,” said Hughes. “All other interests must yield to them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the name, till the money-stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is honored, not paid.”
The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if he would like to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth; her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.
Hughes went on: “I find it easier to forgive enmity than indifference; he who is not for us is against us in the worst sense. Our cause has a sacred claim upon all generous and enlightened spirits; they are recreant if they neglect it. But we must be patient, even with indifference; it is hard to bear, but we cannot fight it, and we must bear it. Nothing has astonished me more, since my return to the world, than to find the great mass of men living on, as when I left it, in besotted indifference to the vital interests of the hour. I find the politicians still talking of the tariff, just as they used to talk; low tariff and cheap clothes for the working-man; high tariff and large wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work he starves in his den till he is evicted with a ruthlesness unknown in the history of Irish oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and he hasn’t risen himself yet to the conception of anything more philosophical than more pay and fewer hours.”
A sad-faced man spoke from a corner of the room. “We must have time to think, and something to eat to-day. We can’t wait till to-morrow.”
“That is true,” Hughes answered. “Many must perish by the way. But we must have patience.”
His son-in-law spoke up, and his gloomy face darkened. “I have no heart for patience. When I see people perishing by the way, I ask myself how they shall be saved, not some other time, but now. Some one is guilty of the wrong they suffer. How shall the sin be remitted?” His voice shook with fanatical passion.
“We must have patience,” Hughes repeated. “We are all guilty.”
“It would be a good thing,” said the man with a German accent, “if the low-tariff men would really cut off the duties. The high-tariff men don’t put wages up because they have protection, b
ut they would surely put them down if they didn’t have it. Then you would see labor troubles everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Hughes; “but such hopes as that would make me hate the cause, if anything could. Evil that good may come? Never! Always good, and good for evil, that the good may come more and more! We must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise.”
The spirit which he rebuked had unlocked the passions of those around him. Ray had a vision of them in the stormy dispute which followed, as waves beating and dashing upon the old man; the head of the bald man was like a buoy among the breakers, as it turned and bobbed about, in his eagerness to follow all that was said.
Suddenly the impulses spent themselves, and a calm succeeded. One of the men looked at his watch; they all rose one after another to go.
Hughes held them a little longer. “I don’t believe the good time is so far off as we are apt to think in our indignation at wrong. It is coming soon, and its mere approach will bring sensible relief. We must have courage and patience.”
Ray and Kane went away together. Mrs. Denton looked at him with demure question in her eyes when they parted; Peace imparted no feeling in her still glance. Hughes took Ray’s little hand in his large, loose grasp, and said:
“Come again, young man; come again!”
XVII.
“If ever I come again,” Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the street, “I think I shall know it!” He abhorred all sorts of social outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled with a sense of personal injury from Hughes’s asking him to take part in their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of favor done which he must not allow to become painful.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 518
