Poor White: Chapter 21

Chapter 21

It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that
stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the
cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. In the corn
fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay
the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights
and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at
long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the
silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening
went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer's
wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. The hoofs of his horse
beat a soft tattoo on the roads. His sweetheart sat beside him and he was
in no hurry. All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow
he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until
the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse
and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.

Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and
then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the
roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence
corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting
away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.

Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields
the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting,
delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color.
As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand
shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.

In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not
yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing
lights--beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer
night--had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the
terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of
rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in
prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities. Detroit and
Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor
cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was
still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle
repair shop in Detroit.

It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country
doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long
intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked
toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the
lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other
summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things
were astir.

Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own
way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew
with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell
that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. Something
happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Heads wagged,
special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the great hive of men
was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that had so suddenly
become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were planted in new soil, in
American soil.

Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motor
car ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads. The
motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughter Clara
with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom had brought the
car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him had taught him the
art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early in the evening he had
run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter and son-in-law for their
first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him and after they had started and
were clear of the town, Tom turned to him. "Now watch me step on her tail,"
he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up
from the Cleveland mechanic.

As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back
seat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years she
had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had
married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then
darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly
increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her
father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life.
"Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?" she asked
herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long
stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air
like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no
husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold
of life, but life has slipped through my fingers."

Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside
himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father.
She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could
not find. "The fault must be in me," she told herself. "He's all right, but
what's the matter with me?"

After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than
once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when
he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was a wall a blow
could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow. The wall was
shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her
husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping
room.

Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she and Hugh,
as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darkness she put up
her hand to touch her husband's face and hair. He lay still and she had the
impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp
sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.

When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.

The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke
forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress
toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it were
evening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lighted house
where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness would help the
effort they were both making to tear away the wall. They walked along a
lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge across the stream
that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talk of the work
at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. They came to a fence
where the lane turned and from where they could look down the hillside and
into the town. He did not look at Clara but stared down the hillside and
the words, in regard to the mechanical difficulties that had occupied his
mind all day, ran on and on. When later they went back to the house he felt
a little relieved. "I've said words. There is something achieved," he
thought.

* * * * *

And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motor
with her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftly through
the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm,
through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long,
straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted
the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the
fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold
and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled
air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its
persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also
disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where
fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns
sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened
horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in
wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to
hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had,
she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with
her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to
take possession of her.

And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against the
machine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom with his
new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summer moon came
up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over the shoulders of the
hills south of the farmhouse.

Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth's
shop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victory
over his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he had been
telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons and store, and
now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house he went to a saloon
and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after
which he swaggered through the streets to the door of the shop. Although
he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim did not lack energy, and his
employer's shop was filled with work demanding attention. For a week both
he and Joe had been returning to their work benches every evening. Jim
wanted to come because some driving influence within made him love the
thought of keeping the work always on the move, and Joe because Jim made
him come.

Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that
evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the
superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought
on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not
organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred
the town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fifty or
sixty men had decided to quit. "We won't work for a fellow like Ed Hall,"
they declared. "He sets a scale of prices and then, when we have driven
ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts the scale."
Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and two or three of
them, developing unexpected eloquence, began delivering speeches on street
corners. On the next day the strike spread and for several days the shop
had been closed. Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day
of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were
to be brought in.

And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into
the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and
McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were
being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a
man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the
corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained
factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or
necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the
workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads.
They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's
words. "I tell you what," said a little old workman, pulling nervously at
his graying mustache, "I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of
talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government,
that's what he's doing." The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The
Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their
demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and
socialists. Many of the laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of
pioneers who had opened up the country where the great sprawling towns were
now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great
Civil War. During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government
out of the very air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books
talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been
Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come
Lincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-American country
had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and
oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.

And now there had come among them men who had no reverence for government.
What a speaker for the first time dared say openly on the streets of
Bidwell, had already been talked in the shops. The new men, the foreigners
coming from many lands, had brought with them strange doctrines. They
began to make acquaintances among the American workmen. "Well," they said,
"you've had great men here; no doubt you have; but you're getting a new
kind of great men now. These new men are not born out of people. They're
being born out of capital. What is a great man? He's one who has the
power. Isn't that a fact? Well, you fellows here have got to find out that
nowadays power comes with the possession of money. Who are the big men of
this town?--not some lawyer or politician who can make a good speech, but
the men who own the factories where you have to work. Your Steve Hunter and
Tom Butterworth are the great men of this town."

The socialist, who had come to speak on the streets of Bidwell, was a
Swede, and his wife had come with him. As he talked his wife made figures
on a blackboard. The old story of the trick by which the citizens of the
town had lost their money in the plant-setting machine company was revived
and told over and over. The Swede, a big man with heavy fists, spoke of the
prominent citizens of the town as thieves who by a trick had robbed their
fellows. As he stood on the box beside his wife, and raising his fists
shouted crude sentences condemning the capitalist class, men who had gone
away angry came back to listen. The speaker declared himself a workman like
themselves and, unlike the religious salvationists who occasionally spoke
on the streets, did not beg for money. "I'm a workman like yourselves," he
shouted. "Both my wife and myself work until we've saved a little money.
Then we come out to some town like this and fight capital until we're
busted. We've been fighting for years now and we'll keep on fighting as
long as we live."

As the orator shouted out his sentences he raised his fist as though to
strike, and looked not unlike one of his ancestors, the Norsemen, who
in old times had sailed far and wide over unknown seas in search of the
fighting they loved. The men of Bidwell began to respect him. "After all,
what he says sounds like mighty good sense," they declared, shaking their
heads. "Maybe Ed Hall isn't any worse than any one else. We got to break
up the system. That's a fact. Some of these days we got to break up the
system."

* * * * *

Jim Gibson got to the door of Joe's shop at half-past seven o'clock.
Several men stood on the sidewalk and he stopped and stood before them,
intending to tell again the story of his triumph over his employer. Inside
the shop Joe was already at his bench and at work. The men, two of them
strikers from the corn-cutting machine plant, complained bitterly of the
difficulty of supporting their families, and a third man, a fellow with a
big black mustache who smoked a pipe, began to repeat some of the axioms
in regard to industrialism and the class war he had picked up from the
socialist orator. Jim listened for a moment and then, turning, put his
thumb on his buttocks and wriggled his fingers. "Oh, hell," he sneered,
"what are you fools talking about? You're going to get up a union or get
into the socialist party. What're you talking about? A union or a party
can't help a man who can't look out for himself."

The blustering and half intoxicated harness maker stood in the open shop
door and told again and in detail the story of his triumph over his
employer. Then another thought came and he spoke of the twelve hundred
dollars Joe had lost in the stock, of the plant-setting machine company.
"He lost his money and you fellows are going to get licked in this fight,"
he declared. "You're all wrong, you fellows, when you talk about unions or
joining the socialist party. What counts is what a man can do for himself.
Character counts. Yes, sir, character makes a man what he is."

Jim pounded on his chest and glared about him.

"Look at me," he said. "I was a drunkard and down and out when I came to
this town; a drunkard, that's what I was and that's what I am. I came here
to this shop to work, and now, if you want to know, ask any one in town who
runs this place. The socialist says money is power. Well, there's a man
inside here who has the money, but you bet I've got the power."

Slapping his knees with his hands Jim laughed heartily. A week before, a
traveling man had come to the shop to sell machine-made harness. Joe had
ordered the man out and Jim had called him back. He had placed an order for
eighteen sets of the harness and had made Joe sign the order. The harness
had arrived that afternoon and was now hung in the shop. "It's hanging in
the shop now," Jim cried. "Go see for yourself."

Triumphantly Jim walked up and down before the men on the sidewalk, and
his voice rang through the shop where Joe sat on his harness-maker's horse
under a swinging lamp hard at work. "I tell you, character's the thing
that counts," the roaring voice cried. "You see I'm a workingman like you
fellows, but I don't join a union or a socialist party. I get my way. My
boss Joe in there's a sentimental old fool, that's what he is. All his life
he's made harnesses by hand and he thinks that's the only way. He claims he
has pride in his work, that's what he claims."

Jim laughed again. "Do you know what he did the other day when that
traveler had gone out of the shop and after I had made him sign that
order?" he asked. "Cried, that's what he did. By God, he did,--sat there
and cried."

Again Jim laughed, but the workmen on the sidewalk did not join in his
merriment. Going to one of them, the one who had declared his intention of
joining the union, Jim began to berate him. "You think you can lick Ed Hall
with Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth back of him, eh?" he asked sharply.
"Well, I'll tell you what--you can't. All the unions in the world won't
help you. You'll get licked--for why?

"For why? Because Ed Hall is like me, that's for why. He's got character,
that's what he's got."

Growing weary of his boasting and the silence of his audience, Jim started
to walk in at the door, but when one of the workmen, a pale man of fifty
with a graying mustache, spoke, he turned to listen. "You're a suck, a suck
and a lickspittle, that's what you are," said the pale man, his voice
trembling with passion.

Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalk
with a blow of his fist. Two of the other workmen seemed about to take up
the cause of their fallen brother, but when in spite of their threats Jim
stood his ground, they hesitated. They went to help the pale workman to his
feet, and Jim went into the shop and closed the door. Climbing onto his
horse he went to work, and the men went off along the sidewalk, still
threatening to do what they had not done when the opportunity offered.

Joe worked in silence beside his employee and night began to settle down
over the disturbed town. Above the clatter of many voices in the street
outside could be heard the loud voice of the socialist orator who had taken
up his stand for the evening at a nearby corner. When it had become quite
dark outside, the old harness maker climbed down from his horse and going
to the front door opened it softly and looked up and down the street. Then
he closed it again and walked toward the rear of the shop. In his hand
he held his harness-maker's knife, shaped like a half moon and with an
extraordinarily sharp circular edge. The harness maker's wife had died
during the year before and since that time he had not slept well at night.
Often for a week at a time he did not sleep at all, but lay all night with
wide-open eyes, thinking strange, new thoughts. In the daytime and when Jim
was not about, he sometimes spent hours sharpening the moon-shaped knife on
a piece of leather; and on the day after the incident of the placing of the
order for the factory-made harness he had gone into a hardware store and
bought a cheap revolver. He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to
the workmen outside. When Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation he
had stopped sewing at the broken harness in his vise and, getting up, had
taken the knife from its hiding-place under a pile of leather on a bench to
give its edge a few last caressing strokes.

Holding the knife in his hand Joe went with shambling steps toward the
place where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed to lie
over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenly ceased.
Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on which Jim sat,
life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-like tread. Joy
shone in his eyes. As though warned of something impending, Jim turned and
opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but his words never found their
way to his lips. The old man made a peculiar half step, half leap past the
horse, and the knife whipped through the air. At one stroke he had
succeeded in practically severing Jim Gibson's head from his body.

There was no sound in the shop. Joe threw the knife into a corner and ran
quickly past the horse where the body of Jim Gibson sat upright. Then the
body fell to the floor with a thump and there was the sharp rattle of
heels on the board floor. The old man locked the front door and listened
impatiently. When all was again quiet he went to search for the knife he
had thrown away, but could not find it. Taking Jim's knife from a bench
under the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body and climbed upon his horse
to turn out the lights.

For an hour Joe stayed in the shop with the dead man. The eighteen sets of
harness shipped from a Cleveland factory had been received that morning,
and Jim had insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks along the shop
walls. He had bullied Joe into helping hang the harnesses, and now Joe took
them down alone. One by one they were laid on the floor and with Jim's
knife the old man cut each strap into little pieces that made a pile of
litter on the floor reaching to his waist. When that was done he went again
to the rear of the shop, again stepping almost carelessly over the dead
man, and took the revolver out of the pocket of an overcoat that hung by
the door.

Joe went out of the shop by the back door, and having locked it carefully,
crept through an alleyway and into the lighted street where people walked
up and down. The next place to his own was a barber shop, and as he hurried
along the sidewalk, two young men came out and called to him. "Hey," they
called, "do you believe in factory-made harness now-days, Joe Wainsworth?
Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harness?"

Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road. A
group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestures with
their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growing city,
past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressing a crowd
of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it had been in the
moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson. The crowds of
people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon by a crowd and hanged
to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of
voices in the street. "We've got to take power into our hands. We've got to
carry on our own battle for power," the voice declared.

The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing
affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to
kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson.
In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear
was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening's
work. He was quite sure that had his wife been alive she would have
understood what had happened. She had always understood everything he did
or said. He remembered his courtship. His wife had been a country girl and
on Sundays, after their marriage, they had gone together to spend the day
in the wood. After Joe had brought his wife to Bidwell they continued the
practice. One of his customers, a well-to-do farmer, lived five miles north
of town, and on his farm there was a grove of beech trees. Almost every
Sunday for several years he got a horse from the livery stable and took his
wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for
an hour, while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and
went into the beech forest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches
of the trees, and when the two people had remained silent for a time,
hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them.
Joe had brought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering
little animals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered
away. One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot
one of the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from the
farmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of a tree,
and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leaned against
him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quivering thing on the
ground. When it lay still the boy came and picked it up. Still Joe said
nothing. Taking his wife's arm he walked to where they were in the habit of
sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts to scatter on the ground.
The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman,
had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and did
not want his wife to see, and she pretended she had not seen.

On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm
and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of
dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to
a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the
stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light
a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, who
had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the
plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times
to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as
machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold
anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him. Something danced
before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had
taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised
it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched
forward to the sidewalk.

Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand,
Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his
way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down.
It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near
the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been
Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wife to the farm
and the beech forest.

But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did
not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it some way," he
thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding
in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech
forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often
sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. "I'll rest a
little and then I'll think how I can do it," he thought wearily, holding
his head in his hands. "I mustn't go to sleep. If they find me they'll hurt
me. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They'll hurt me
before I have a chance to kill myself," he repeated, over and over, holding
his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.

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