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Youth Challenges

by Clarence Budington Kelland · English · Gutenberg #5797 · 578,250 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Youth Challenges

Author: Clarence Budington Kelland


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5797]
                Most recently updated: June 3, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5797

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH CHALLENGES ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.









Youth Challenges

By

CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

AUTHOR OF

"The Little Moment of Happiness," "The High Flyers," "Sudden Jim," "The
Source," "The Hidden Spring," etc.






CHAPTER I


Bonbright Foote VI arose and stood behind the long table which served
him as a desk and extended his hand across it. His bearing was that of
a man taking a leading part in an event of historic importance.

"My son," said he, "it gratifies me to welcome you to your place in
this firm." Then he smiled. When Bonbright Foote VI smiled it was as
though he said to himself, "To smile one must do thus and so with the
features," and then systematically put into practice his instructions.
It was a cultured smile, one that could have been smiled only by a
gentleman conscious of generations of correct antecedents; it was an
aristocratic smile. On the whole it was not unpleasant, though so
excellently and formally done.

"Thank you, father," replied Bonbright Foote VII. "I hope I shall be of
some use to you."

"Your office is ready for you," said his father, stepping to a door
which he unlocked with the gravity of a man laying a corner stone.
"This door," said he, "has not been opened since I took my place at the
head of the business--since I moved from the desk you are to occupy to
the one in this room. It will not be closed again until the time
arrives for you to assume command. We have--we Footes--always regarded
this open door as a patent token of partnership between father and son."

Young Foote was well acquainted with this--as a piece of his family's
regalia. He knew he was about to enter and to labor in the office of
the heir apparent, a room which had been tenantless since the death of
his grandfather and the consequent coronation of his father. Such was
the custom. For twelve years that office had been closed and waiting.
None had ventured into it, except for a janitor whose weekly dustings
and cleanings had been performed with scrupulous care. He knew that
Bonbright Foote VI had occupied the room for seventeen years. Before
that it had stood vacant eleven years awaiting for Bonbright Foote VI
to reach such age and attainments as were essential. Young Foote
realized that upon the death of his father the office would be closed
again until his son, Bonbright Foote VIII, should be equipped, by time
and the university founded by John Harvard, to enter as he was entering
to-day. So the thing had been done since the first Bonbright Foote
invested Bonbright Foote II with dignities and powers.

Father and son entered the long-closed office, a large, indeed a
stately room. It contained the same mahogany table at which Bonbright
Foote II had worked; the same chairs, the same fittings, the same
pictures hung on the walls, that had been the property of the first
crown prince of the Foote dynasty. It was not a bright place,
suggestive of liveliness or gayety, but it was decorously inviting--a
place in which one could work with comfort and satisfaction.

"Let me see you at your desk," said the father, smiling again. "I have
looked forward to seeing you there, just as you will look forward to
seeing YOUR son there."

Bonbright sat down, wondering if his father had felt oppressed as HE
felt oppressed at this moment. He had a feeling of stepping from one
existence into another, almost of stepping from one body, one identity,
to another. When he sat at that desk he would be taking up, not his own
career, but the career of the entity who had occupied this office
through generations, and would occupy it in perpetual succession.
Vaguely he began to miss something. The sensation was like that of one
who has long worn a ring on his finger, but omits to put it on one
morning. For that person there is a vague sense of something missing
throughout the day. Bonbright did not know what he felt the lack of--it
was his identity.

"For the next month or so," said his father, "about all you can hope to
do is to become acquainted with the plant and with our methods. Rangar
will always be at your disposal to explain or to give you desired
information. I think it would be well if he were to conduct you through
the plant. It will give you a basis to work from."

"The plant is still growing, I see," said Bonbright. "It seems as if a
new building were being put up every time I come home."

"Yes, growing past the prophecy of any of our predecessors," said his
father. He paused. "I am not certain," he said, as one who asks a
question of his inner self, "but I would have preferred a slower, more
conservative growth."

"The automobile has done it, of course."

"Axles," said his father, with a hint of distaste. "The manufacturing
of rear axles has overshadowed everything else. We retain as much of
the old business--the manufacturing of machinery--as ever. Indeed, THAT
branch has shown a healthy growth. But axles! A mushroom that has
overgrown us in a night."

It was apparent that Bonbright Foote VI did not approve of axles, as it
was a known fact that he frowned upon automobiles. He would not own one
of them. They were too new, too blatant. His stables were still
stables. His coachman had not been transmuted into a chauffeur. When he
drove it was in a carriage drawn by horses--as his ancestors had driven.

"Yes... yes..." he said, slowly, with satisfaction, "it is good to have
you in the business, son. It's a satisfaction to see you sitting
there.... Now we must look about to find a suitable girl for you to
marry. We must begin to think about Bonbright Foote VIII." There was no
smile as he said this; the observation was made in sober earnest.
Bonbright saw that, just as his ancestors looked to him to carry on the
business, so they looked to him to produce with all convenient dispatch
a male successor to himself. It was, so to speak, an important feature
of his job.

"I'll send in Rangar," said his father, not waiting for Bonbright to
reply to the last suggestion, and walked with long-legged dignity out
of the room.

Bonbright rested his chin on his palm and stared gloomily at the wall.
He felt bound and helpless; he saw himself surrounded by firm and
dignified shades of departed Bonbright Footes whose collective wills
compelled him to this or prohibited that course of action.

Adventure, chance, were eliminated from his life. He was to be no
errant musician, improvising according to his mood; the score he was to
play was before him, and he must play it note for note, paying strict
attention to rests, keys, andantes, fortissimos, pianissimos. He had
been born to this, had been made conscious of his destiny from
babyhood, but never had he comprehended it as he did on this day of his
investiture.

Even the selection and courting of a mate, that greatest of all
adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother
already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her.
... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled him
most.

"I'll see about that," he muttered, rebelliously, "I'll see about that."

Not that marriage was of importance to him yet, except as a thing to be
avoided until some dim future. Women had not assumed consequence to
him; his relations with them had been scant surface relations. They
were creatures who did or did not please the eye, who did or did not
dance well, who did or did not amuse one. That was all. He was only
twenty-three.

Rangar, his father's secretary, and the man who stood as shield between
Bonbright Foote VI and unpleasant contacts with his business and the
world's business, entered. Rangar was a capable man whose place as
secretary to the head of the business did not measure his importance in
the organization. Another man of his abilities and opportunity and
position would have carried the title of general manager or vice
president--something respect-carrying. As for Rangar, he was content.
He drew the salary that would have accompanied those other titles,
possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to
remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished
the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights
between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills
and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable
to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a
competent, efficient man, if peculiar in his ambitions.

"Your father," said he, "has asked me to show you through the plant."

"Thank you--yes," said Bonbright, rising.

They went out, passing from the old, the family, wing of the office
building, into the larger, newer, general offices, made necessary by
the vastly increased business of the firm. Here, in a huge room, were
bookkeepers, stenographers, clerks, filing cabinets, desks,
typewriters--with several cubicles glassed off for the more important
employees and minor executives.

"We have tried," said Rangar, "to retain as far as possible the old
methods and systems. Your father, Mr. Foote, is conservative. He clings
to the ways of his father and his grandfather."

"I remember," said Bonbright, "when we had no typewriting machines."

"We had to come to them," said Rangar, with a note of regret. "Axles
compelled us. But we have never taken up with these new
contraptions--fads--like phonographs to dictate to, card indices,
loose-leaf systems, adding machines, and the like. Of course it
requires more clerks and stenographers, and possibly we are a bit
slower than some. Your father says, however, that he prefers conducting
his business as a gentleman should, rather than to make a mere machine
of it. His idea," said Rangar, "of a gentleman in business is one who
refuses to make use of abbreviations in his correspondence."

Bonbright was looking about the busy room, conscious that he was being
covertly studied by every occupant of it. It made him uncomfortable,
uneasy.

"Let's go on into the shops," he said, impatiently.

They turned, and encountered in the aisle a girl with a stenographer's
notebook in her hand; indeed, Bonbright all but stepped on her. She was
a slight, tiny thing, not thin, but small. Her eyes met Bonbright's
eyes and she grinned. No other word can describe it. It was not an
impertinent grin, nor a familiar grin, nor a COMMON grin. It was
spontaneous, unstudied--it lay at the opposite end of the scale from
Bonbright Foote VI's smile. Somehow the flash of it COMFORTED
Bonbright. His sensations responded to it. It was a grin that radiated
with well wishes for all the world. Bonbright smiled back, awkwardly,
and bobbed his head as she stepped aside for him to pass.

"What a grin!" he said, presently.

"Oh," said Rangar. "Yes--to be sure. The Girl with the Grin--that's
what they call her in the office. She's always doing it. Your father
hasn't noticed. I hope he doesn't, for I'm sure he wouldn't like it."

"As if," said Bonbright to himself, "she were happy--and wanted
everybody else to be."

"I'm sure I don't know," said Rangar. "She's competent."

They passed outside and through a covered passageway into the older of
the shops. Bonbright was not thinking about the shops, but about the
girl. She was the only thing he had encountered that momentous morning
that had interested him, the only thing upon which Bonbright Foote,
Incorporated, had not set the stamp of its repressing personality.

He tried to visualize her and her smile that he might experience again
that sensation of relief, of lightened spirit. In a measure he was able
to do so. Her mouth was large, he saw--no small mouth could have
managed that grin. She was not pretty, but, somehow, attractive. Her
eyes were bully; intelligent, humorous sort of eyes, he decided.

"Bet she's a darn nice kid," he concluded, boyishly. His father would
have been shocked at a thought expressed in such words.

"The business has done wonders these last five years," said Rangar,
intruding on Bonbright's thoughts. "Five years ago we employed less
than a thousand hands; to-day we have more than five thousand on the
payroll. Another few years and we shall have ten thousand."

"Axles?" asked Bonbright, mechanically.

"Axles," replied Rangar.

"Father doesn't approve of them--but they must be doing considerable
for the family bank account."

Rangar shot a quick glance at the boy, a glance with reproof in it for
such a flippancy. Vaguely he had heard that this young man had done
things not expected from a Foote; had, for instance, gone in for
athletics at the university. It was reported he had actually allowed
himself to be carried once on the shoulders of a cheering mob of
students! There were other rumors, also, which did not sit well on the
Foote tradition. Rangar wondered if at last a Foote had been born into
the family who was not off the old piece of cloth, who might, indeed,
prove difficult and disappointing. The flippancy indicated it.

"Our inventory," he said, severely, "five years ago, showed a trifle
over a million dollars. To-day these mills would show a valuation of
five millions. The earnings," he added, "have increased in even greater
ratio."

"Hum," said Bonbright, his mind already elsewhere. His thought,
unspoken, was, "If we've got so blamed much, what's the use piling it
up?"

At noon they had not finished the inspection of the plant; it was well
toward five o'clock when they did so, for Rangar did his duty
conscientiously. His explanations were long, careful, technical.
Bonbright set his mind to the task and listened well. He was even
interested, for there were interesting things to see, processes
requiring skilled men, machines that had required inventive genius to
devise. He began to be oppressed by the bigness of it. The plant was
huge; it was enormously busy. The whole world seemed to need axles,
preferably Foote axles, and to need them in a hurry.

At last, a trifle dazed, startled by the vastness of the domain to
which he was heir apparent, Bonbright returned to the aloof quiet of
his historic room.

"I've a lot to learn," he told Rangar.

"It will grow on you.... By the way, you will need a secretary." (The
Footes had secretaries, not stenographers.) "Shall I select one for
you?"

"Yes," said Bonbright, without interest; then he looked up quickly.
"No," he said, "I've selected my own. You say that girl--the one who
grinned--is competent?"

"Yes, indeed--but a girl! It has been the custom for the members of the
firm to employ only men."

Bonbright looked steadily at Rangar a moment, then said:

"Please have that girl notified at once that she is to be my secretary."

"Yes, sir," said Rangar. The boy WAS going to prove difficult. He owned
a will. Well, thought the man, others may have had it in the family
before--but it has not remained long.

"Anything more, Mr. Foote?"

"Thank you, no," said Bonbright, and Rangar said good evening and
disappeared.

The boy rested his chin on his hand again, and reflected gloomily. He
hunched up his shoulders and sighed. "Anyhow," he said to himself,
"I'll have SOMEBODY around me who is human."




CHAPTER II


Bonbright's father had left the office an hour before he and Rangar had
finished their tour of the works. It was always his custom to leave his
business early and to retire to the library in his home, where daily he
devoted two hours to adding to the manuscript of The Philosophical
Biography of Marquis Lafayette. This work was ultimately to appear in
several severe volumes and was being written, not so much to enlighten
the world upon the details of the career of the marquis as it was to
utilize the marquis as a clotheshorse to be dressed in Bonbright Foote
VI's mature reflections on men, events, and humanity at large.

Bonbright VII sat at his desk motionless, studying his career as it lay
circumscribed before him. He did not study it rebelliously, for as yet
rebellion had not occurred to him. The idea that he might assert his
individuality and depart from the family pattern had not ventured to
show its face. For too many years had his ancestors been impressing him
with his duty to the family traditions. He merely studied it, as one
who has no fancy for geometry will study geometry, because it cannot be
helped. The path was there, carefully staked out and bordered; to-day
his feet had been placed on it, and now he must walk. As he sat he
looked ahead for bypaths--none were visible.

The shutting-down whistle aroused him. He walked out through the
rapidly emptying office to the street, and there he stood, interested
by the spectacle of the army that poured out of the employees'
entrances. It was an inundation of men, flooding street from sidewalk
to sidewalk. It jostled and joked and scuffled, sweating, grimy, each
unit of it eager to board waiting, overcrowded street cars, where acute
discomfort would be suffered until distant destinations were reached.
Somehow the sight of that surging, tossing stream of humanity impressed
Bonbright with the magnitude of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, even
more than the circuit of the immense plant had done.

Five thousand men, in a newspaper paragraph, do not affect the
imagination. Five thousand men in the concrete are quite another
matter, especially if you suddenly realize that each of them has a
wife, probably children, and that the whole are dependent upon the
dynasty of which you are a member for their daily bread.

"Father and I," he said to himself, as the sudden shock of the idea
impacted against his consciousness, "are SUPPORTING that whole mob."

It gave him a sense of mightiness. It presented itself to him in that
instant that he was not a mere business man, no mere manufacturer, but
a commander of men--more than that, a lord over the destinies of men.
It was overwhelming. This realization of his potency made him gasp.
Bonbright was very young.

He turned, to be carried on by the current. Presently it was choked. A
stagnant pool of humanity formed around some center, pressing toward it
curiously. This center was a tiny park, about which the street divided,
and the center was a man standing on a barrel by the side of a sign
painted on cloth. The man was speaking in a loud, clear voice, which
was able to make itself perfectly audible even to Bonbright on the
extreme edge of the mass.

"You are helpless as individuals," the man was saying. "If one of you
has a grievance, what can he do?... Nothing. You are a flock of
sheep.... If ALL of you have a grievance, what can you do? You are
still a pack of sheep.... Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, owns you, body
and soul.... Suppose this Foote who does you the favor to let you earn
millions for him--suppose he wants to buy his wife a diamond
necklace.... What's to prevent him lowering your wages next week to pay
for it?... YOU couldn't stop him!... Why can an army beat a mob of
double its numbers? Because the army is ORGANIZED! Because the army
fights as one man for one object!... You are a mob. Capital is
organized against you.... How can you hope to defend yourselves? How
can you force a betterment of your conditions, of your wage?... By
becoming an army--a labor army!... By organizing.... That's why I'm
here, sent by the National Federation--to organize you. To show you how
to resist!... To teach you how to make yourselves irresistible!..."
There were shouts and cheers which blotted out the speaker's words.
Then Bonbright heard him again:

"Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, is entitled to fair interest on the
money it has invested in its plant. It is entitled to a fair profit on
the raw materials it uses in manufacture.... But how much of the final
cost of its axles does raw material represent? A fraction! What gives
the axles the rest of their value?... LABOR! You men are paid two,
three, some of you even four dollars a day--for your labor. Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, adds a little pig iron to your labor, and gives
you a place to work in, and takes his millions of dollars a year.... Do
you get your fair share?... You do NOT, and you will never get a
respectable fraction of your fair share till you organize--and seize
it."

There was more. Bonbright had never heard the like of it before and it
fascinated him. Here was a point of view that was new to him. What did
it mean? Vaguely he had heard of Socialism, of labor unions, of the
existence of a spirit of suspicion and discord between capital and
labor. Now he saw it, face uncovered starkly.

A moment before he had realized his power over these men; now he
perceived that these men, some of them, realized it even better than
he.... Realized it and resented it; resented it and fought with all the
strength of their souls to undermine it and make it topple in ruin.

His mind was a caldron into which cross currents of thought poured and
tossed. He had no experience to draw on. Here was a thing he was being
plunged into all unprepared. It had taken him unprepared, and shaken
him as he had never been shaken before. He turned away.

Half a dozen feet away he saw the Girl with the Grin--not grinning now,
but tense, pale, listening with her soul in her eyes, and with the
light of enthusiasm glowing beside it.

He walked to her side, touched her shoulder.... It was unpremeditated,
something besides his own will had urged him to speak to her.

"I don't understand it," he said, unsteadily.

"Your class never does," she replied, not sharply, not as a retort, but
merely as one states a fact to give enlightenment.

"My father," she said, "was killed leading the strikers at Homestead.
... The unions educated me."

"What is this man--this speaker--trying to do? Stir up a riot?"

She smiled. "No. He is an organizer sent by the National Federation.
... They're going to try to unionize our plant."

"Unionize?"

"Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," she said, "is a non-union shop."

"I didn't know," said he, after a brief pause. "I'm afraid I don't
understand these things.... I suppose one should know about them if he
is to own a plant like ours." Again he paused while he fumbled for an
idea that was taking shape. "I suppose one should understand about his
employees just as much as he does about his machinery."

She looked at him with a touch of awakened interest. "Do you class men
with machinery?" she asked, well knowing that was not his meaning. He
did not reply. Presently he said:

"Rangar told you you were to be my secretary?"

"Yes, sir," she said, using that respectful form for the first time.
The relation of employer and employee had been re-established by his
words. "Thank you for the promotion."

"You understand what this is all about," he said. "I shall want to ask
you about it.... Perhaps you even know the man who is speaking?"

"He boards with my mother," said she. "That was natural," she added,
"my father being who he was."

Bonbright turned and looked at the speaker with curiosity awakened as
to the man's personality. The man was young--under thirty, and handsome
in a black, curly, quasi-foreign manner.

Bonbright turned his eyes from the man to the girl at his side. "He
looks--" said Bonbright.

"How?" she asked, when it was apparent he was not going to finish.

"As if," he said, musingly, "he wouldn't be the man to call on for a
line smash in the last quarter of a tough game."

Suddenly the speech came to an end, and the crowd poured on.

"Good night," said the girl. "I must find Mr. Dulac. I promised I would
walk home with him."

"Good night," said Bonbright. "His name is Dulac?"

"Yes."

Men like Dulac--the work they were engaged upon--had not fallen within
the circle of Bonbright's experience. Bonbright's training and
instincts had all been aristocratic. At Harvard he had belonged to the
most exclusive clubs and had associated with youths of training similar
to his. In his athletics there had been something democratic, but
nothing to impress him with democracy. Where college broadens some men
by its contacts it had not broadened Bonbright, for his contacts had
been limited to individuals chipped from the same strata as himself....
In his home life, before going to college, this had been even more
marked. As some boys are taught arithmetic and table manners, Bonbright
had been taught veneration for his family, appreciation for his
position in the world, and to look upon himself and the few associates
of his circumscribed world as selected stock, looked upon with especial
favor and graciousness by the Creator of the universe.

Therefore this sudden dip into reality set him shivering more than it
would another who entered the water by degrees. It upset him.... The
man Dulac stirred to life in him something that was deeper than mere
curiosity.

"Miss--" said he, and paused. "I really don't know your name."

"Frazer," she supplied.

"Miss Frazer, I should like to meet this Dulac. Would you be willing?"

She considered. It was an unusual request in unusual circumstances, but
why not? She looked up into his boyish face and smiled. "Why not?" she
said, aloud.

They pressed forward through the crowd until they reached Dulac,
standing beside his barrel, surrounded by a little knot of men. He saw
the girl approaching, and lifted his hand in acknowledgment of her
presence. Presently he came to her, casting a careless glance at
Bonbright.

"Mr. Dulac," she said, "Mr. Foote has been listening to your speech. He
wants to meet you."

"Foote!" said Dulac. "Not--"

"Mr. Bonbright Foote," said the girl.

Evidently the man was nonplussed. He stared at Bonbright, who extended
his hand. Dulac looked at it, took it mechanically.

"I heard what you were saying, Mr. Dulac," said Bonbright. "I had never
heard anything like it before--so I wanted to meet you."

Dulac recovered himself, perceived that here was an opportunity, and
spoke loudly so that the staring, interested workingmen, who now
surrounded them, could hear distinctly.

"I'm glad you were present," said he. "It is not often we workingmen
catch the ear of you employers so readily. You sit apart from your men
in comfortable offices or in luxurious homes, so they get little
opportunity to talk straight from the shoulder to you.... Even if they
had the chance," he said, with a look about him, "they would not dare.
To be respectful and to show no resentment mean their bread and butter."

"Resentment?" said Bonbright. "You see I am new to the business and to
this. What is it they resent?"

"They resent being exploited for the profit of men like yourself....
They resent your having the power of life and death over them...."

The girl stood looking from one man to the other; from Dulac, tall,
picturesquely handsome, flamboyant, conscious of the effect of each
word and gesture, to Bonbright, equally tall, something broader,
boyish, natural in his unease, his curiosity. She saw how like he was
to his slender, aristocratic father. She compared the courtesy of his
manner toward Dulac with Dulac's studied brusqueness, conscious that
the boy was natural, honest, really endeavoring to find out what this
thing was all about; equally conscious that Dulac was exercising the
tricks of the platform and utilizing the situation theatrically. Yet he
was utilizing it for a purpose with which she was heart and soul in
sympathy. It was right he should do so....

"I wish we might sit down and talk about it," said Bonbright. "There
seem to be two sides in the works, mine and father's--and the men. I
don't see why there should be, and I'd like to have you tell me. You
see, this is my first day in the business, so I don't understand my own
side of it, or why I should have a side--much less the side of the men.
I hadn't imagined anything of the sort.... I wish you would tell me all
about it. Will you?"

The boy's tone was so genuine, his demeanor so simple and friendly,
that Dulac's weapons were quite snatched from his hands. A crowd of the
men he was sent to organize was looking on--a girl was looking on. He
felt the situation demanded he should show he was quite as capable of
courtesy as this young sprig of the aristocracy, for he knew
comparisons were being made between them.

"Why," said he, "certainly.... I shall be glad to."

"Thank you," said Bonbright. "Good night." He turned to the girl and
lifted his hat. "Thank YOU," said he, and eyes in which there was no
unfriendliness followed him as he walked away, eyes of men whom Dulac
was recruiting for the army of the "other side" of the social struggle.

He hurried home because he wanted to see his father and to discuss this
thing with him.

"If there is a conflict," he said to himself, "in our business,
workingmen against employer, I suppose I am on the employer's side.
THEY have their reasons. We must have our reasons, too. I must have
father explain it all to me."

His mother called to him as he was ascending the stairs:

"Be as quick as you can, Bonbright. We have guests at dinner to-night."

"Some one I know?"

"I think not," His mother hesitated. "We were not acquainted when you
went to college, but they have become very prominent in the past four
years.... Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Lightener--and their daughter,"

Bonbright noticed the slight pause before the mention of the daughter,
and looked quickly at his mother. She looked as quickly away.

"All right, mother," he said.

He went to his room with another disturbance added to the many that
disquieted him. Just as certainly as if his mother had put it into
words he knew she had selected this Lightener girl to be Mrs. Bonbright
Foote VII--and the mother of Bonbright Foote VIII.

"Confound it," he said, "it's started already.... Dam Bonbright Foote
VIII!"




CHAPTER III


Bonbright dressed with a consciousness that he was to be on exhibition.
He wondered if the girl had done the same; if she, too, knew why she
was there and that it was her duty to make a favorable impression on
him, as it was his duty to attract her. It was embarrassing. For a
young man of twenty-three to realize that his family expects him to
make himself alluring to a desirable future wife whom he has never seen
is not calculated to soothe his nerves or mantle him with calmness. He
felt silly.

However, here HE was, and there SHE would be. There was nothing for it
but to put his best foot forward, now he was caught for the event, but
he vowed it would require more than ordinary skill to entrap him for
another similar occasion. It seemed to him at the moment that the main
object of his life thenceforward would be, as he expressed it, "to
duck" Miss Lightener.

When he went down the guests had arrived. His mother presented him,
using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it
always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue--as if she had
said "our Rembrandt," or, "our Chippendale sideboard."

Mrs. Lightener did not impress him. Here was a quiet, motherly
personality, a personality to grow upon one through months and years.
At first meeting she seemed only a gray-haired, shy, silent sort of
person, not to be spoken of by herself as Mrs. Lightener, but in the
reflected rays of her husband, as Malcolm Lightener's wife.

But Malcolm Lightener--he dominated the room as the Laocoon group would
dominate a ten by twelve "parlor." His size was only a minor element in
that impression. True, he was as great in bulk as Bonbright and his
father rolled in one, towering inches above them, and they were tall
men. It was the jagged, dynamic, granite personality of him that jutted
out to meet one almost with physical impact. You were conscious of
meeting a force before you became conscious of meeting a man. And yet,
when you came to study his face you found it wonderfully human--even
with a trace of granite humor in it.

Bonbright was really curious to meet this man, whose story had reached
him even in Harvard University. Here was a man who, in ten years of
such dogged determination as affected one almost with awe, had turned a
vision into concrete reality. In a day when the only mechanical
vehicles upon our streets were trolley cars, he had seen those streets
thronged with "horseless carriages." He had seen streets packed from
curb to curb with endless moving processions of them. He had seen the
nation abandon its legs and take to motor-driven wheels. This had been
his vision, and he had made it reality.

From the place of a master mechanic, at four dollars a day, he had
followed his vision, until the world acknowledged him one of her
richest men, one of her greatest geniuses for organization. In ten
years, lifting himself by his boot straps, he had promoted himself from
earnings of twelve hundred dollars a year to twelve million dollars a
year.... He interested Bonbright as a great adventurer.

To Hilda Lightener he was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be
unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that
any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It
was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none
of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her
eyes had twinkled into his--and he was at his ease. Afterward he
studied over the thing, but could not comprehend it.... It had been as
if he were encountering, after a separation, a friend of years--not a
girl friend, but a friend with no complications of sex.

She was tall, nearly as tall as Bonbright, and she favored her father.
Not that the granite was there. She was not beautiful, not even
pretty--but you liked her looks. Bonbright liked her looks.

At table Bonbright was seated facing Hilda Lightener. His father at
once took charge of the conversation, giving the boy a breathing space
to collect and appraise his impressions. Presently Mr. Foote said,
impressively:

"This is an important day in our family, Lightener. My son entered the
business this morning."

Lightener turned his massive, immobile face toward the boy, his
expression not inviting, yet the seeing might have marked the ghost of
a twinkle in his gray eyes.

"Um.... Any corrections, amendments, or substitutions to offer?" he
demanded.

Bonbright looked at him, obviously not comprehending the sarcasm.

"Most young spriggins I take into MY business," said Lightener, "think
a whole day's experience equips them to take hold and make the whole
thing over.... They can show me where I'm all wrong."

Bonbright smiled, not happily. He was not accustomed to this sort of
humor, and did not know how to respond to it.

"It was so big," he said. "It sort of weighed me down--yet--somehow I
didn't get interested till after the whistle blew."

Lightener grunted.

"That's what interests most of 'em--getting out of the place after the
whistle blows."

"Dad!" said Hilda. "What was it interested you then, Mr. Foote?"

"The men," said Bonbright--"that great mob of men pouring out of the
gates and filling the street.... Somehow they seemed to stand for the
business more than all the buildings full of machinery.... I stood and
watched them."

Interest kindled in Lightener's eyes. "Yes?" he prompted.

"It never occurred to me before that being at the head of a business
meant--meant commanding so many men... meant exercising power over all
those lives.... Then there were the wives and children at home...."

Bonbright's father leaned forward icily. "Son," he said, coldly, "you
haven't been picking up any queer notions in college?"

"Queer notions?"

"Socialistic, anarchistic notions. That sort of thing."

"I don't believe," said Bonbright, with utter honesty, "that I ever
gave the workingman a thought till to-day.... That's why it hit me so
hard, probably."

"It hit you, eh?" said Lightener. He lifted his hand abruptly to motion
to silence Mr. Foote, who seemed about to interrupt. "Leave the boy
alone, Foote.... This is interesting. Never saw just this thing happen
before.... It hit you hard, eh?"

"It was the realization of the power of large employers of labor--like
father and yourself, sir."

"Was that all?"

"At first.... Then there was a fellow on a barrel making a speech about
us.... I listened, and found out the workingmen realize that we are
sort of czars or some such thing--and resent it. I supposed things were
different. This Dulac was sent here to organize our men into a
union--just why I didn't understand, but he promised to explain it to
me."

"WHAT?" demanded Bonbright Foote VI, approaching nearer than his wife
had ever seen him to losing his poise.

"You talked to him?" asked Hilda, leaning forward in her interest.

"I was introduced to him; I wanted to know.... He was a handsome
fellow. Not a gentleman, of course--"

"Oh!" Lightener pounced on that expression. "Not a gentleman, eh?...
Expect to find the Harvard manner in a man preaching riot from a potato
barrel?... Well, well, what did he say? How did HE affect you?"

"He seemed to think the men resented our power over them. Just how
correctly he stated their feeling I don't know, of course. They cheered
his speech, however.... He said father had the power to buy mother a
diamond necklace to-morrow, and cut their wages to pay for it--and they
couldn't help themselves."

"Well--could they?"

"I don't know. I didn't understand it all, but it didn't seem right
that those men should feel that way toward us. I want to talk to father
about it--have him explain it to me."

Lightener chuckled and turned to Mr. Foote. "I don't suppose you
appreciate the humor of that, Foote, the way I do. He's coming to you
for an unbiased explanation of why your employees--feel that way....
Young fellow," he turned to Bonbright again--"I could come closer to
doing it than your father--because I was one of them once. I used to
come home with grease on my hands and a smudge on my nose, smelling of
sweat." Mrs. Foote repressed a shudder and lowered her eyes. "But I
couldn't be fair about it. Your father has no more chance of explaining
the thing to you--than my wife has of explaining the theory of an
internal-combustion engine.... We employers can't do it. We're on the
other side. We can't see anything but our own side of it."

"Come now, Lightener, I'm fair-minded. I've even given some study to
the motives of men."

"And you're writing a book." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of
philosophical reflections that go in books aren't the sort to answer
when you're up against the real thing in social unrest.... In your
whole business life you've never really come into contact with your
men. Now be honest, have you?"

"I've always delegated that sort of thing to subordinates," said Mr.
Foote, stiffly.

"Which," retorted Mr. Lightener, "is one of the reasons for the
unrest.... That's it. We don't understand what they're up against, nor
what we do to aggravate them."

"It's the inevitable warfare between capital and labor," said Mr.
Foote. "Jealousy is at the root of it; unsound theories, like this of
socialism, and too much freedom of speech make it all but unbearable."

"Dulac said they must organize to be in condition to fight us."

"Organize," said Mr. Foote, contemptuously. "I'll have no unions in my
shop. There never have been unions and there never shall be. I'll put a
sudden stop to that.... Pretty idea, when the men I pay wages to, the
men I feed and clothe, can dictate to me how I shall conduct my
affairs."

"Yes," said Lightener, "we automobile fellows are non-union, but how
long we can maintain it I don't know. They have their eyes on us and
they're mighty hungry."

"To-morrow morning," said Mr. Foote, "notices will appear in every
department stating that any man who affiliates with a labor union will
be summarily dismissed."

"Maybe that will end the thing this time, Foote, but it'll be back. It
'll be back."

Hilda leaned forward again and whispered to Bonbright, "You're not
getting much enlightenment, are you?" Her eyes twinkled; it was like
her father's twinkle, but more charming.

"How," he asked, slowly, "are we ever to make anything of it if we, on
the employers' side, can't understand their point of view, and they
can't understand ours?"

Mrs. Foote arose. "Let's not take labor unions into the other room with
us," she said.

Bonbright and Hilda walked in together and immediately engaged in
comfortable conversation; not the sort of nonsense talk usually
resorted to by a young man and a young woman on their first meeting.
They had no awkwardness to overcome, nor was either striving to make an
impression on the other. Bonbright had forgotten who this girl was, and
why she was present, until he saw his mother and Mrs. Lightener
approach each other, cast covert glances in their direction, and then
observe something with evident pleasure.

"They seem attracted by each other," Mrs. Foote said.

"He's a nice boy," replied Mrs. Lightener. "I think you're right."

"An excellent beginning. Propinquity and opportunity ought to do the
rest.... We can see to that."

Bonbright understood what they were saying as if he had heard it; bit
his lips and looked ruefully from the mothers to Hilda. Her eyes had
just swung from the same point to HIS face, and there was a dancing,
quizzical light in them. SHE understood, too. Bonbright blushed at this
realization.

"Isn't it funny?" said Hilda, with a little chuckle. "Mothers are
always doing it, though."

"What?" he asked, fatuously.

"Rubbish!" she said. "Don't pretend not to understand. I knew YOU knew
what was up the moment you came into the room and looked at me. ...
You--dodged."

"I'm sure I didn't," he replied, thrown from his equilibrium by her
directness, her frankness, so like her father's landslide directness.

"Yes, you dodged. You had made up your mind never to be caught like
this again, hadn't you? To make it your life work to keep out of my
way?"

He dared to look at her directly, and was reassured.

"Something like that," he responded, with miraculous frankness for a
Foote.

"Just because they want us to we don't have to do it," she said,
reassuringly.

"I suppose not."

"Suppose?"

"I'm a Foote, you know, Bonbright Foote VII. I do things I'm told to
do. The last six generations have planned it all out for me.... We do
things according to inherited schedules.... Probably it sounds funny to
you, but you haven't any idea what pressure six generations can bring
to bear." He was talking jerkily, under stress of emotion. He had never
opened his mouth on this subject to a human being before, had not
believed it possible to be on such terms with anybody as to permit him
to unbosom himself. Yet here he was, baring his woes to a girl he had
known but an hour.

"Of course," she said, with her soft, throaty chuckle, "if you really
feel you have to.... But I haven't any six generations forcing ME. Or
do you think yours will take me in hand?"

"It isn't a joke to me," he said. "How would you like it if the
unexpected--chance--had been carefully weeded out of your future?... It
makes things mighty flat and uninteresting. I'm all wrapped up in
family traditions and precedents so I can't wriggle--like an Indian
baby.... Even THIS wouldn't be so rotten if it were myself they were
thinking about. But they're not. I'm only an incident in the family, so
far as this goes.... It's Bonbright Foote VIII they're fussing
about.... It's my duty to see to it there's a Bonbright Foote VIII
promptly."

She didn't sympathize with him, or call him "poor boy," as so many less
natural, less comprehending girls would have done.

"I haven't the least idea in the world," she said, "whether I'll ever
want to marry you or not--and you can't have a notion whether you'll
want me. Suppose we just don't bother about it? We can't avoid each
other--they'll see to that. We might as well be comfortably friendly,
and not go shying off from each other. If it should happen we do want
to marry each other--why, all right. But let's just forget it. I'm sure
I sha'n't marry you just because a lot of your ancestors want me to....
Folks don't fall in love to order--and you can put this away carefully
in your mind--when I marry it will be because I've fallen in love."

"You're very like your father," he said.

"Rushing in where angels fear to tread, you mean? Yes, dad's more
direct than diplomatic, and I inherit it.... Is it a bargain?"

"Bargain?"

"To be friends, and not let our mammas worry us.... I like you."

"Really?" he asked, diffidently.

"Really," she said.

"I like you, too," he said, boyishly.

"We'll take in our Keep Off the Grass signs, then," she said. "Mother
and father seem to be going." She stood up and extended her hand. "Good
night, chum," she said. To herself she was saying what she was too wise
to say aloud: "Poor kid! A chum is what he needs."




CHAPTER IV


Bonbright's first day in the plant had carried no suggestion from his
father as to what his work was actually to be. He had merely walked
about, listening to Rangar's expositions of processes and systems.
After he was in bed that night he began to wonder what work would fall
to him. What work had it been the custom for the heir apparent to
perform? What work had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather
performed when their positions were his position to-day?... Vaguely he
recognized his incompetence to administer anything of importance.
Probably, little by little, detail by detail, matters would be placed
under his jurisdiction until he was safely functioning in the family
groove.

His dreams that night were of a reluctant, nightmarish passage down a
huge groove, a monotonous groove, whose smooth, insurmountable sides
offered no hint of variety.... As he looked ahead he could see nothing
but this straight groove stretching into infinity. Always he was
disturbed and made wretched by a consciousness of movement, of varied
life and activity, of adventure, of thrill, outside the groove, but
invisible, unreachable.... He strove to clamber up the glassy sides,
only to slip back, realizing the futility of the EFFORT.

He breakfasted alone, before his father or mother was about, and left
the house on foot, driven by an aching restlessness. It was early. The
factory whistle had not yet blown when he reached the gates, but
already men carrying lunch boxes were arriving in a yawning, sleepy
stream.... Now Bonbright knew why he had arisen early and why he had
come here. It was to see this flood of workmen again; to scrutinize
them, to puzzle over them and their motives and their unrest. He leaned
against the wall and watched.

He was recognized. Here and there a man offered him good morning with a
friendliness of tone that surprised Bonbright. A good many men spoke to
him respectfully; more regarded him curiously; some hopefully. It was
the occasional friendly smile that affected him. One such smile from an
older workman, a man of intelligent face, of shrewd, gray eyes, caused
Bonbright to move from his place to the man's side.

"I don't know your name, of course," he said, diffidently.

"Hooper," said the man, pleasantly.

"The men seem to know me," Bonbright said. "I was a little surprised. I
only came yesterday, you know."

"Yes," said Hooper, "they know who you are."

"They seemed---almost friendly."

Hooper looked sharply at the young man. "It's because," said he,
"they're pinning hopes to you."

"Hopes?"

"Labor can't get anywhere until it makes friends in the ranks of the
employers," said Hooper. "I guess most of the men don't understand
that--even most of the leaders, but it's so. It's got to be so if we
get what we must have without a revolution."

Bonbright pondered this. "The men think I may be their friend?"

"Some saw you last night, and some heard you talk to Dulac. Most of
them have heard about it now."

"That was it?... Thank you, Mr. Hooper."

Bonbright went up to his office, where he stood at the window, looking
down upon the thickening stream of men as the minute for the starting
whistle approached.... So he was of some importance, in the eyes of the
workingmen, at least! They saw hope in his friendship. ... He shrugged
his shoulders. What could his friendship do for them? He was impotent
to help or harm. Bitterly he thought that if the men wanted friendship
that would be worth anything to them, they should cultivate his dead
forbears.

Presently he turned to his desk and wrote some personal letters--as a
distraction. He did not know what else to do. There was nothing
connected with the plant that he could set his hand to. It seemed to
him he was just present, like a blank wall, whose reason for existence
was merely to be in a certain place.

He was conscious of voices in his father's room, and after a time his
father entered and bade him a formal good morning. Bonbright was
acutely conscious of his father's distinguished, cultured, aristocratic
appearance. He was conscious of that manner which six generations of
repression and habit in a circumscribed orbit had bestowed on Bonbright
Foote VI. Bonbright was unconscious of the great likeness between him
and his father; of the fact that at his father's age it would be
difficult to tell them apart. Physically he was out of the Bonbright
Foote mold.

"Son," said Bonbright Foote VI, "you have made an unfortunate beginning
here. You have created an impression which we shall have to eradicate
promptly."

"I don't understand."

"It has been the habit of our family to hold aloof from our employees.
We do not come directly into contact with them. Intercourse between us
and them is invariably carried out through intermediaries."

Bonbright waited for his father to continue.

"You are being discussed by every man in the shops. This is peculiarly
unfortunate at this moment, when a determined effort is being made by
organized labor to force unionism on us. The men have the notion that
you are not unfriendly toward unionism."

"I don't understand it," said Bonbright. "I don't know what my feelings
toward it may be."

"Your feelings toward it," said his father with decision, "are
distinctly unfriendly."

Again Bonbright was silent.

"Last evening," said his father, "you mingled with the men leaving the
shops. You did a thing no member of our family has ever done--consented
to an interview with a professional labor agitator."

"That is hardly the fact, sir.... I asked for the interview."

"Which is worse.... You even, as it is reported to me, agreed to talk
with this agitator at some future time."

"I asked him to explain things to me."

"Any explanations of labor conditions and demands I shall always be
glad to make. The thing I am trying to bring home to you is that the
men have gotten an absurd impression that you are in sympathy with
them.... Young men sometimes come home from college with unsound
notions. Possibly you have picked up some socialistic nonsense. You
will have to rid yourself of it. Our family has always arrayed itself
squarely against such indefensible theories.... But the thing to do at
once is to wipe out any silly ideas your indiscretion may have aroused
among our workingmen."

"But I am not sure--"

"When you have been in this business ten years I shall be glad to
listen to your matured ideas. Now your ideas--your actions at
least-must conform to the policy we have maintained for generations. I
have called some of our department heads to my room. I believe I hear
them assembling. Let us go in."

Bonbright followed his father mechanically. The next room contained
some ten or twelve subordinate executives who eyed Bonbright curiously.

"Gentlemen," said the elder Foote, "this is my son, whom you may not
have met as yet. I wish to present him to you formally, and to tell you
that hereafter he and I share the final authority in this plant.
Decisions coming from this office are to be regarded as our joint
decisions--except in the case of an exception of immediate moment. ...
As you know, a fresh and determined effort is afoot to unionize this
plant. My son and I have conferred on the matter, but I have seen fit
to let the decision rest with him, as to our policy and course of
action."

The men looked with renewed curiosity at the young man who stood, white
of face, with compressed lips and troubled eyes.

"My son has rightly determined to adhere to the policy established many
years ago. He has determined that unionism shall not be permitted to
enter Bonbright Foote, Incorporated.... I state your sentiments, do I
not, my son?"

At the direct challenge Bonbright raised his eyes to his father's face
appealingly. "Father--" he said.

"I state your position?" his father said, sternly.

Against Bonbright's will he felt the accumulated power of the family
will, the family tradition. He had been reared in its shadow. Its grip
lay firm upon him. Struggle he might, but the strength to defy was not
yet in him.... He surrendered, feeling that, somehow, his private soul
had been violated, his individuality rent from him.

"Yes," he said, faintly.

"The first step he has decided upon," said his father, "and one which
should be immediately repressive. It is to post in every room and
department of the shops printed notices to the effect that any man who
affiliates himself with organized labor, or who becomes a member of a
so-called trade-union, will be summarily dismissed from his
employment.... That was the wording you suggested, was it not?"

"Yes," said Bonbright, this time without struggle.

"Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "my son directs that these cards be printed
AT ONCE, and put in place before noon. It can be done, can it not?"

"Yes, sir," said Rangar.

"I think that is all, gentlemen.... You understand my son's position, I
believe, so that if anyone questions you can answer him effectively?"

The department heads stirred uneasily. Some turned toward the door, but
one man cleared his throat.

"Well, Mr. Hawthorne?" said the head of the business.

"The men seem very determined this time. I'm afraid too severe action
on our part will make trouble."

"Trouble?"

"A strike," said Hawthorne. "We're loaded with contract orders, Mr.
Foote. A strike at this time--"

"Rangar," said Mr. Foote, sharply, "at the first sign of such a thing
take immediate steps to counteract it.... Better still, proceed now as
if a strike were certain. These mills MUST continue uninterruptedly....
If these malcontents force a strike, Mr. Hawthorne, we shall be able to
deal with it.... Good morning, gentlemen."

The men filed out silently. It seemed as if they were apprehensive,
almost as if they ventured to disagree with the action of their
employers. But none voiced his disapproval.

Bonbright stood without motion beside his father's desk, his eyes on
the floor, his lips pressed together.

"There," said his father, with satisfaction, "I think that will set you
right."

"Right?... The men will think I was among them last night as a spy!...
They'll despise me.... They'll think I wasn't honest with them."

Bonbright Foote VI shrugged his shoulders. "Loyalty to your family," he
said, "and to your order is rather more important than retaining the
good will of a mob of malcontents."

Bonbright turned, his shoulders dropping so that a more sympathetic eye
than his father's might have found itself moistening, and walked slowly
back to his room. He did not sit at his desk, but walked to the window,
where he rested his brow against his hand and looked out upon as much
of the world as he could see.... It seemed large to him, filled with
promise, filled with interests, filled with activities for HIM--if he
could only be about them. But they were held tantalizingly out of reach.

He was safe in his groove; had not slipped there gradually and
smoothly, but had been thrust roughly, by sudden attack, into it.

His young, healthy soul cried out in protest against the affront that
had been put upon it. Not that the issue itself had mattered so much,
but that it had been so handled, ruthlessly. Bonbright was no friend to
labor. He had merely been a surprised observer of certain phenomena
that had aroused him to thought. He did not feel that labor was right
and that his father was wrong. It might be his father was very
right.... But labor was such a huge mass, and when a huge mass seethes
it is impressive. Possibly this mass was wrong; possibly its seething
must be stilled for the better interests of mankind. Bonbright did not
know. He had wanted to know; had wanted the condition explained to him.
Instead, he had been crushed into his groove humiliatingly.

Bonbright was young, to be readily impressed. If his father had
received his uncertainty with kindliness and had answered his hunger's
demand for enlightenment with arguments and reasoning, the crisis
probably would have passed harmlessly. His father had seen fit not to
use diplomacy, but to assert autocratically the power of Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated. Bonbright's individuality had thought to lift its
head; it had been stamped back into its appointed, circumscribed place.

He was not satisfied with himself. His time for protest had been when
he answered his father's challenge. The force against him had been too
great, or his own strength too weak. He had not measured up to the
moment, and this chagrined him.

"All I wanted," he muttered, "was to KNOW!"

His father called him, and he responded apathetically.

"Here are some letters," said Mr. Foote. "I have made notes upon each
one how it is to be answered. Be so good as to dictate the replies."

There it was again. He was not even to answer letters independently,
but to dictate to his secretary words put into his mouth by Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated.

"It will help you familiarize yourself with our routine," said his
father, "and your signature will apprise the recipients that Bonbright
Foote VII has entered the concern."

He returned to his desk and pressed the buzzer that would summon Ruth
Frazer with book and pencil. She entered almost instantly, and as their
eyes met she smiled her famous smile. It was a thing of light and
brightness, compelling response. In his mood it acted as a stimulant to
Bonbright.

"Thank you," he said, involuntarily.

"For what?" she asked, raising her brows.

"For--why, I'm sure I don't know," he said. "I don't know why I said
that.... Will you take some letters, please?"

He began dictating slowly, laboriously. It was a new work to him, and
he went about it clumsily, stopping long between words to arrange his
thoughts. His attention strayed. He leaned back in his chair, dictation
forgotten for the moment, staring at Ruth Frazer without really being
conscious of her presence. She waited patiently. Presently he leaned
forward and addressed a question to her:

"Did you and Mr. Dulac mention me as you walked home?"

"Yes," she said.

"Would it be--impertinent," he asked, "to inquire what you said?"

She wrinkled her brows to aid recollection.

"Mr. Dulac," she replied, "wondered what you were up to. That was how
he expressed it. He thought it was peculiar--your asking to know him."

"What did YOU think?"

"I didn't think it was peculiar at all. You"--she hesitated--"had been
taken sort of by surprise. Yes, that was it. And you wanted to KNOW. I
think you acted very naturally."

"Naturally!" he repeated after her. "Yes, I guess that must be where I
went wrong. I was natural. It is not right to be natural. You should
first find how you are expected to act--how it is planned for you to
act. Yourself--why, yourself doesn't count."

"What do you mean, Mr. Foote?"

"This morning," he said, bitterly, "cards with my name signed to them
have been placed, or will be placed, in every room of the works,
notifying the men that if they join a labor union they will be
discharged."

"Why--why--"

"I have made a statement that I am against labor unions."

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, but somehow compelled to
sympathize with him. He had passed through a bitter crisis of some
sort, she perceived.

"I am not interested in all those men--that army of men," he went on.
"I don't want to understand them. I don't want to come into contact
with them. I just want to sit here in my office and not be bothered by
such things.... We have managers and superintendents and officials to
take care of labor matters. I don't want to talk to Dulac about what he
means, or why our men feel resentment toward us. Please tell him I have
no interest whatever in such things."

"Mr. Foote," she said, gently, "something has happened to you, hasn't
it? Something that has made you feel bitter and discouraged?"

"Nothing unusual--in my family--Miss Frazer. I've just been cut to the
Bonbright Foote pattern. I didn't fit my groove exactly--so I was
trimmed until I slipped into it. I'm in now."

A sudden tumult of shouts and cheers arose in the street under his
window; not the sound of a score of voices nor of a hundred, but a
sound of great volume. Ruth looked up, startled, frightened. Bonbright
stepped to the window. "It's only eleven o'clock," he said, "but the
men are all coming out.... The whistle didn't blow. They're cheering
and capering and shaking hands with one another. What does that mean,
do you suppose?"

"I'm afraid," said Miss Frazer, "it's your placard."

"My placard?"

"The men had their choice between their unions and their jobs--and
they've stood by their unions."

"You mean--?"

"They've struck," said Ruth.




CHAPTER V


There are family traditions among the poor just as there are among the
rich. The families of working-men may cling as tenaciously to their
traditions as the descendants of an earl. In certain families the sons
are compelled by tradition to become bakers, in others machinists;
still other lowly family histories urge their members to conduct of one
sort or another. It is inherent in them to hold certain beliefs
regarding themselves. Here is a family whose tradition is loyalty to
another family which has employed the father, son, grandfather; across
the street may live a group whose peculiar religion is to oppose all
constituted authority and to uphold anarchism. Theories and beliefs are
handed down from generation to generation until they assume the dignity
of blood laws.

Bonbright was being wrenched to fit into the Foote tradition. Ruth
Frazer, his secretary, needed no alterations to conform to the
tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating
of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level
of equality--or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a
remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps
one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond
which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled,
single-purposed labor man--trade-union man--extremist--revolutionist.
Her father had been killed in a labor riot--and beatified by her. As
the men of her family had been, so were the women--so was she.

Rights of man, tyranny of capital, class consciousness had been taught
her with her nursery rhymes. She was a zealot. A charming zealot with a
soul that laughed and wanted all mankind to be happy with it--a soul
that translated itself by her famous grin.

When she thought of capital, of moneyed aristocracy in the mass and in
the abstract, she hated it. It was a thing to be uprooted, plotted
against, reviled. When she met a member of it in the body, and face to
face, as she was meeting Bonbright Foote, she could not hate. He was a
man, an individual. She could not withhold from him the heart-warming
flash of her smile, could not wish him harm. Somehow, in the concrete,
he became a part of mankind, and so entitled to happiness.

She was sincere. In her heart she prayed for the revolution. Her keen
brain could plan for the overthrow of the enemy and her soul could
sacrifice her body to help to bring it to pass. She believed. She had
faith. Her actions would be true to her faith even at a martyr cost.
But to an individual whom she saw face to face, let him be the very
head and front of the enemy, and she could not wish him personal harm.
To a psychologist this might have presented a complex problem. To Ruth
it presented no problem at all. It was a simple condition and she lived
it.

She was capable of hero worship, which, after all, is the keystone of
aristocracies. But her heroes were not warriors, adventurers,
conquerors of the world, conquerors of the world's wealth. They were
revolutionists. They were men who gave their lives and their abilities
to laboring for labor.... Already she was inclining to light the fires
of her hero worship at the feet of the man Dulac.

Ruth Frazer's grin has been spoken of. It has been described as a grin.
That term may offend some sensitive eye as an epithet applicable only
to something common, vulgar. To smile is proper, may even be
aristocratic; only small boys and persons of slack breeding are guilty
of the grin.... Ruth Frazer's grin was neither common nor vulgar. It
was warming, encouraging, bright with the flashing of a quick mind, and
withal sweet, womanly, delicious. Yet that it was a grin cannot be
denied. Enemies to the grin must make the most of it.

The grin was to be seen, for Dulac had just entered Ruth's mother's
parlor, and it glowed for him. The man seemed out of place in that
cottage parlor. He seemed out of place in any homelike room, in any
room not filled by an eager, sweating, radical crowd of men assembled
to hang upon his words. That was the place for him, the place nature
had created him to become. To see him standing alone any place, on the
street, in a hotel, affected one with the feeling that he was exotic
there, misplaced. He must be surrounded by his audience to be RIGHT.

Something of this crossed Ruth's mind. No woman, seeing a possible man,
is without her sentimental speculation. She could not conceive of Dulac
in a HOME.

"It's been a day!" he said.

"Yes."

"Every skilled mechanic has struck," he said, with pride, as in a
personal achievement. "And most of the rest. To-night four thousand out
of their five thousand men were with us."

"It came so suddenly. Nobody thought of a strike this morning."

"We were better organized than they thought," he said, running his hand
through his thick, black hair, and throwing back his head. "Better than
I thought myself.... I've always said fool employers were the best
friends we organizers have. The placard that young booby slapped the
men in the face with--that did it....That and his spying on us last
night."

"I'm sure he wasn't spying last night."

"Bosh! He was mighty quick to try to get our necks under his heel this
morning."

"I don't know what happened this morning," she said, slowly. "I'm his
secretary, you know. Something happened about that placard. I don't
believe he wanted it to go up."

"You're defending him? Of course. You're a girl and you're close to the
throne with a soft job. He's a good-looking kid in his namby-pamby
Harvard way, too."

"Mr. Dulac!...My job--I was going to ask you what I should do. I want
to help the men. I want them to feel that I'm with them, working for
them and praying for them. Ought I to quit, too--to join the strike?"

Dulac looked at her sharply, calculatingly. "No," he said, presently,
"you can do a lot more good where you are."

"Will there be trouble? I dread to think of rioting and maybe
bloodshed. It will be bad enough, anyhow--if it lasts long. The poor
women and children!"

"There'll be trouble if they try to turn a wheel or bring in scab
labor." He laughed, so that his white teeth showed. "The first thing
they did was to telephone for the police. I suppose this kid with a
whole day's experience in the business will be calling in strike
breakers and strong-arms and gunmen....Well, let him bring it down on
himself if he wants to. We're in this thing to win. It means unionism
breaking into this automobile game. This is just the entering wedge."

"Won't the automobile manufacturers see that, too?" she asked. "Won't
the men have all their power and wealth to fight?"

Dulac shrugged his shoulders. "I guess the automobile world knows who
Dulac is to-night," he said, with gleaming eyes.

Somehow the boast became the man. It was perfectly in character with
his appearance, with his bearing. It did not impress Ruth as a brag; it
seemed a natural and ordinary thing for him to say.

"You've been here just two weeks," she said, a trifle breathlessly; for
he loomed big to her girlish eyes. "You've done all this in two weeks."

He received the compliment indifferently. Perhaps that was a pose;
perhaps the ego of the man made him impervious even to compliments.
There are men so confident in their powers that a compliment always
falls short of their own estimate of themselves.

"It's a start--but all our work is only a start. It's preliminary," His
voice became oratorical. "First we must unionize the world. Now there
are strong unions and weak unions--both arrayed against a capital
better organized and stronger than ever before in the world's history.
Unionism is primary instruction in revolution. We must teach labor its
power, and it is slow to learn. We must prepare, prepare, prepare, and
when all is ready we shall rise. Not one union, not the unions of a
state, of a country, but the unions of the world...hundreds of millions
of men who have been ground down by aristocracies and wealth for
generations. Then we shall have such an overturning as shall make the
French Revolution look like child's play....A World's Republic--that's
our aim; a World's Republic ruled by labor!"

Her eyes glistened as he talked; she could visualize his vision, could
see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where
every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's
chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums,
degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty,
should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, plenty, beauty.

It was for this high aim that Dulac worked. His stature increased. She
marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her. She
idealized him; her soul prostrated itself before him.

So much of accomplishment lay behind him--and he not yet thirty years
old! The confidence reposed in him by labor was eloquently testified to
by the sending of him to this important post on the battle line.
Already he had justified that confidence. With years and experience
what heights might he not climb!...This was Ruth's thought. Beside
Dulac's belief in himself and his future it was colorless.

Dulac had been an inmate of the Frazer cottage two weeks. In that time
he had not once stepped out of his character. If his attitude toward
the world were a pose it had become so habitual as to require no
objective prompting or effort to maintain. This character was that of
the leader of men, the zealot for the cause of the under dog. It held
him aloof from personal concerns. Individual affairs did not touch him,
but functioned unnoticed on a plane below his clouds. Not for an
instant had he sought the friendship of Ruth and her mother, not to
establish relations of friendship with them. He was devoted to a cause,
and the cause left no room in his life for smaller matters. He was a
man apart.

Now he was awkwardly tugging something from his pocket. Almost
diffidently he offered it to Ruth. It was a small box of candy.

"Here..." he said, clumsily.

"For me!" Ruth was overpowered. This demigod had brought HER a gift. He
had thought about her--insignificant her! True, she had talked with
him, had even taken walks with him, but those things had not been
significant. It had seemed he merely condescended to the daughter of a
martyr to his cause. He had been paying a tribute to her father. But a
gift--a personal gift such as any young man might make to a girl whose
favor he sought! Could it mean...?

Then she saw that he was embarrassed, actually embarrassed before her,
and she was ashamed of herself for it. But she saw, too, that in him
was a human man, a man with fears and sensations and desires and
weaknesses like other men. After all, a demigod is only half of Olympus.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you SO much."

"You're not--offended?"

He was recovering himself. In an instant he was back again in character.

"We men," he said, "who are devoted to the Cause have little time in
our lives for such things. The Cause demands all. When we go into it we
give up much that other men enjoy. We are wanderers. We have no homes.
We can't AFFORD to have homes....I," he said, it proudly, "have been in
jail more than once. A man cannot ask a woman to share such a life. A
man who leads such a life has no place in it for a woman."

"I should think," she said, "that women would be proud to share such a
life. To know they were helping a little! To know they were making one
comfortable spot for you to come to and rest when you were tired or
discouraged...."

"Comforts are not for us," he said, theatrically, yet he did not seem
theatrical to her, only nobly self-sacrificing.

"It isn't right," she said, passionately. "The poorest laborer has more
than you. He has his home and his family. No matter how poor he is, no
matter what he suffers, he has some compensations....And you--you're
giving your life and everything in life that's bright and beautiful for
that laborer."

"The happiness of one man buying the happiness of millions," he said,
his black eyes glowing. "Yet sometimes we have our weak moments. We see
and we desire."

"And are entitled to possess," she said.

His eyes glowed upon her hungrily--she read the hunger in them, hunger
for HER! It frightened her, yet it made her heart leap with pride. To
be looked upon with favor by such a man!

"Some women," he said, slowly, "might live through it. There are women
big enough and strong enough--a few, maybe. Big enough to endure
neglect and loneliness; to live and not know if their husbands would
sleep at home that night or in a jail or be in the middle of a riot on
the other side of the world! They could not even depend on their
husbands for support....A few might not complain, might be able to
endure....You, Miss Ruth--I believe you are one of them!"

Her cheeks paled. Was he--could he be about to ask her to share his
life? It was impossible! Yet what else could he mean? To what else
could his words be tending? She was awed, frightened--yet warmed by a
surge of pride. She thought of her father....If he could see and know!
If knowledge could only pass to him that his daughter had been thought
worthy by such a man to play her part for the Cause!...She waited
tensely, hand pressed to her bosom.

Dulac stepped toward her, barbarically handsome. She felt the force,
the magnetism of him. It called to her, compelled her....She could not
lift her eyes.

Slowly he approached another step. It was as though he were forced to
her against his will. The silence in the room was the tense silence of
a human crisis....Then it was broken ruthlessly. There came a pounding
on the door that was not a knock, but an alarm. It was imperative,
excited, ominous.

"Oh..." Ruth cried.

Her mother was opening the door.

"Dulac! Where's Dulac?" a man's voice demanded.

"Here," he replied. "What is it?"

"O'Hagan's in town," the man panted, rushing into the room. "They've
brought in O'Hagan and his gang of bullies."

O'Hagan, king of strike breakers! Ruth knew that name well, and what
the arrival of the man of evil omen foretold. It promised violence,
riot, bloodshed, suffering.

"They're going to try to run, then," said Dulac, calmly.

"The police have escorted a mob of scabs into the mill yards. They've
tried to drive away our pickets. They've locked up Higgins and Bowen.
Got Mason, too, but the crowd took him away from the police."

"It's on their own heads," said Dulac, solemnly. "I'll come with you."
He turned to Ruth and took her hand. "You see," he said, "it calls me
away--even from a moment like that...."




CHAPTER VI


Malcolm Lightener was not a man to send messages nor to depend upon
telephones. He was as direct as a catapult, and was just as regardful
of ceremony. The fact that it was his and everybody else's dinner hour
did not hold him back an instant from having himself driven to the
Foote residence and demanding instant speech with Mr. Foote.

Mr. Foote, knowing Lightener, shrugged his shoulders and motioned
Bonbright to follow him from the table.

"If we asked him to be seated and wait," said he, "Lightener would
burst into the dining room."

They found their visitor not seated, but standing like a granite
monolith in the center of the library.

"Well," he said, observing no formalities of greeting, "you've chucked
a brick into the hornets' nest."

"Won't you be seated?" asked Mr. Foote, with dignified courtesy.

"Seated? No, I've got no time for seats, and neither have you, if you
would wake up to it. Do you know what you've done with your
bullheadedness? You've rammed the automobile manufacturers up against a
crisis they've been dodging for years. Needlessly. There was no more
need for this strike at this time than there is for fur overcoats in
hell. But just when the hornets were stirred up and buzzing, you had to
heave your brick.... And now we've got to back your play."

"I am not aware," said Mr. Foote, icily, "that we have asked
assistance."

"If the house next to mine catches fire the owner doesn't have to
holler to me for help. I've got to help to keep the blaze from
spreading to my own house.... You've never thought beyond the
boundaries of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--that's what's the matter
with you. You're hidebound. A blind man could see the unions look at
this thing as their entering wedge into the automobile industry. If
they break into you they'll break into us. So we've got to stop 'em
short."

"If we need any help--" Mr. Foote began.

"Whether you need it or whether you want it," said Lightener, "you get
it."

"Let me point out to you," said Mr. Foote, with chilly courtesy, "that
my family has been able to manage its business for several
generations--with some small success.... Our relations with our
employees are our own concern, and we shall tolerate no interference.
... I have placed my son in complete charge of this situation, with
confidence that he will handle it adequately."

"Huh!" grunted Lightener, glancing at Bonbright. "I heard about THAT.
... What I came to say principally was: This thing can be headed off
now if you go at it with common sense. Make concessions. Get to this
Dulac. You can get your men back to work--and break up this union
thing."

"Mr. Lightener, our course is decided on. We shall make no concessions.
My son has retained O'Hagan, the strike breaker. To-morrow morning the
mills start up as usual, with new men. We have them camped in the yards
now. There shall be no compromising. When we have the strikers whipped
into their places we'll talk to them--not before."

"What's the idea of putting up the boy as stalking horse? What do you
expect to get by hiding behind him?"

"My son was indiscreet. He created a misapprehension among the men as
to his attitude toward labor. I am merely setting them right."

"And sewing a fine crop of hatred for the boy to reap."

Mr. Foote shrugged his shoulders "The position of my family has not
been doubtful since the inception of our business. I do not propose
that my son shall make it so. Our traditions must be maintained."

"If you'd junk a few traditions," said Lightener, "and import a little
modern efficiency--and human understanding of human beings--you might
get somewhere. You quit developing with that first ancestor of yours.
If the last hundred years or so haven't been wasted, there's been some
progress. You're wabbling along in a stage coach when other folks use
express trains.... When I met the boy here last night, I thought he was
whittled off a different stick from the rest of you.... I guess he was,
too. But you're tying a string of ancestors around his neck and
squeezing him into their likeness."

"My son knows his duty to his family," said Mr. Foote.

"I didn't have a family to owe duty to, thank God," said Lightener,
"but I spent quite some time figuring out my duty to myself.... You
won't listen to reason, eh? You're going to bull this thing through?"

"My son will act as my son should act," said Mr. Foote.

Lightener turned to where Bonbright stood with set face and eyes that
smoldered, and studied him with an eye accustomed to judging men.

"There'll be rioting," he said. "Probably there'll be bloodshed.
There'll certainly be a devil of a lot of suffering. Your father is
putting the responsibility for it on your shoulders, young fellow. Does
that set comfortably on your mind?"

Bonbright was slow to answer. His position was difficult, for it seemed
to him he was being asked by a stranger to criticize his father and his
family. His own unrest under the conditions which were forced upon him
was not to be mentioned. The major point--the conflict between capital
as represented by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, and labor--as
represented by the striking employees--he did not understand. He had
wanted to understand it; he had felt a human interest in the men, but
this was forbidden to him.... Whatever he felt, whatever he thought,
whatever dread he might have of the future as it impended over
himself--he must be loyal to his name. So when he spoke it was to say
in a singularly unboyish voice:

"My father has spoken for me, Mr. Lightener."

For the first time Lightener smiled. He laid a heavy hand on
Bonbright's shoulder. "That was well done, my boy," he said. Bonbright
was grateful for his understanding.

A servant appeared. "Mr. Bonbright is wanted on the telephone," she
said.

It was Rangar. "There's rioting at the plant," the man said,
unemotionally. "I have notified the police and taken the necessary
steps."

"Very well," said Bonbright. He walked to the library, and, standing in
the door, stirred by excitement so that his knees quivered and a great
emptiness was within him, he said to his father, "There's rioting at
the plant, sir."

Then he turned, put on his coat and hat, and quietly left the house.

There was rioting at the mills! Bonbright was going to see what rioting
was like, what it meant. It was no impulse, no boyish spirit of
adventure or curiosity, that was taking him, but a command. No sooner
had Rangar spoken the words over the telephone than Bonbright knew he
must go.

"Whatever is happening," he said to himself, "I'm going to be blamed
for it."

With some vague juvenile notion of making himself unrecognizable he
turned up the collar of his coat and pulled down his cap....

When still some blocks from the mills a patrol wagon filled with
officers careened past him, its gong emitting a staccato, exciting
alarm. Here was reality. Bonbright quickened his step; began to run.
Presently he entered the street that lay before the face of the
factory--a street lighted by arc lamps so that the scene was adequately
visible. As far as the main gates into the factory yards the street was
in the possession of the police; beyond them surged and clamored the
mob, not yet wrought to the pitch of attack. Bonbright thought of a
gate around the corner. He would enter this and ascend to his office,
whence he could watch the street from his window.

Before the gate a man sat on a soap box, a short club dangling by a
thong from his wrist. As Bonbright approached he arose.

"What you want?" he demanded, taking a businesslike grip on his weapon.

"I want to go in," said Bonbright. "I'm Mr. Foote."

The man grinned. "To be sure, Mr. Foote. Howdy, Mr. Foote. You'll be
glad to meet me. I'm Santa Claus."

"I tell you I'm Mr. Foote. I want to go inside."

"And I tell you," said the man, suddenly dropping his grin, "to beat
it--while you're able."

Youthful rage sent its instant heat through Bonbright. For an instant
he meditated jerking the man from that gate by the nape of the neck and
teaching him a lesson with his athletic foot.... It was not fear of the
result that deterred him; it was the thought that this man was his own
employee, placed there by him for this very purpose. If the guard made
HIM bristle with rage, how would the sight of the man and his club
affect the strikers? He was a challenge and an insult, an invitation to
violence. Bonbright turned and walked away, followed by a derisive
guffaw from the strike breaker.

Bonbright retraced his steps and approached the rear of the police.
Here he was stopped by an officer.

"Where you goin'?"

"I'm Mr. Foote," said Bonbright. "I want to see what's happening."

"I can't help it if you're Mr. Roosevelt, you can't go any farther than
this.... Now GIT." He gave Bonbright a violent and unexpected shove,
which almost sent the young man off his feet. He staggered, recovered
himself, and stood glowering at the officer. "Move!" came the short
command, and once more burning with indignation, he obeyed. Here was
another man acting in his behalf, summoned to his help. It was thus the
police behaved, roughly, intolerantly, neither asking nor accepting
explanations. It did not seem to Bonbright this could be the right way
to meet the emergency. It seemed to him calculated only to aggravate
it. The application of brute force might conquer a mob or stifle a
riot, but it would leave unquenched fires of animosity. A violent
operation may be necessary to remove a malignant growth. It may be the
only possible cure; but no physician would hope to cure typhoid fever
by knocking the patient insensible with a club. True, the delirium
would cease for a time, but the deep-seated ailment would remain and
the patient only be the worse for the treatment.... Here the disease
was disagreement, misunderstanding, suspicion, bitterness of heart
between employer and employees. Neither hired strike breaker nor
policeman's baton could get to the root of it.... Yet he, Bonbright
Foote VII, was the man held out to all the world as favoring this
treatment, as authorizing it, as ordering it!

He walked quite around the block, approaching again on a side street
that brought him back again just ahead of the police. This street was
blocked by excited, restless, crowding, jeering men, but Bonbright
wormed his way through and climbed upon a porch from which he could see
over the heads of the foremost to where a line of police and the front
rank of strikers faced each other across a vacant space of pavement,
the square at the intersection of the streets.

Behind him a hatless man in a high state of excitement was making an
inflammatory speech from a doorstep. He was urging the mob to charge
the police, to trample them under.... Bonbright leaned far over the
railing so he could look down the street where the main body of the mob
was assembled. There was another speaker. Bonbright recognized
Dulac--and Dulac, with all his eloquence, was urging the men to
disperse to their homes in quiet. Bonbright listened. The man was
talking sense! He was pointing out the folly of mob violence! He was
showing them that it achieved nothing.... But the mob was beyond the
control of wise counsel. Possibly the feet of many had pressed brass
rails while elbows crooked. Certainly there was present a leaven of
toughs, idlers, in no way connected with the business, but sent by the
devil to add to the horror of it.

One of these, discreetly distant from the front, hurled half a brick
into the line of police. It was a vicious suggestion. Other bricks and
missiles followed, while the crowd surged forward. Suddenly the line of
patrolmen opened to let through a squad of mounted police, who charged
the mob.... It was a thing requiring courage, but a thing ordered by an
imbecile.

Horses and men plunged into that dammed river of men.... It was a scene
Bonbright could never erase from his memory, yet never could have
described. It was a nightmare, a sensation of dread rather than a scene
of fierce, implacable action.

The police drew back. The strikers hesitated.... Between them, on the
square of pavement, lay quiet, or writhing in pain, half a dozen human
forms.... Bonbright, his face colorless as those who lay below, stared
at the bodies. For this that he saw he would be held responsible by the
world....

He ran down the steps and began struggling through the mob. "Let me
through.... Let me through," he panted.

He broke through to the front, not moved by reason, but quivering with
the horror of the sight of men needlessly slain or maimed.... He must
do something. He must stop it!

Then he Was recognized. "It's young Foote," a man shouted, and snatched
at his shoulder. He shook the man off, but the cry was taken up. "It's
Foote--young Foote.... Spying again."

Men sprang upon him, but he turned furiously and hurled them back. They
must not stop him. He must not be interfered with, because he had to
put an end to this thing. The mob surged about him, striking,
threatening, so that he had to turn his face toward them, to strike out
with his fists. More than one man went down under his blows before he
could break away and run toward the police.

"See what you've done," he shouted in their faces. "This must stop." He
advanced another step, as if to force the mounted officers to retreat.

"Grab him," ordered a sergeant.

Bonbright was promptly grabbed and hauled through the line of mounted
police, to be thrown into the arms of waiting patrolmen. He fought as
strength was given him to fight, but they carried him ungently and
hurled him asprawl upon the floor of a patrol wagon, already well
occupied by arrests from the mob.

"Git 'em to the station," the driver was ordered, and off lurched the
patrol wagon.

That rapid ride brought cooling to Bonbright's head. He had made a fool
of himself. He was ashamed, humiliated, and to be humiliated is no
minor torture to a young man.

Instead of giving his name to the lieutenant on the desk he refused to
give a name, and was entered as John Doe. It was his confused thought
to save his family from publicity and disgrace.... So he knew what it
was to have barred doors shut upon him, to be alone in a square cell
whose only furnishing was a sort of bench across one end. He sank upon
this apathetically and waited for what morning should bring.




CHAPTER VII


The world owes no small part of its advancement to the reflections of
men in jails.

Bonbright, alone in the darkness of his cell, was admirably situated
for concentrated thought. All through the sleepless night he reviewed
facts and theories and conditions. He reached few definite conclusions,
and these more boyish than mature; he achieved to no satisfaction with
himself. His one profound conclusion was that everything was wrong.
Capital was wrong, labor was wrong; the whole basis upon which society
is organized was wrong. It was an exceedingly sweeping conclusion,
embracing EVERYTHING. He discerned no ray of light.

He studied his own conduct, but could convince himself of no voluntary
wrongdoing. Yet he was in a cell.... In the beginning he had merely
tried to understand something that aroused his curiosity--labor. From
the point of view of capital, as represented by his father, this had
been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor
had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in
his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His
attitude became fatalistic--he was being moved about by a ruthless hand
without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and
his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a
rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be
moved from square to square with such success or error as the player
possessed.

Last night.... He had been mishandled by the employees of capital and
the guardians of society; he had been mobbed by labor. He resented the
guard and the police, but could not resent the mobbing. ... He seemed
to be dangling between two worlds, mishandled by either that he
approached. But one fact he realized--labor would have none of him. His
father had seen to that. There was no place for him to go but into the
refuge of capital, and so to become an enemy to labor against which he
had no quarrel.... This night set him more deeply in the Bonbright
Foote groove. There was nothing for him now but complete submission,
apathetic submission.

If it must be so, it must be so. He would let the family current bear
him on. He would be but another Bonbright Foote, differentiated from
the others only by a numeral to designate his generation.

Singularly, his own immediate problem did not present itself
insistently until daylight began to penetrate the murk of the cell.
What would the authorities do with him? How was he to get his liberty?
Would the thing become public? He felt his helplessness, his
inadequacy. He could not ask his father to help him, for he did not
want his father ever to know what had happened the night before, yet he
must have help from some one. Suddenly the name of Malcolm Lightener
occurred to him.

After a time the doorman appeared with breakfast.

"Can I send a message?" asked Bonbright.

The doorman scrutinized him, saw he was no bum of the streets, but
quite evidently a gentleman in temporary difficulty.

"Maybe," he said, grudgingly. "Gimme the message and I'll see."

"Please telephone Mr. Malcolm Lightener that the younger of the
gentlemen he called on last evening is here and would like to see him."

"Malcolm Lightener, the automobile feller?"

"Yes."

"Friend of your'n?"

"Yes."

"Um!..." The doorman disappeared to return presently with the
lieutenant.

"What's this about Malcolm Lightener?" the officer asked.

"I gave the man here a message for him," said Bonbright.

"Is it on the level? You know Lightener?"

"Yes," said Bonbright, impatiently.

"Then what the devil did you stay here all night for? Why didn't you
have him notified last night? Looks darn fishy to me."

"It will do no harm to deliver my message," said Bonbright.

"Huh!... Let him out." The doorman swung wide the barred door and the
lieutenant motioned Bonbright out. "Come and set in the office," he
said. "Maybe you'd rather telephone yourself?"

"If I might," said Bonbright, amazed at the potency of Lightener's name
to open cell doors and command the courtesy of the police. It was his
first encounter with Influence.

He was conducted into a small office; then the lieutenant retired
discreetly and shut the door. Bonbright made his call and asked for
speech with Malcolm Lightener.

"Hello!... Hello!" came Lightener's gruff voice. "What is it?"

"This is Bonbright Foote.... I'm locked up in the Central Station. I
wonder if you can't help me somehow?"

There was a moment's silence; then Bonbright heard a remark not
intended for his ears but expressive of Lightener's astonishment,
"Well, I'm DARNED!" Then: "I'll be right there. Hold the fort."

Bonbright opened the door and said to the lieutenant, "Mr. Lightener's
on his way down."

"Um!... Make yourself comfortable. Say, was that breakfast all right?
Find cigars in that top drawer." The magic of Influence!

In twenty minutes Lightener's huge form pushed through the station
door. "Morning, Lieutenant. Got a friend of mine here?"

"Didn't know he was a friend of yours, Mr. Lightener. He wouldn't give
his name, and never asked to have you notified till this morning....
He's in my office there."

Lightener strode into the room and shut the door.

"Well?" he demanded.

Breathlessly, almost without pause, Bonbright poured upon him an
account of last night's happenings, making no concealments,
unconsciously giving Lightener glimpses into his heart that made the
big man bend his brows ominously. The boy did not explain; did not
mention accusingly his father, but Lightener understood perfectly what
the process of molding Bonbright was being subjected to. He made no
comment.

"I don't want father to know this," Bonbright said. "If it can be kept
out of the papers.... Father wouldn't understand. He'd feel I had
disgraced the family."

"Doggone the family," snapped Lightener. "Come on."

Bonbright followed him out.

"May I take him along, Lieutenant? I'll fix it with the judge if
necessary.... And say, happen to recognize him?"

"Never saw him before."

"If any of the newspaper boys come snoopin' around, you never saw me,
either. Much obliged, Lieutenant."

"You're welcome, Mr. Lightener. Glad I kin accommodate you."

Lightener pushed Bonbright into his limousine. "You don't want to go
home, I guess. We'll go to my house. Mother'll see you get breakfast.
... Then we'll have a talk.... Here's a paper boy; let's see what's
doing."

It was the morning penny paper that Lightener bought, the paper with
leanings toward the proletariat, the veiled champion of labor. He
bought it daily.

"Huh!" he grunted, as he scanned the first page. "They kind of allude
to you."

Bonbright looked. He saw a two-column head:

YOUNG MILLIONAIRE URGES ON POLICE

The next pyramid contained his name; the story related how he had
rushed frantically to the police after they had barbarously charged a
harmless gathering of workingmen, trampling and maiming half a dozen,
and had demanded that they charge again. It was a long story, with
infinite detail, crucifying him with cheap ink; making him appear a
ruthless, heartless monster, lusting for the spilled blood of the
innocent.

Bonbright looked up to meet Lightener's eyes.

"It--it isn't fair," he said, chokingly.

"Fairness," said Lightener, almost with gentleness, "is expected only
when we are young."

"But I didn't.... I tried to stop them."

"Don't try to tell anybody so--you won't be believed."

"I'm going to tell somebody," said Bonbright, his mind flashing to Ruth
Frazer, "and I'm going to be believed. I've got to be believed."

After a while he said: "I wasn't taking sides. I just went there to
see. If I've got to hire men all my life I want to understand them."

"You've got to take sides, son. There's no straddling the fence in this
world.... And as soon as you've taken sides your own side is all you'll
understand. Nobody ever understood the other side."

"But can't there ever be an understanding? Won't capital ever
understand labor, or labor capital?"

"I suppose a philosopher would say there is no difference upon which
agreement can't be reached; that there must somewhere be a common
meeting ground.... The Bible says the lion shall lie down with the
lamb, but I don't expect to live to see him do it without worrying some
about the lion's teeth."

"It's one man holding power over other men," said Bonbright.

As the car stopped at Malcolm Lightener's door, sudden panic seized
Bonbright.

"I ought not to come here," he said, "after last night. Mrs.
Lightener... your daughter."

"I'll bet Hilda's worrying you more than her mother. Nonsense! They
both got sense."

Certainly Mrs. Lightener had.

"Just got him out of the police station," her husband said as he led
the uncomfortable Bonbright into her presence. "Been shut up all
night.... Rioting--that's what he's been doing. Throwing stones at the
cops."

Mrs. Lightener looked at Bonbright's pale, weary, worried face. "You
let him be, Malcolm.... Never mind HIM," she said to the boy. "You just
go right upstairs with him. A warm bath and breakfast are what you
need. You don't look as if you'd slept a WINK."

"I haven't," he confessed.

When Bonbright emerged from the bath he found the motherly woman had
sent out to the haberdashers for fresh shirt, collar, and tie. He
donned them with the first surge of genuine gratefulness he had ever
known. Of course he had said thank you prettily, and had thought he
felt thanks.... Now he knew he had not.

"Guess you won't be afraid to face Hilda now," said Lightener, entering
the room. "I notice a soiled collar is worn with a heap more misgiving
than a soiled conscience.... Grapefruit, two soft-boiled eggs, toast,
coffee.... Some prescription."

Hilda was in the library, and greeted him as though it were an ordinary
occurrence to have a young man just out of the cell block as a
breakfast guest. She did not refer to it, nor did her father at the
moment. Bonbright was grateful again.

After breakfast the boy and girl were left alone in the library,
briefly.

"I'm ashamed," said Bonbright, chokingly.

"You needn't be," she said. "Dad told us all about it. I thought the
other night I should like you. Now I'm sure of it." She owned her
father's directness.

"You're good," he said.

"No--reasonable," she answered.

He sat silent, thinking. "Do you know," he said, presently, "what a lot
girls have to do with making a fellow's life endurable?... Since I went
to work I--I've felt really GOOD only twice. Both times it was a girl.
The other one just grinned at me when I was feeling down on my luck. It
was a dandy grin.... And now you..."

"Tell me about her," she said.

"She's my secretary now. Little bit of a thing, but she grins at all
the world... Socialist, too, or anarchist or something. I made them
give her to me for my secretary so I could see her grin once in a
while."

"I'd like to see her."

"I don't know her," said Bonbright. "She's just my secretary. I'll bet
she'd be bully to know."

Hilda Lightener would not have been a woman had she not wondered about
this girl who had made such an impression on Bonbright. It was not that
she sensed a possible rival. She had not interested herself in
Bonbright to the point where a rival could matter. But--she would like
to see that girl.

Malcolm Lightener re-entered the room.

"Clear out, honey," he said to his daughter. "Foote and I have got to
make medicine."

She arose. "If he rumbles like a volcano," she said to Bonbright,
"don't be afraid. He just rumbles. Pompeii is in no danger."

"You GIT," her father said.

"Now," he said when they were alone, "what's to pay?"

"I don't know."

"Will your father raise the devil? Maybe you'd like to have me go along
when you interview him."

"I think I'd rather not."

Lightener nodded with satisfaction.

"Well, then--I've kind of taken a shine to you. You're a young idiot,
all right, but there's something about you.... Let's start off with
this: You've got something that's apt to get you into hot water. Either
it's fool curiosity or genuine interest in folks. I don't know which.
Neither fits into the Bonbright Foote formula. Six generations of 'em
seem to have been whittled off the same chip--and then the knife
slipped and you came off some other chip altogether. But the Foote chip
don't know it, and won't recognize it if it does.... I'm not going to
criticize your father or your ancestors, whatever kind of darn fools I
may personally think they are. What I want to say is, if you ever kick
over the traces, drop in and tell me about it. I'll see you on your
road."

"Thanks," said Bonbright, not half comprehending.

"You can't keep on pressing men out of the same mold forever. Maybe you
can get two or three or a dozen to be as like as peas--and then nature
plays a joke on you. You're the joke on the Foote mold, I reckon. Maybe
they can squeeze you into the form and maybe they can't.... But
whatever happens is going to be darn unpleasant for you."

Bonbright nodded. THAT he knew well.

"You've got a choice. You can start in by kicking over the traces--with
the mischief to pay; or you can let the vanished Footes take a crack at
you to see what that can make of you. I advise no boy to run against
his father's wishes. But everybody starts out with something in him
that's his own--individual--peculiar to him. Maybe it's what the
preachers call his soul. Anyhow, it's HIS. Whatever they do to you, try
to hang on to it. Don't let anybody pump it out of you and fill its
room with a standardized solution. Get me?"

"I think so."

"I guess that's about, all from me. Now run along to your dad. Got any
idea what will happen?"

Bonbright studied the rug more than a minute before he answered.

"I think I was right last night. Maybe I didn't go about it the way I
should, but I INTENDED right. At least I didn't intend WRONG. Father
will be--displeased. I don't think I can explain it to him... "

"Uh!" grunted Lightener.

"So I--I guess I sha'n't try," Bonbright ended. "I think I'll go along
and have it over with."

When he was gone Malcolm Lightener made the following remark to his
wife, who seemed to understand it perfectly:

"Some sons get born into the wrong families."




CHAPTER VIII


Bonbright entered his office with the sensations of a detected juvenile
culprit approaching an unavoidable reckoning. If there was a ray of
brightness in the whole episode it was that the newspapers had
miraculously been denied the meatiest bit of his night's adventure--his
detention in a cell. If that had been flaunted before the eyes of the
public Bonbright felt he would never have been able to face his father.

He was vividly aware of the stir his entrance caused among the office
employees. It was as though the heart of the office skipped a beat. He
flushed, and, with eyes straight before him, hurried into his own room
and sat in his chair. He experienced a quivering, electric
emptiness--his nerves crying out against an approaching climax. It was
blood-relative to panic.

Presently he was aware that his father stood in the door scrutinizing
him. Bonbright's eyes encountered his father's. They seemed to lock ...
In that tense moment the boy was curiously aware how perfectly his
father's physical presence stood for and expressed his theory of being.
Tall, unbending, slender, aristocratic, intellectual--the pose of the
body, the poise of the head, even that peculiar, slanting set of the
lips expressed perfectly the Bonbright Foote idea. Five generations had
bred him to be the perfect thing it desired.

"Well, sir," he said, coldly. Bonbright arose. There was a formality
about the situation which seemed to require it. "Good morning," he
said, in a low tone.

"I have seen the papers."

"Yes, sir."

"What they printed was in substance true?"

"I prefer not--to discuss it, sir."

"And _I_ prefer TO discuss it... Do you fancy you can drag the name of
Foote through the daily press as though it were that of some dancing
girl or political mountebank, and have no reference made of it? Tell me
exactly what happened last night--and why it was permitted to happen."

"Father--" Bonbright's voice was scarcely audible, yet it was alive and
quivering with pain. "I cannot talk to you about last night."

The older man's lips compressed. "You are a man grown--are supposed to
be a man grown. Must I cross-examine you as if you were a sulking
schoolboy?"

Bonbright was not defiant, not sulkily stubborn. His night's
experiences had affected, were affecting him, working far-reaching
changes in him, maturing him. But he was too close to them for their
effect to have been accomplished. The work was going on each moment,
each hour. He did not reply to his father immediately, but when he did
so it was with a certain decision, a firmness, a lack of the old
boyishness which was marked and distinct.

"You must not cross-question me. There are things about which one's own
father has not the right to ask.... If I could have come to you
voluntarily--but I could not. In college I have seen fellows get into
trouble, and the first thing they thought of was to go to their fathers
with it... It was queer. What happened last night happened to ME.
Possibly it will have some effect on my family and on the name of
Foote, as you say... But it happened to ME. Nobody else can understand
it. No one has the right to ask about it."

"It happened to YOU! Young man, you are the seventh Bonbright
Foote--member of a FAMILY. What happens to you happens to it. You
cannot separate yourself from it. You, as an individual, are not
important, but as Bonbright Foote VII you become important. Do you
imagine you can act and think as an entity distinct from Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated?... Nonsense. You are but one part of a whole; what
you do affects the whole, and you are responsible for it to the shops."

"A man must be responsible to himself," said Bonbright, fumbling to
express what was troubling his soul. "There are bigger things than
family..."

His father had advanced to the desk. Now he interrupted by bringing his
hand down upon it masterfully. "For you there is no bigger thing than
family. You have a strange idea. Where did you get it? Is this sort of
thing being taught in college to-day? I suppose you have some notion of
asserting your individuality. Bosh! Men in your position, born as you
have been born, have no right to individuality. Your individuality must
express the individuality of your family as mine has done, and as my
father's and HIS father's did before me... I insist that you explain
fully to me what occurred last night."

"I am sorry, sir, but I cannot."

There was no outburst of passion from the father; it would have been
wholly out of keeping with his character. Bonbright Foote VI was a
strong man in his way; he possessed force of character--even if that
force were merely a standardized, family-molded force of character. He
recognized a crisis in the affairs of the Foote family which must be
met wisely. He perceived that results could not be obtained through the
violent impact of will; that here was a dangerous condition which must
be cured--but not by seizing it and wrenching it into place... Perhaps
he could make Bonbright obey him, but if matters were as serious as
they seemed, it would be far from wise. The thing must be dealt with
patiently, firmly. Here was only a symptom; the disease went deeper.
For six generations one Bonbright Foote after another had been born
true to tradition's form--the seventh generation had gone askew! It
must be set right, remolded.

"Let me point out to you," said he, "that you are here only because you
are my son and the descendant of our forefathers. Aside from that you
have no right to consideration or to position. You possess wealth. You
are a personage... Suppose it were necessary to deprive you of these
things. Suppose, as I have the authority to do, I should send you out
of this office to earn your own living. Suppose, in short, I should
find it necessary to do as other fathers have done--to disown you...
What then? What could you do? What would your individuality be
worth?... Think it over, my son. In the meantime we will postpone this
matter until you revise your mood."

He turned abruptly and went into his own room. He wanted to consider.
He did not know how to conduct himself, nor how to handle this
distressing affair... He fancied he was acting wisely and
diplomatically, but at the same time he carried away with him the
unpleasant consciousness that victory lay for the moment with his son.
Individuality was briefly triumphant. One thing was clear to him--it
should not remain so. The Bonbright Foote tradition should be continued
correctly by his son. This was not so much a determination as a state
of mind. It was a thing of inevitability.

Bonbright's feeling as his father left him was one of utter
helplessness, of futility. He had received his father's unveiled threat
and later it would have its effect. For the moment it passed without
consideration. First in his mind was the fact that he did not know what
to do--did not even know what he WANTED to do. All he could see was the
groove he was in, the family groove. He did not like it, but he was not
sure he wanted to be out of it. His father had talked of individuality;
Bonbright did not know if he wanted to assert his individuality. He was
at sea. Unrest grappled with him blindly, urging him nowhere, seeming
merely to wrestle with him aimlessly and maliciously... What was it all
about, anyhow? Why was he mixed up in the struggle? Why could not he be
left alone in quiet? If he had owned a definite purpose, a definite
ambition, a describable desire, it would have been different, but he
had none. He was merely bitterly uncomfortable without the slightest
notion what event or course of action could bring him comfort.

One thought persisted through the chaos of his surging thoughts. He
must call in Ruth Frazer and explain to her that he had not done what
the papers said he did. Somehow he felt he owed her explanation, her of
all the world.

She entered in response to the button he pushed, but there was not the
broad smile--the grin--he looked up eagerly to see. She was grave,
rather more than grave--she was troubled, so troubled that she did not
raise her eyes to look at him, but took her seat opposite him and laid
her dictation book on the desk.

"Miss Frazer--" he said, and at his tone she looked at him. He seemed
very young to her, yet older than he had appeared before. Older he was,
with a tired, haggard look left by his sleepless night. She could not
restrain her heart from softening toward him, for he was such a
boy--just a boy.

"Miss Frazer," he said again, "I want to--talk to you about last
night--about what the papers said."

If he expected help from her he was disappointed. Her lips set visibly.

"It was not true--what they said... I sha'n't explain it to anybody
else. What good could it do? But I want you to understand. It seems as
if I HAVE to explain to you.... I can't have you believing--"

"I didn't read it in the papers," she said. "I heard from an eyewitness.

"Mr. Dulac," he said. "Yes, he would have seen. Even to him it might
have looked that way--it might. But I didn't--I didn't! You must
believe me. I did not run to the police to have them charge the
strikers again... Why should I?"

"Why should you?" she repeated, coldly.

"Let me tell you... I went there--out of curiosity, I guess. This whole
strike came so suddenly. I don't understand why strikes and troubles
like this must be, and I thought I might find out something if I went
and watched... I wasn't taking sides. I don't know who is right and who
is wrong. All I wanted was to learn. One thing... I don't blame the
strikers for throwing bricks. I could have thrown a brick at one of our
guards; a policeman shoved me and I could have thrown a brick at
him.... I suppose, if there are to be strikes and mobs who want to
destroy our property, that we must have guards and police... But they
shouldn't aggravate things. I went around where I could see--and I saw
the police charge. I saw them send their horses smashing into that
crowd--and I saw them draw back, leaving men on the pavement,... There
was one who writhed about and made horrible sounds!... The mob was
against us and the police were for us--but I couldn't stand it. I guess
I lost my head. I hadn't the least intention of doing what I did, or of
doing anything but watch... but I lost my head. I did rush up to the
police, Miss Frazer, and the strikers tried to mob me. I was struck
more than once... It wasn't to tell the police to charge. You must
believe me--you MUST.... I was afraid they WOULD charge again, so I
rushed at them. All I remember distinctly is shouting to them that they
mustn't do it again--mustn't charge into that defenseless mob.... It
was horrible." He paused, and shut his eyes as though to blot out a
picture painted on his mind. Then he spoke more calmly. "The police
didn't understand, either. They thought I belonged to the mob, and they
arrested me.... I slept--I spent the night in a cell in Police
Headquarters."

Ruth was leaning over the desk toward him, eyes wide, lips parted.
"Is--is that the TRUTH?" she asked; but as she asked she knew it was
so. Then: "I'm sorry--so sorry. You must let me tell Mr. Dulac and he
will tell the men. It would be terrible if they kept on believing what
they believe now. They think you are--"

"I know," he said, wearily. "It can't be helped. I don't know that it
matters. What they think about me is what--it is thought best for them
to think. I am supposed to be fighting the strike."

"But aren't you?"

"I suppose so. It's the job that's been assigned to me--but I'm doing
nothing. I'm of no consequence--just a stuffed figure."

"You caused the strike."

"I?" There was genuine surprise in his voice. "How?"

"With that placard."

"I suppose so," he said, slowly. "My name WAS signed to it, wasn't
it?... You see I had been indiscreet the night before. I had mingled
with the men and spoken to Mr. Dulac.... I had created a false
impression--which had to be torn up--by the roots."

"I don't understand, Mr. Foote."

"No," he said, "of course not.... Why should you? I don't understand
myself. I don't see why I shouldn't talk to Mr. Dulac or the men. I
don't see why I shouldn't try to find out about things. But it wasn't
considered right--was considered very wrong, and I was--disciplined.
Members of my family don't do those things. Mind, I'm not complaining.
I'm not criticizing father, for he may be right. Probably he IS right.
But he didn't understand. I wasn't siding with the men; I was just
trying to find out..."

"Do you mean," she asked, a bit breathlessly, "that you have done none
of these things of your own will--because you wanted to? I mean the
placard, and bringing in O'Hagan and his strike breakers, and taking
all these ruthless methods to break the strike?... Were you made to
APPEAR as though it was you--when it wasn't?"

"Don't YOU misunderstand me, Miss Frazer. You're on the other
side--with the men. I'm against them. I'm Bonbright Foote VII." There
was a trace of bitterness in his voice as he said it, and it did not
escape her attention. "I wasn't taking sides.... I wouldn't take sides
now--but apparently I must.... If strikes are necessary then I suppose
fellows in places like mine must fight them.... I don't know. I don't
see any other way.... But it doesn't seem right--that there should be
strikes. There must be a reason for them. Either our side does
something it shouldn't--and provokes them, or your side is unfair and
brings them on.... Or maybe both of us are to blame.... I wanted to
find out."

"I shall tell Mr. Dulac," she said. "I shall tell him EVERYTHING. The
men mustn't go on hating and despising you. Why, they ought to be sorry
for you!... Why do you endure it? Why don't you walk out of this place
and never enter it again?..."

"You don't understand," he said, with perplexity." I knew you would
think I am siding with the men."

"I don't think that--no!... You might come to side with us--because
we're right. But you're not siding with yourself. You're letting
somebody else operate your very soul--and that's a worse sin than
suicide.... You're letting your father and this business, this
Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, wipe you out as if you were a mark on a
slate--and make another mark in your place to suit its own plans. ...
You are being treated abominably."

"Miss Frazer, I guess neither of us understands this thing. You see
this business, for generations, has had a certain kind of man at the
head of it. Always. It has been a successful business. Maybe when
father, and his father, were young, they had to be disciplined as I am
being. Maybe it is RIGHT--what I have heard called TRAINING."

"Do you like it?"

He did not answer at once. "I--it disturbs me. It makes me uneasy. ...
But I can do nothing. They've got me in the groove, and I suppose I'll
move along it."

"If you would own up to it, you're unhappy. You're being made
miserable.... Why, you're being treated worse than the strikers--and by
your own father!... Everybody has a right to be himself."

"You say that, but father and the generations of Footes before him say
the exact opposite.... However, I'm not the question. All I wanted to
do was to explain to you about last night. You believe me?"

"Of course. And I shall tell--"

He shook his head. "I'd rather you didn't. Indeed, you mustn't. As long
as I am here I must stick by my family. Don't you see? I wanted YOU to
know. My explanation was for you alone."

Rangar appeared in the door--quietly as it was his wont to move.
"Pardon," he said. "Your father wishes to speak to you, Mr. Foote."

"One moment, Miss Frazer. I have some letters," Bonbright said, and
stepped into his father's office.

"Bonbright," said his father, "Rangar has just discovered that your
secretary--this Miss Frazer--lives in the same house with Dulac the
strike leader.... She comes of a family of disturbers herself. Probably
she is very useful to Dulac where she is. Therefore you will dismiss
her at once."

"But, father--"

"You will dismiss her at once--personally."

A second time that day the eyes of father and son locked.

Bonbright's face was colorless; he felt his lips tremble.

"At once," said his father, tapping his desk with his finger.

Bonbright's sensation was akin to that of falling through space--there
seemed nothing to cling to, nothing by which to sustain himself. How
utterly futile he was was borne in upon him! He could not resist.
Protestation would only humiliate him. He turned slowly and walked into
his own room, where he stood erect before his desk.

"Miss Frazer," he said in a level, timbreless voice, "the labor leader
Dulac lives in your house. You come of a family of labor agitators.
Therefore you are discharged."

"WHAT?" she exclaimed, the unexpectedness of it upsetting her poise.

"You are discharged," he repeated; and then, turning his back on her,
he walked to the window, where he stood tense, tortured by humiliation,
gazing down upon a street which he could not see.

Ruth gathered her book and pencils and stood up. She moved slowly to
the door without speaking, but there she stopped, turned, and looked at
Bonbright. There was neither dismay nor anger in her eyes--only
sympathy. But she did not speak it aloud. "Poor boy!" she whispered to
herself, and stepped out into the corridor.




CHAPTER IX


Ruth Frazer had passed her twentieth birthday, and now, for the first
time, she was asking herself that question which brings tearful
uncertainty, vague fears, disquieting speculations to the great
majority of women--should she give herself, body and soul, into the
hands of a definite man? It was the definiteness, the identification of
the man, that caused all her difficulty. All women expect to be chosen
by, and to choose, some man; but when he arrives in actual flesh and
blood--that is quite another matter. Some, perhaps many, have no
doubts. Love has come to them unmistakably. But not so with most. It is
a thing to be wept over, and prayed over, and considered with many
changes of mind, until final decision is made one way or the other.

Dulac had been interrupted in what Ruth knew would have been a proposal
of marriage; the scene would be resumed, and when it was what answer
should she give?

It is no easy task for a girl of twenty to lay her heart under the
microscope and to see if the emotion which agitates it is love, or
admiration, or the excitation of glamour. She has heard of love, has
read of love, has dreamed of love, possibly, but has never experienced
love. How, then, is she to recognize it? With Ruth there had been no
long acquaintanceship with this man who came asking her future of her.
There had been no months or years of service and companionship.
Instead, he had burst on her vision, had dazzled her with his presence
and his mission. Hers was a steady little head, and one capable of
facing the logic of a situation. Was her feeling toward Dulac merely
hero worship?

The cause he represented was dear to her heart, and he was an eminent
servant in that cause. It thrilled her to know that such a man as he
could want HER for his wife. It quite took her breath away. Present
also was the feeling that if Dulac wanted her, if she could bring
happiness, ease, help to him, it would be her duty to give herself. By
so doing she would contribute her all to the cause.... Behind that
thought were generations of men and women who had sacrificed and
suffered for labor. If her father had given his life, would he not
expect his daughter to give HER life? If she could make Dulac stronger
to carry on his work for social revolution, had she a right to withhold
herself?...

But, being a girl, with youth singing in her heart, it was impossible
that anything should take precedence of love. That was the great
question. Did she love?... At noon she was sure she did; at one o'clock
she was sure she did not; at two o'clock she was wavering between the
two decisions; at six o'clock she had passed through all these stages
half a dozen times, and was no nearer certainty.

Being who she was and what she was, her contacts with the world had not
been those of the ordinary girl of her age and her station in life. In
her earlier years she had been accustomed to radical words, radical
thought, radical individuals. The world she was taught to see was not
the world girl children are usually taught to see. And yet she retained
her humor, her brightness of spirit, the joy of life that gave her her
smile.... She had known boys and men. However, none of these had made
marked impression upon her. They had been mere incidents, pleasant,
uninteresting, wearying, amusing. None had thrilled her.... So she had
less experience to call to her aid than the average girl.

Dulac occupied her mind as no man had ever occupied it before; the
thought of him thrilled her.... He wanted her, this magnetic,
theatrically handsome man wanted her....

When we make a choice we do so by a process of comparison. We buy this
house because we like it better than that house; we buy this hat
because we prefer it to that other;... it is so we get our notions of
value, of desirability. It is more than possible that some effort at
comparison is made by a woman in selecting a husband. She compares her
suitor with other men. Her decision may hinge upon the result. ...
Dulac was clearly superior to most of the men Ruth had known.... Then,
unaccountably, she found herself thinking of Bonbright Foote, who had
that morning discharged her from her employment. She found herself
setting young Foote and Dulac side by side and, becoming objectively
conscious of this, she felt herself guilty of some sort of disloyalty.
What right had a man in Foote's position to stand in her thoughts
beside Dulac? He was everything Dulac was not; Dulac was nothing that
Foote was.

She realized she was getting nowhere, was only confusing herself.
Perhaps, she told herself, when Dulac was present, when he asked her to
be his wife, she would know what to answer. So, resolutely, she put the
matter from her mind. It would not stay out.

She dreaded meeting Dulac at supper--for the evening meal was supper in
the Frazer cottage--and yet she was burningly curious to meet him, to
be near him, to verify her image of him.... Extra pains with the detail
of her simple toilet held her in her room until her mother called to
know if she were not going to help with the meal. As she went to the
kitchen she heard Dulac moving about in his room.

When they were seated at the table it was Mrs. Frazer who jerked the
conversation away from casual matters.

"Ruth was discharged this morning, Mr. Dulac," she said, bitterly, "and
her as good a typewriter and as neat and faithful as any. No fault
found, either, nor could be, not if anybody was looking for it with a
fine-tooth comb. Meanness, that's what I say. Nothing but meanness....
And us needing that fifteen dollars a week to keep the breath of life
in us."

"Don't worry about that, mother," Ruth said, quickly. "There are plenty
of places--"

"Who fired you?" interrupted Dulac, his black eyes glowing angrily.
"That young cub?"

"Young Mr. Foote," said Ruth.

"It was because I live here," said Dulac, intensely. "That was why,
wasn't it? That's the way they fight, striking at us through our
womenfolks.... And when we answer with bricks..."

"I don't think he wanted to do it," Ruth said. "I think he was made to."

"Nonsense! Too bad the boys didn't get their hands on him last
night--the infernal college-bred whipper-snapper!... Well, don't you
worry about that job. Nor you, either, Mrs. Frazer."

"Seems like I never did anything but worry; if it wasn't about one
thing it was another, and no peace since I was in the cradle," said
Mrs. Frazer, dolefully. "If it ain't the rent it's strikes and riots
and losin' positions and not knowin' if your husband's comin' home to
sleep in bed, or his name in the paper in the morning and him in jail.
And since he was killed--"

"Now, mother," said Ruth, "I'll have a job before tomorrow night. We
won't starve or be put out into the street."

Mrs. Frazer dabbed at her eyes with her apron and signified her firm
belief that capital was banded together for the sole purpose of causing
her mental agony; indeed, that capital had been invented with that end
in view, and if she had her way--which seldom enough, and her never
doing a wrong to a living body--capital should have visited on it
certain plagues and punishments hinted at as adequate, but not named.
Whereupon she got up from the table and went out into the kitchen after
the pie.

"Mrs. Frazer," said Dulac, when she returned, "I've got to hurry
downtown to headquarters, but I want to have a little talk with Ruth
before I go. Can't the dishes wait?"

"I did up dishes alone before Ruth was born, and a few thousand times
since. Guess I can get through with it without her help at least once
more."

Dulac smiled, so that his white, even teeth showed in a foreign sort of
way. In that moment Ruth thought there was something Oriental or Latin
about his appearance--surely something exotic. He had a power of
fascination, and its spell was upon her.

He stood up and walked to the door of the little parlor, where he stood
waiting. Ruth, not blushing, but pale, afraid, yet eager to hear what
she knew he was going to say, passed him into the room. He closed the
door.

"You know what I want to say," he began, approaching close to her, but
not touching her. "You know what life will be like with a man whose
work is what mine is.... But I'd try to make up for the hardships and
the worries and the disagreeable things. I'd try, Ruth, and I think I
could do it.... Your heart is with the Cause. I wouldn't marry you if
it wasn't because you couldn't stand the life. But you want to see what
I want to see.... If I'm willing to run the risks and live the life I
have to live because I see how I can help along the work and make the
world a better place for those to live in who need to have it a better
place... if I can do what I do, I've thought you might be willing to
share it all.... You're brave. You come of a blood that has suffered
and been willing to suffer. Your father was a martyr--just as I would
be willing to be a martyr...."

Somehow the thing did not seem so much like a proposal of marriage as
like a bit of flamboyant oratory. The theatrical air of the man, his
self-consciousness--with the saving leaven of unquestionable
sincerity--made it more an exhortation from the platform. Even in his
intimate moments Dulac did not step out of character.... But this was
not apparent to Ruth. Glamour was upon her, blinding her. The
personality of the man dominated her personality. She saw him as he saw
himself.... And his Cause was her Cause. If he would have suffered
martyrdom for it, so would she. She raised her eyes to his and, looking
into them, saw a soul greater than his soul, loftier than his soul. She
was an apostle, and her heart throbbed with pride and joy that this man
of high, self-sacrificing purpose should desire her.... She was ready
to surrender; her decision was made. Standing under his blazing eyes,
in the circle of his magnetism, she was sure she loved him.

But the surrender was not to be made then. Her mother rapped on the
door.

"Young gentleman to see you, Ruth," she called.

She heard Dulac's teeth click savagely. "Quick," he said. "What is it
to be?"

The spell was broken, the old uncertainty, the wavering, was present
again. "I--oh, let me think. To-morrow--I'll tell you to-morrow."

She stepped--it was almost a flight--to the door, and opened it. In the
dining room, hat in hand, stood Bonbright Foote. Dulac saw, too.

"What does he want here?" he demanded, savagely.

"I don't know."

"I'll find out. It's no good to you he intends."

"Mr. Dulac!" she said, and faced him a moment. He stopped, furious
though he was. She stopped him. She held him.... There was a strength
in her that he had not realized. Her utterance of his name was a
command and a rebuke.

"I know his kind," Dulac said, sullenly. "Let me throw him out."

"Please sit down," she said. "I want to bring him in here. I know him
better than you--and I think your side misunderstands him. It may do
some good."

She stepped into the dining room. "Mr. Foote," she said.

He was embarrassed, ill at ease. "Miss Frazer," he said, with boyish
hesitation, "you don't want to see me--you have no reason to do
anything but--despise me, I guess. But I had to come. I found your
address and came as quickly as I could."

"Step in here," she said. Then, "You and Mr. Dulac have met."

Dulac stood scowling. "Yes," he said, sullenly. Bonbright flushed and
nodded.... Dulac seemed suddenly possessed by a gust of passion. He
strode threateningly to Bonbright, lips snarling, eyes blazing.

"What do you mean by coming here? What do you want?" he demanded,
hoarsely. "You come here with your hands red with blood. Two men are
dead.... Four others smashed under the hoofs of your police!... You're
trying to starve into submission thousands of men. You're striking at
them through their wives and babies.... What do you care for them or
their suffering? You and your father are piling up millions--and every
penny a loaf stolen from the table of a workingman!... There'll be
starving out there soon.... Babies will be dying for want of food--and
you'll have killed them.... You and your kind are bloodsuckers,
parasites!... and you're a sneaking, spying hound.... Every man that
dies, every baby that starves, every ounce of woman's suffering and
misery that this strike causes are on your head.... You forced the
strike, backed up by the millions of the automobile crowd, so you could
crush and smash your men so they wouldn't dare to mutter or complain.
You did it deliberately--you prowling, pampered puppy...." Dulac was
working himself into blind rage.

Bonbright looked at the man with something of amazement, but with
nothing of fear. He was not afraid. He did not give back a step, but,
as he stood there, white to the lips, his eyes steadily on Dulac's
eyes, he seemed older, weary. He seemed to have been stripped of youth
and of the lightheartedness and buoyancy of youth. He was thinking,
wondering. Why should this man hate him? Why should others hate him?
Why should the class he belonged to be hated with this blighting
virulence by the class they employed?...

He did not speak nor try to stem Dulac's invective. He was not angered
by it, nor was he hurt by it.... He waited for it to subside, and with
a certain dignity that sat well on his young shoulders. Generations of
ancestors trained in the restraints were with him this night, and stood
him in good stead.

Ruth stood by, the situation snatched beyond her control. She was
terrified, yet even in her terror she could not avoid a sort of
subconscious comparison of the men.

"Mr. Dulac!... Please!... Please!..." she said, tearfully.

"I'm going to tell this--this murderer what he is. and then I'm going
to throw him out," Dulac raged.

"Mr. Foote came to see ME," Ruth said, with awakened spirit. "He is in
my house.... You have no right to act so. You have no right to talk
so.... You sha'n't go on."

Dulac turned on her. "What is this cub to you? What do you care?...
Were you expecting him?"

"She wasn't expecting me," said Bonbright, breaking silence for the
first time. "I came because she didn't get a square deal.... I had to
come."

"What do you want with her?... You've kicked her out of your
office--now leave her alone.... There's just one thing men of your
class want of girls of her class...."

At first Bonbright did not comprehend Dulac's meaning; then his face
reddened; even his ears were enveloped in a surge of color. "Dulac," he
said, evenly, "I came to say something to Miss Frazer. When I have done
I'm going to thrash you for that."

Ruth seized Dulac's arm. "Go away," she cried. "You have no right. ...
If you ever want an answer--to that question--you'll go NOW... If this
goes on--if you don't go and leave Mr. Foote alone, I'll never see you
again.... I'll never speak to you again.... I mean it!"

Dulac, looking down into her face, saw that she did mean it. He shot
one venomous glance at Bonbright, snatched his hat from the table, and
rushed from the room.

Presently Ruth spoke.

"I'm so sorry," she said.

Bonbright smiled. "It was too bad.... He believes what he says about
me...."

"Yes, he believes it, and thousands of other men believe it.... They
hate you."

"Because I have lots of money and they have little. Because I own a
factory and they work in it.... There must be a great deal to it
besides that.... But that isn't what I came to say. I--it was about
discharging you."

"Yes," she said. "I knew it wasn't you.... Your father made you."

He flushed. "You see... I'm not a real person. I'm just something with
push buttons. When somebody wants a thing done he pushes one, and I do
it.... I didn't want you to go. I--Well, things aren't exactly joyous
for me in the plant. I don't fit--and I'm being made to fit." His voice
took on a tinge of bitterness. "I've got to be something that the label
'Bonbright Foote VII' will fit.... It was on account of that smile of
yours that I made them give you to me for my secretary. The first time
I saw you you smiled--and it was mighty cheering. It sort of lightened
things up--so I got you to do my work--because I thought likely you
would smile sometimes...."

Her eyes were downcast to hide the moisture that was in them.

"Father made me discharge you.... I couldn't help it--and you don't
know how ashamed it made me.... To know I was so helpless. That's what
I came to say. I wanted you to know--on account of your smile. I didn't
want you to think--I did it willingly.... And--sometimes it isn't easy
to get another position--so--so I went to see a man, Malcolm Lightener,
and told him about you. He manufactures automobiles--and he's--he's a
better kind of man to work for than--we were. If you are willing you
can--go there in the morning."

She showed him her smile now--but it was not the broad, beaming grin;
it was a dewy, tremulous smile.

"That was good of you," she said, softly.

"I was just trying to be square," he said. "Will you take the place? I
should like to know. I should like to know I'd helped to make things
right."

"Of course I shall take it," she said.

"Thank you.... I--shall miss you. Really.... Good night, Miss
Frazer--and thank you."

She pitied him from her heart. His position was not a joyful one....
And, as people sometimes do, she spoke on impulse, not calculating
possible complications.

"If--you may come to see me again if you want to."

He took her extended hand. "I may?" he said, almost incredulously. "And
will you smile for me?"

"Once, each time you come," she said.




CHAPTER X


Day after day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength
departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The
men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic
determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of
hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless
stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins
that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany
bars.

Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his
individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the
strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did
not bend under it. He would not admit the hopelessness of the
contest--and he fought on. At the end of a month he was still able to
fire his audiences with sincere, if theatrical, oratory; he could still
play upon them and be certain of a response. At the end of two months
he--even he--was forced to admit that they listened with stolidness,
with apathy. They were falling away from him; but he fought on. He
would not admit defeat, would not, even in his most secret thoughts,
look forward to inevitable failure.

Every man that deserted was an added atom of strength to Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated. Every hungry baby, every ailing wife, every empty
dinner table fought for the company and against Dulac. Rioting ended.
It requires more than hopeless apathy to create a riot; there must be
fervor, determination, enthusiasm. Daily Dulac's ranks were thinned by
men who slunk to the company's employment office and begged to be
reinstated.... The back of the strike was broken.

Bonbright Foote saw how his company crushed the strike; how,
ruthlessly, with machinelike certainty and lack of heart, it went ahead
undeviatingly, careless of obstructions, indifferent to human beings in
its path. There was something Prussian about it; something that
recalled to him Bismarck and Moltke and 1870 with the exact, soulless
mechanical perfection of the systematic trampling of the France of
Napoleon III.... And, just as the Bonbright Foote tradition crunched
the strike to pieces so it was crunching and macerating his own
individuality until it would be a formless mass ready for the mold.

The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating
direction by heart and mind. No day passed upon which the rod of
Bonbright's will was not bent, was not twisted to make it follow the
direction of some other will stronger than his--the direction of the
accumulated wills of all the Bonbright Footes who had built up the
family tradition.

No initiative was allowed him; he was not permitted to interest himself
in the business in his own youthful, healthy way; but he must see it
through dead eyes, he must initiate nothing, criticize nothing, suggest
nothing. He must follow rule.

His father was not satisfied with him, that he realized--and that he
was under constant suspicion. He was unsatisfactory. His present mental
form was not acceptable and must undergo painful processes of
alteration. His parents would have taken him back, as a bad bargain,
and exchanged him for something else if they could, but being unable,
they must make him into something else.

Humiliation lay heavy on him. Every man in the employ of Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, must realize the shamefulness of his position,
that he was a fiction, a sham held up by his father's hands. Orders
issued from his lips to unsmiling subordinates, who knew well they were
not his orders, but words placed in his mouth to recite parrot-like.
Letters went out under his signature, dictated by him--according to the
dictation of his father. He was a rubber stamp, a mechanical means of
communication.... He was not a man, an individual--he was a marionette
dancing to ill-concealed strings.

The thing he realized with abhorrence was that when he was remade, when
he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create--when at
last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was
master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other
automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same,
never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic
priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material
as needful--with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their
religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be a symbol....

He approached his desk in the morning with loathing, and left it at
night without relief. Hopelessness was upon him and he could not flee
from it; it was inescapable.

True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend--a
sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and
Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them....
Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to
help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so
Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He
discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of
efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have
taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor
had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a
boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that
course.... So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in
his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote,
Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw
where modern business would make changes and improvements--but after
the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew
indifferent.

Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines.

"Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely--and the matter ended.

In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one
process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pass from one
machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary
employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw
time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew
better. He knew how it should be done--but he did not care.... The
methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the
laws of his father's life.

Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm
Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a
woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the
city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had
won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden,
almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of
salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made
her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all.
Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She
continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked
after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had
cooked the meals and made the beds.... She represented womanhood of a
sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with....
There was much about her which gave him food for reflection.

And Hilda.... Since their first meeting there had been no reference to
the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the
knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his
friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by,
how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade,
a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be
wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully.

Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in
his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own
with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would
never have dared to drive.

She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her
attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity.
... He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet
he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her
the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.

He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile
field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with
Hilda.... The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent
reason--though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this
excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.

He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see
her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but
more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position.... She
represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so
wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive
difference.... And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the
moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life.

He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a
result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing
the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he
accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words,
he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote
VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with
the beggar maid.

So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the
molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that
was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father.
There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he
had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically
watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form....

After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning
soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and
presently his father summoned him to come in.

"I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary
talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of
Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going
repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your
secretary--whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists."

The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle,
nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the
guilty look of youth.

"Is it true?" snapped his father.

"I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily.

Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or
little.

"Have you no respect for your family name?... If you must have things
like this in your life, for God's sake keep them covered up. Don't be
infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering
like ghouls over the liaison of my son with--with a female anarchist
who is--the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?"

Liaison!... Liaison!... The foreign term beat again and again against
Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in
connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it
was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain.

"Liaison, sir!... Liaison?" he said, fumblingly.

"I can find a plainer term if you insist."

For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously
detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his
father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he
regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation,
this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that,
but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!...
Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family
tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin
unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission.

His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought
bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer
by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who
was outraged.... It was HER!

His father could think that of her--casually. The mere fact that she
was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the
senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his
son.... The Sultan throwing his handkerchief.

Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat.

"It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because
stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface.

"Bosh!" said the father.

Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled
off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer
to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his
smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones.

"It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie."

"Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful...."

"Careful!... I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever
did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. ...
And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to
believe.... I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could
believe such a thing of her.... Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll
tell you why.... I'll tell you why, good and plenty! ... My first day
in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile
was the only life or brightness in the place.... Everything else was
dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes.
Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!... Men dead
and rotten and eaten by worms--they run this place, and you want me to
let them run me.... Every move you make you consult a skeleton.... And
you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to
walk with a weight of dead bones.... I've tried. You are my father, and
I thought maybe you knew best.... I've submitted. I've submitted to
your humiliations, to having everything that's ME--that is individual
in me--stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back
in its place. ... She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit--and
you kicked her out.... And I've been going to see her--just to see her
smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you....
That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will
keep on making it so.... Probably you'll grind me into the family
groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've
just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the
man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer..."

He stopped, pale, panting, quivering.

"How dare you!... How dare--"

"Dare!"... Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great,
quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to
have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on
his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped,
clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. ... A
lie.... A slimy lie!"




CHAPTER XI


Mr. Foote stood motionless, staring after his son as he might have
stared at some phenomenon which violated a law of nature; for instance,
as he might have stared at the sun rising in the west, at a stream
flowing uphill, at Newton's apple remaining suspended in air instead of
falling properly to the ground. He was not angry--yet. That personal
and individual emotion would come later; what he experienced now was a
FAMILY emotion, a staggering astonishment participated in by five
generations of departed Bonbright Footes.

He was nonplussed. Here had happened a thing which could not happen. In
the whole history of the Foote family there had never been recorded an
instance of a son uttering such words to his father or of his family.
There was no instance of an outburst even remotely resembling this one.
It simply could not be.... And yet it was. He had witnessed it,
listened to it, had been the target at which his son's hot words had
been hurled.

For most occurrences in his life Mr. Foote could find a family
precedent. This matter had been handled thus, and that other matter had
been handled so. But this thin--it had never been handled because it
had never happened. He was left standing squarely on his own feet,
without aid or support.

Mortification mingled with his astonishment. It had remained for
him--who had thought to add to the family laurels the literary
achievement of portraying philosophically the life of the Marquis
Lafayette--to father a son who could be guilty of thinking such
thoughts and uttering such words. He looked about the room
apprehensively, as if he feared to find assembled there the shades of
departed Bonbrights who had been eavesdropping, as the departed are
said to do by certain psychic persons.... He hoped they had not been
listening at his keyhole, for this was a squalid happening that he must
smother, cover up, hide forever from their knowledge.

These sensations were succeeded by plain, ordinary, common, uncultured,
ancestorless anger. Bonbright Foote VI retained enough personality,
enough of his human self, to be able to become angry. True, he did not
do it as one of his molders would have done; he was still a Foote, even
in passion. It was a dignified, a cultured, a repressed passion... but
deep-seated and seething for an outlet, just the same. What he felt
might be compared distantly to what other men feel when they seize upon
the paternal razor strop and apply it wholesomely to that portion of
their son's anatomy which tradition says is most likely to turn boys to
virtue.... He wanted to compel Bonbright to make painful reparation to
his ancestors. He wanted to inflict punishment of some striking,
uncommon, distressing sort....

His anger increased, and he became even more human. With a trifle more
haste than was usual, with the studied, cultured set of his lips less
studied and cultured than ever they had been before, he strode to his
son's door. Something was going to happen. He was restraining himself,
but something would happen now. He felt it and feared it. ... His rage
must have an outlet. Vaguely he felt that fire must be fought with
fire--and he all unaccustomed to handling that element. But he would
rise to the necessities....

He stepped into Bonbright's room, keyed up to eruption, but he did not
erupt. Nobody was there to erupt AT. Bonbright was gone....

Mr. Foote went back to his desk and sat there nervously drumming on its
top with his fingers. He was not himself. He had never been so
disturbed before and did not know it was possible for him to be upset
in this manner. There had been other crises, other disagreeable
happenings in his life, but he had met them calmly, dispassionately,
with what he was pleased to call philosophy. He had liked to fancy
himself as ruled wholly by intellect and not at all by emotion. And now
emotion had caught him up as a tidal wave might catch up a strong
swimmer, and tossed him hither and thither, blinded by its spray and
helpless.

His one coherent thought was that something must be done about it. At
such a moment some fathers would have considered the advisability of
casting their sons loose to shift for themselves as a punishment for
too much independence and for outraging the laws requiring
unquestioning respect for father from son. This course did not even
occur to Mr. Foote. It was in the nature of things that it should not,
for in his mind his son was a permanent structure, a sort of extension
on the family house. He was THERE. Without him the family ended, the
family business passed into the hands of strangers. There would be no
Bonbright Foote VIII who, in his turn, should become the father of
Bonbright Foote IX, and so following. No, he did not hold even
tentatively the idea of disinheritance.

Something, however, must be done, and the something must result in his
son's becoming what he wanted his son to become. Bonbright must be
grasped and shoved into the family groove and made to travel and
function there. There could be no surrender, no wavering, no concession
made by the family.... The boy must be made into what he ought to
be--but how? And he must have his lesson for this day's scene. He must
be shown that he could not, with impunity, outrage the Family Tradition
and flout the Family Ghosts.... Again--how?

What Bonbright intended in his present state of boyish rage and revolt,
his father did not consider. It was characteristic of him that he
failed to think of that. All his considerations were of what he and the
Family should do to Bonbright.... A general would doubtless have called
this defective strategy. To win battles one must have some notion of
the enemy's intentions--and of his potentialities.... His
determination--set and stiff as cold metal--was that something
unpleasant should happen to the boy and that the boy should be brought
to his senses.... If anyone had hinted to him that the boy was just
coming to his senses he would have listened as one listens to a patent
absurdity.

He pressed the buzzer which summoned Rangar, and presently that
soft-footed individual appeared silently in the door--looking as Mr.
Foote had never seen him look before. Rangar was breathing hard, he was
flustered, his necktie was awry, and his face was ivory white. Also,
though Mr. Foote did not take in this detail, his eyes smoldered with
restrained malignancy.

"Why, Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "what's wrong?"

"Wrong, Mr. Foote!... I--It was Mr. Bonbright."

"What about Mr. Bonbright?"

"A moment ago he came rushing out of his office--I use the word rushing
advisedly.... He was in a rage, sir. He was, you could see it plain.
I--I was in his way, sir, and I stepped aside. But he wouldn't have it.
No, sir, he wouldn't.... He reached out, Mr. Foote, and grabbed me;
yes, sir, grabbed me right before the whole office. It was by the front
of the shirt and the necktie, and he shook me.... He's a strong young
man.... And he said, 'You're the sneak that's been running to father
with lies,' and then he shook me again. 'I suppose,' he says in a
second, 'that I've got to expect to be spied on.... Go ahead, it's a
job that fits you.' Yes, sir, that's exactly what he said in his own
words. 'Fits me,' says he. And then he shook me again and threw me
across the alleyway so that I fell over on a desk. 'Spy ahead,' he
says, so that everybody in the office heard him and was snickering at
me, 'but report what you see after this--and see to it it's the
truth.... One more lie like this one,' he says, and then stopped and
rushed on out of the office. It was a threat, Mr. Foote, and he meant
it. He means me harm."

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Foote, holding himself resolutely in the character
he had built for himself. "A fit of boyish temper."

Rangar's eyes glinted, but he made no rejoinder.

"He rather lost his temper with ME," said Mr. Foote, "when I accused
him of a liaison with that girl.... He denied it, Rangar, or so I
understood. He was very young and--tempestuous about it. Are you sure
you were right?"

"What else would he be going there for, Mr. Foote?"

"My idea exactly."

"Unless, sir, he fancies he's in love with the girl.... I once knew a
young man in a position similar to Mr. Bonbright's who fell in love
with a girl who sold cigars in a hotel.... He fairly DOGGED her, sir.
Wanted to marry her. You wouldn't believe it, but that's what he did,
and his family had to buy her off and send her away or he'd have done
it, too.... It might happen to any young man, Mr. Foote."

"Not to a member of my family, Rangar."

"I can't agree with you, sir.... Nobody's immune to it. You can't deny
that Mr. Bonbright has been going to see her regularly. Five or six
times he's been there, and stayed a long time every visit.... It was
one thing or the other he went for, and you can't deny that. If he says
it wasn't what you accused him of, then it was the other."

"You mean that my son--a Foote--could fall in love, as you call it,
with the daughter of a boarding house and a companion of anarchists?"

"I hate to say it to you, sir, but there isn't anything else to
believe.... He's young, Mr. Foote, and fiery. She isn't bad looking,
either, and she's clever. A clever girl can do a lot with a boy, no
matter who he is, if she sets her heart on him. It wouldn't be a bad
match for a girl like her if she was to entice Mr. Bonbright into a
marriage."

"Impossible, Rangar.... However, you have an eye kept on him. I want to
be told every move he makes, where he goes, who he sees. I want to know
everything about him, Rangar. Will you see to it?"

"Yes, sir," said Rangar, a gleam of malice again visible in his eyes.

"What do you know about this girl? Have you had her looked up?"

"Not fully, sir. But I've heard she was heart and soul with what these
anarchists believe. Her father was one of them. Killed by the police or
soldiers or somebody.... The unions educated her. That's why Dulac went
to live there--to help them out.... And it's been reported to me, Mr.
Foote, that Dulac was sweet on her himself. That came from a reliable
source."

"My son a rival of an anarchist for the favor of the daughter of a
cheap boarding house!" exclaimed Mr. Foote.

"This Dulac was seen, Mr. Foote, with reference to the strike. He's a
fanatic. Nothing could be done with him. He actually offered violence
to our agent who attempted to show him how it would be to his benefit
to--to be less energetic. We offered him--"

"I don't care to hear what we offered him. Such details are
distasteful, Rangar. That's what I hire you for, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir.... Anyhow, Mr. Foote, he couldn't be bought."

"Yes.... Yes. Well, we'll have to continue along the lines we've been
following. They have been not unsuccessful."

"True enough. It's just a question of time now. It might do some good,
Mr. Foote, to have the rumor get about that we wouldn't take back any
men who did not apply for reinstatement before the end of next week....
There's considerable discontent, due largely to insufficient
nourishment. Yes, we can lay it to that, I imagine. It's this man Dulac
that holds the strike together. If only every laboring man had a dozen
babies there'd be less strikes," Rangar finished, not exactly
callously, but in a matter-of-fact way. If he had thought of it he
might have added, "and a sick wife." Rangar would not have hesitated to
provide each striker with the babies and the wife, purely as a
strike-breaking measure, if he could have managed the matter.

"They're improvident," said Mr. Foote, sagaciously. "If they must
strike and cut off their earnings every so often, why don't they lay up
savings to carry them through?"

"They seem to have the notion, sir, that they don't earn enough to
save. That, while it isn't their main grievance, is an important one.
But the idiots put nonsensical, immaterial grievances ahead of money
matters mostly.... Rights! Rights to do this or not to do that--to
organize or to sit at board meetings. They're not practical, Mr. Foote.
If it was just money they wanted we might get on with them. It's men
like this Dulac putting notions into their heads that they haven't
brains enough to think of themselves. Social revolution, you know--that
sort of thing."

"Do what you like about it. You might have notices tacked up outside
the gates stating that we wouldn't take back men who weren't back by
the date you named. And, Rangar, be sure Mr. Bonbright's name is signed
to it. I want to rid the men thoroughly of any absurd ideas about him."

"You have, sir. If Dulac is a fair sample, you have. Why, he seems
regularly to HATE Mr. Bonbright. Called him names, and that sort of
thing.... Maybe, though, there's something personal mixed up in it."

"That girl?..."

"Very likely, sir."

"You know her, Rangar. She worked under you. What sort of girl is
she?... I mean would you consider it wise to approach her with a
proposition--delicately put, of course--to--say--move to another city,
or something of the sort?"

"My observation of her--while not close--(you understand I have little
opportunity for close observations of unimportant subordinates)--was
that it would be unwise and--er--futile. She seemed to have quite a
will. Indeed, I may say she seemed stubborn ... and no fool. If she's
got a chance at Mr. Bonbright she wouldn't give it up for a few
dollars. Not her, sir."

"I don't recall her especially. Small--was she not? Not
the--ah--ripe--rounded type to attract a boy? Eh?"

"Curves and color don't always do it, Mr. Foote, I've observed. I've
known scrawny ones, without a thing to stir up the imagination, that
had ten boys running after them to one running after the kind they have
pictures of on calendars.... I don't know if it's brains, or what, but
they've got something that attracts."

"Hum!... Can't say I've had much experience. Probably you're right.
Anyhow, we're faced by something definite in the way of a condition.
... If the thing is merely a liaison--we can break it up, I imagine,
without difficulty. If my son is so blind to right and wrong, and to
his position, as to want to MARRY the girl, we'll have to resort
promptly to effective measures."

"Promptly," said Rangar. "And quietly, Mr. Foote. If she got an idea
there was trouble brewing, she might off with him and get married
before we could wink."

"Heavens!... An anarchistic boarding-house girl for a daughter-in-law!
We'd be a proud family, Rangar."

"Yes, sir. I understand you leave it with me?"

"I leave it with you to keep an eye on Bonbright. Consult with me
before acting. My son is in a strange humor. He'll take some handling,
I'm afraid, before we bring him to see things as my son ought to see
them. But I'll bring him there, Rangar. I should be doing my duty very
indifferently, indeed, if I did not. He's resentful. He wants to
display a thing he calls his individuality--as if our family had use
for such things. We're Footes, and I rather fancy the world knows what
that means.... My son shall be a Foote, Rangar. That's all.... Stay a
moment, though. Hereafter bear in mind I do not care to be troubled
with squalid details. If things have to be done, do them.... If babies
must be hungry--why, I suppose it is a condition that must exist from
time to time. The fault of their fathers.... However, I do not care to
hear about them. I am engaged on an important literary work, as you
know, and such things tend to distract me."

"Naturally, sir," said Rangar.

"But you will on no account relax your firmness with these strikers.
They must be shown."

"They're being shown," said Rangar, grimly, and walked out of the
office. In the corridor his face, which had been expressionless or
obsequious when he saw the need, changed swiftly. His look was that of
a man thinking of an enemy. There was malice, vindictiveness, hatred in
that look, and it expressed with exactness his sentiments toward young
Bonbright Foote.... It did not express all of them, for, lurking in the
background, unseen, was a deep contempt. Rangar despised Bonbright as a
nincompoop, as he expressed it privately.

"If I didn't think," he said, "I'd get all the satisfaction I need by
leaving him to his father, I'd take a hand myself. But the Foote spooks
will give it to him better than I could.... I can't wish him any worse
luck than to be left to THEM." He chuckled and felt of his disarranged
tie.

As for Bonbright Foote VI, he was frightened. No other word can
describe his sensations. The idea that his son might marry--actually
MARRY--this girl, was appalling. If the boy should actually take such
an unthinkable step before he could be prevented, what a situation
would arise!

"Of course it wouldn't last," he said to himself. "Such marriages never
do.... But while it did last--And there might be a child--a SON!" A
Bonbright Foote VIII come of such a mother, with base blood in his
veins! He drew his aristocratic shoulders together as though he felt a
chill.

"When he comes back," Mr. Foote said, "we'll have this thing out."

But Bonbright did not come back that day, nor was he visible at home
that night.... The next day dragged by and still he did not appear. ...




CHAPTER XII


Ruth Frazer had been working nearly two months for Malcolm Lightener,
and she liked the place. It had been a revelation to her following her
experience with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. It INTERESTED her,
fascinated her. There was an atmosphere in the tremendous offices--a
tension, a SNAPPINESS, an alertness, an efficiency that made Bonbright
Foote, Incorporated, seem an anachronism; as belonging in an earlier,
more leisurely, less capable century. There was a spirit among the
workers totally lacking in her former place of employment; there was an
attitude in superiors, and most notable in Malcolm Lightener himself,
which was so different from that of Mr. Foote that it seemed
impossible. Foote held himself aloof from contacts with his help and
his business. Malcolm Lightener was everywhere, interested in
everything, mixing into everything. And though she perceived his
granite qualities, experienced his brusqueness, his gruffness, she, in
common with the office, felt for him something that was akin to
affection. He was the sort to draw forth loyalty.

Her first encounter with him occurred a couple of days after her
arrival in the office. She was interrupted in the transcription of a
letter by a stern voice behind her, saying:

"You're young Foote's anarchist, aren't you?"

She looked up frightened into the unsmiling eyes of Malcolm Lightener.

"Mr. Foote--got me my place here," she said, hesitatingly.

"Here--take this letter." And almost before she could snatch book and
pencil he was dictating, rapidly, dynamically. When Malcolm Lightener
dictated a letter he did it as though he were making a public speech,
with emphasis and gesture. "There," he said, "read it back to me."

She did, her voice unsteady.

"Spell isosceles," he demanded.

She managed the feat accurately.

"Uh!... That usually gets 'em.... Needn't transcribe that letter. Like
it here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why?"

She looked up at him, considering the matter. Why did she like it
there? "Because," she said, slowly, "it doesn't seem like just
a--a--big, grinding machine, and the people working here like wheels
and pulleys and little machines. It all feels ALIVE, and--and--we feel
like human beings."

"Huh!..." he grunted, and frowned down at her. "Brains," he said.
"Mighty good thing to have. Took brains to be able to think that--and
say it." He turned away, then said, suddenly, over his shoulder, "Got
any bombs in your desk?"

"Bombs!..."

"Because," he said, with no trace of a smile, "we don't allow little
girls to bring bombs in here.... If you see anything around that you
think needs an infernal machine set off under it, why, you come and
tell me. See?... Tell me before you explode anything--not after. You
anarchists are apt to get the cart before the horse."

"I'm not an anarchist, Mr. Lightener."

"Huh!... What are you, then?"

"I think--I'm sure I'm a Socialist."

"All of the same piece of cloth.... Mind, if you feel a bomb coming
on--see me about it." He walked away to stop by the desk of a mailing
clerk and enter into some kind of conversation with the boy.

Ruth looked after him in a sort of daze. Then she heard the girls about
her laughing.

"You've passed your examination, Miss Frazer," said the girl at the
next desk. "Everybody has to.... You never can tell what he's going to
do, but he's a dear. Don't let him scare you. If he thought he had he'd
be tickled to death--and then he'd find some way to show you you
needn't be at all."

"Oh!" said Ruth.

More than once she saw laboring men, machinists, men in greasy
overalls, with grimy hands and smeared faces, pass into Malcolm
Lightener's office, and come out with the Big Boss walking beside them,
talking in a familiar, gruff, interested way. She was startled
sometimes to hear such men address him by his first name--and to see no
lightning from heaven flash blastingly. She was positively startled
once when a machinist flatly contradicted Lightener in her hearing on
some matter pertaining to his work.

"That hain't the way at all," the man said, flatly. Ruth waited for the
explosion.

"Landers planned it that way." Landers was chief engineer in the plant,
drawing a princely salary.

"Landers is off his nut. He got it out of a book. I'm DOIN' it. I tell
you it won't work."

"Why?" Always Lightener had a WHY. He was constantly shooting it at
folks, and it behooved them to have a convincing answer. The machinist
had, and he set it forth at length and technically. Lightener listened.

"You win," he said, when the man was done. That was all.

More than once Ruth saw Hilda Lightener in the office. Usually the
girls in an office fancy they have a grudge against the fortunate
daughter of their employer. They are sure she snubs them, or is a snob,
or likes to show off her feathers before them. This was notably absent
in Hilda's case. She knew many by name and stopped to chat with them.
She was simple, pleasant, guiltless of pomp and circumstance in her
comings and goings.

"They say she's going to marry young Foote. The Foote company makes
axles for us," said Ruth's neighbor, and after that Ruth became more
interested in Hilda.

She liked Bonbright Foote and was sorry for him. Admitting the unwisdom
of his calls upon her, she had not the heart to forbid him, especially
that he had shown no signs of sentiment, or of stepping beyond the
boundary lines of simple friendship.... She saw to it that he and Dulac
did not meet.

As for Dulac--she had disciplined him for his outbreak as was the duty
of a self-respecting young woman, and had made him eat his piece of
humble pie. It had not affected her veneration for his work, nor her
admiration for the man and his sincerity and his ability.... She had
answered his question, and the answer had been yes, for she had come to
believe that she loved him....

She saw how tired he was looking. She perceived the discouragements
that weighed on him, and saw, as he refused to see, that the strike was
a failure in spite of his efforts. And she was sensible. The strike had
failed; nothing was to be gained by sustaining the ebbing remnants of
it, by making men and women and children suffer futilely. ... She would
have ended it and begun straight-way preparing a strike that would not
fail. But she did not say so to him. He HAD to fight. She saw that. She
saw, too, that it was not in him to admit defeat or to surrender. It
would be necessary to crush him first.

And then, at five o'clock, as she came out of the office she found
Bonbright Foote waiting for her in his car. It had never happened
before.

"I--I came for you," he said, awkwardly, yet with something of
tenseness in his voice.

"You shouldn't," she said, not unkindly. He would understand the
reasons.

"I had to," he said. "I--all day I've done nothing but wait to see you.
I've got to talk to you.... Please, now that I'm here, won't you get
in?"

She saw that something was wrong, that something out of the ordinary
had happened, and as she stepped into the car she shot a glance at his
set face and felt a wave of sympathy for him.

"I want you to--to have something to eat with me--out in the country. I
want to get away from town. Let me send a messenger to your mother. I
know you don't want to, and--and all that, but you'll come, won't you?"

Ruth considered. There was much to consider, but she knew he was an
honest, wholesome boy--and he was in trouble.

"This once," she said, and let him see her grin.

"Thank you," he said, simply.

It was but a short drive to an A. D. T. office, where Bonbright wrote a
message to Mrs. Frazer:

I'm taking your daughter to Apple Lake to dinner. I hope you won't
mind. And I promise to have her home safe and early.

A boy was dispatched with this, and Bonbright and Ruth drove out the
Avenue with the evening sun in their faces, toward distant, beautiful
Apple Lake. Bonbright drove in silence, his eyes on the road. Ruth was
alone in her appreciation of the loveliness of the waning day.

The messenger left on his bicycle, but had not gone farther than around
the first corner when a gentleman drew up beside him in an automobile.

"Hey, kid, I want to speak to you," said Mr. Rangar.

The boy stopped and the car stopped.

"You've got a message there that I'm interested in," said Rangar. "It
isn't sealed. I want a look at it." He held out a five-dollar bill. The
boy pocketed the bill and handed over the message, which Rangar read
and returned to him. Then Rangar drove to the office from which the boy
had come and dispatched a message of his own, one not covered by his
instructions from Mr. Foote. It was a private matter with him, inspired
by an incident of the morning having to do with a rumpled necktie and a
ruffled dignity. The malice which had glittered in his eyes then was
functioning now.

Rangar's message was to Dulac.

"Your girl's just gone to Apple Lake with young Foote in his car," it
said. That was all, but it seemed ample to Rangar.

Bonbright was not a reckless driver, but he drove rapidly this evening,
with a sort of driven eagerness. From, time to time Ruth turned and
glanced at his face and wondered what could have happened, for she had
never seen him like this before, even in his darkest moments. There was
a new element in his bearing, an element never there before.
Discouragement, apathy, she had seen, and bitterness. She had seen
wistfulness, hopelessness, chagrin, humiliation, but never until now
had she seen set determination, smoldering embers of rage. What, she
wondered, could this boy's father have done to him now?

Soon they were beyond the rim of industry which banded the city, and,
leaving behind them towering chimneys, smokeless for the night, clouds
of released working-men waiting their turns to crowd into overloaded
street cars, the grimy, busy belt line which extended in a great arc
through the body of the manufacturing strip, they passed through
sprouting, mushroomlike suburban villages--villages which had not been
there the year before, which would be indistinguishable from the city
itself the year after. Farther on they sped between huge-lettered
boards announcing the location of real-estate developments which as yet
consisted only of new cement sidewalks, immature trees promising future
shade, and innumerable stakes marking lot boundaries. Mile after mile
these extended, a testimonial to the faith of men in the growth of
their city.... And then came the country, guiltless of the odors of
gregarious humanity, of gasses, of smokes, of mankind itself, and of
the operations which were preparing its food. Authentic farms spread
about them; barns and farmhouses were dropped down at intervals;
everywhere was green quiet, softened, made to glow enticingly by the
sun's red disk about to dip behind the little hills.... All this Ruth
saw and loved. It was an unaccustomed sight, for she was tied to the
city. It altered her mood, softened her, made her more pliable.
Bonbright could have planned no better than to have driven her along
this road....

Presently they turned off at right angles, upon a country road shaded
by century-old maples--a road that meandered leisurely along, now
dipping into a valley created for agriculture, now climbing a hillside
rich with fruit trees; and now and then, from hilltop, or through gap
in the verdure, the gleam of quiet, rush-fringed lakes came to
Ruth--and touched her, touched her so that her heart was soft and her
lashes wet.... The whole was so placid, so free from turmoil, from
competition, from the tussling of business and the surging upward of
down-weighted classes. She was grateful to it.

Yet when, as she did now and then, she glanced at Bonbright, she felt
the contrast. All that was present in the landscape was absent from his
soul. There was no peace there, no placidity, but unrest, bitterness,
unhappiness--grimness. Yes, grimness. When the word came into her mind
she knew it was the one she had been searching for.... Why was he so
grim?

Presently they entered upon a road which ran low beside Apple Lake
itself, with tiny ripples lapping almost at the tire marks in the sand.
She looked, and breathed deeply and gladly. If she could only live on
such a spot!...

The club house was deserted save by the few servants, and Bonbright
gave directions that they should be served on the veranda. It was
almost the first word he had uttered since leaving the city. He led the
way to a table, from which they could sit and look out on the water.

"It's lovely," she said.

"I come here a good deal," he said, without explanation, but she
understood.

"If I were you, I'd LIVE here. Every day I would have the knowledge
that I was coming home to THIS in the evening.... You could. Why don't
you, I wonder?"

"I don't know. I can't remember a Foote who has ever lived in such a
place. If it hasn't been done in my family, of course I couldn't do it."

She pressed her lips together at the bitter note in his voice. It was
out of tune. "Have the ancestors been after you?" she asked. She often
spoke of the ancestors lightly and jokingly, which she saw he rather
liked.

"The whole lot have been riding me hard. And I'm a well-trained nag. I
never buck or balk.... I never did till to-day."

"To-day?"

"I bucked them off in a heap," he said, with no trace of humor. He was
dead serious. "I didn't know I could do it, but all of a sudden I was
plunging and rearing--and snorting, I expect.... And they were off."

"To stay?"

He dropped his eyes and fell silent. "Anyhow," he said, presently,
"it's a relief to be running free even for an hour."

"When they go to climb back why don't you buck some more? Now that
they're off--keep them off."

"It's not so easy. You see, I've been trained all my life to carry
them. You can't break off a thing like that in an instant. A priest
doesn't turn atheist in a night... and this Family Tradition business
is like a religion. It gets into your bones. You RESPECT it. You feel
it demanding things of you and you can't refuse.... I suppose there is
a duty."

"To yourself," she said, quickly.

"To THEM--and to the--the future.... But I bucked them off once. Maybe
they'll never ride so hard again, and maybe they'll try to break me by
riding harder.... Until to-day I never had a notion of fighting
back--but I'm going to give them a job of it now.... There are things I
WILL do. They sha'n't always have their way. Right now, Miss Frazer,
I've broken with the whole thing. They may be able to fetch me back. I
don't know.... Sometime I'll have to go. When father's through I'd have
to go, anyhow--to head the business."

"Your father ought to change the name of the business to Family Ghosts,
Incorporated," she said, with an attempt to lighten his seriousness.

"I'll be general manager--responsible to a board of directors from
across the Styx," he said, with an approach to a smile. "Here's our
waiter. I telephoned our order. Hope I've chosen to please you."

"Indeed you have," she replied. "I feel quite the aristocrat. I ought
not to do this sort of thing.... But I'm glad to do it once. I abhor
the rich," she said, laughing, "but some of the things they do and have
are mighty pleasant."

After a while she said: "If I were a rich man's wife I'd be something
more than a society gadabout. I'd insist on knowing his business... and
I'd make him do a lot of things for his workmen. Think of being a woman
and able to do so much for thousands of--of my class," she finished.

"Your class!" he said, sharply.

"I belong to the laboring class. First, because I was born into it,
and, second, because my heart is with it."

"Class doesn't touch you. It doesn't concern you. You're YOURSELF." For
the first time in her acquaintance with him he made her uneasy. His
eyes and the way he spoke those sentences disturbed her.

"Nonsense!" she said.

Neither spoke for some time. It was growing dark now, and lights were
glowing on the veranda. "When we're through," Bonbright said, "let's
walk down by the lake. There's a bully walk and a place to sit.... I
asked you to come because I wanted to take you there--miles away from
everybody...."

She was distinctly startled now, but helpless. She read storm signals,
but no harbor was at hand.

"We must be getting back," she said, lamely.

"It's not eight. We can go back in an hour.... Shall we walk down now?
I can't wait, Ruth, to say what I've got to say...."

It was impossible to hold back, futile to attempt escape. She knew now
why he had brought her and what he wanted to say, but she could not
prevent it.... If he must have his say let it be where he desired. Very
grave now, unhappy, her joy marred, she walked down the steps by his
side and along the shore of the lake. "Here," he said, presently,
drawing her into a nook occupied by a bench. She sat down obediently.

Was it fortunate or unfortunate that she did not know an automobile was
just turning into the lake road, a hired automobile, occupied by her
fiance, Dulac? Rangar's note had reached his hands and he had acted as
Rangar had hoped....




CHAPTER XIII


Until a few moments before Ruth had never had a suspicion of
Bonbright's feeling for her; she had not imagined he would ever cross
that distinct line which separates the friend from the suitor. It was
an unpleasant surprise to her. Not that he was repugnant to her, but
she had already bestowed her affections, and now she would have to hurt
this boy who had already suffered so much at the hands of others. She
recoiled from it. She blamed herself for her blindness, but she was not
to blame. What she had failed to foresee Bonbright himself had realized
only that morning.

He had awakened suddenly to the knowledge that his sentiment for Ruth
Frazer was not calm friendship, but throbbing love. He had been
awakened to it rudely, not as most young men are shown that they
love.... When he flung out of his father's office that morning he had
recognized only a just rage; hardly had his feet carried him over the
threshold before rage was crowded out by the realization of love. His
father's words had aroused his rage because he loved the woman they
maligned! Suddenly he knew it....

"It's SO," he said to himself. "It's so--and I didn't know it."

It was disconcerting, but he was glad. Almost at once he realized what
a change this thing brought into his life, and the major consequences
of it.... First, he would have her--he must have her--he would not live
without her. It required no effort of determination to arrive at that
decision. To win her, to have her for his own, was now the one
important thing in his life. To do so would mean--what would it mean?
The Family, dead and living, would be outraged. His father would stand
aghast at his impiousness; his mother, class conscious as few of the
under dogs are ever class conscious, would refuse to receive this girl
as her daughter.... There would be bitterness--but there would be
release. By this one step he would break with the Family Tradition and
the Family Ghosts. They would cast him out.... But would they cast him
out? He was Bonbright Foote VII, crown prince of the dynasty, vested
with rights in the family and in the family's property by family laws
of primogeniture and entail.... No, he would not be cast out, could not
be cast out, for his father would let no sin of his son's stand in the
way of a perpetuation of the family. Bonbright knew that if a complete
breach opened between his father and himself it must be his hand that
opened it. His father's would never do so.... He wondered if he could
do so--if, when he was calm, he would desire to do so.

Once he recognized his love he could not be still; office walls could
not contain him. He was in a fever to see Ruth with newly opened eyes,
with eyes that would see her as they had not seen her in the days
before.... He rushed out--to encounter Hangar, and to experience a
surging return of rage.... Then he went on, with no aim or purpose but
to get rid of the time that must pass before he could see Ruth. It was
ten o'clock, and he could not see her until five. Seven hours....

Now she was here, within reach of his hand, her face, not beautiful by
day, very lovely to his eyes as the rising moon stretched a ribbon of
light across the lake to touch her with its magic glow... and he could
not find words to say what must be said.

He had seated her on the bench and now paced up and down before her,
struggling to become coherent.

Then words came, a torrent of them, not coherent, not eloquent, but
REAL. Ruth recognized the reality in them. "I want you," he said,
standing over her. "I didn't know--I didn't realize... until to-day.
It's so.... It's been so right along. That's why I had to come to
you.... I couldn't get along without seeing you, but I didn't know
why.... I thought it was to see you smile. But it was because I had to
be near you.... I want to be near you always. This morning I found
out--and all day I've waited to see you.... That's all I've
done--thought about you and waited. It seems as if morning were years
away.... I don't know what I've done all day--just wandered around. I
didn't eat--until to-night. I couldn't. I couldn't do anything until I
saw you--and told you.... That's why I brought you here.... I wanted to
tell you HERE--not back there.... Away from all that. ... I can't go on
without you--that's what you mean to me. You're NECESSARY--like air or
water.... I--Maybe you haven't thought about me this way. I didn't
about you.... But you MUST... you MUST!"

It was pitiful. Tears wet Ruth's cheeks and she caught her breath to
restrain a rising sob.

He became calmer, gentler. "Maybe I've surprised you," he said. "Maybe
I've frightened you--I hope not. I don't mean to frighten you. I don't
want you ever to be frightened or worried.... I want to keep all kinds
of suffering out of your life if you'll let me. Won't you let me?..."
He stood waiting.

"Mr. Foote," she said, presently, "I--" then she stopped. She had
intended to tell him about Dulac; that she loved him and had promised
to marry him, but she could not utter the words. It would hurt him so
to know that she loved another man. She could refuse him without that
added pain. "Don't you see," she said, "how impossible it is? It
wouldn't do--even if I cared for you."

"If you cared for me," he said, "nothing could make it impossible."

"We belong in different worlds.... You couldn't come down to mine; I
wouldn't fit into yours. My world wouldn't have you, and your world
wouldn't have me.... Don't you see?"

"I don't see. What has your world or mine to do with it? It's just you
and me."

"When you saw that your family wouldn't have me, when you found out
that your friends wouldn't be friends with me, and that they didn't
want to be friends with you any longer just because you married me ..."

"I don't want any friends or family but you," he said, eagerly,
boyishly.

"Be reasonable, Mr. Foote.... You're rich. Some day you'll be the head
of a great business--with thousands of men working for you.... I belong
with them. You must be against them.... I couldn't bear it. You know
all about me. I've been brought up to believe the things I believe. My
father and grandfather and HIS grandfather worked and suffered for
them.... Just as your ancestors have worked and planned for the things
you represent.... It wouldn't ever do. We couldn't be happy. Even if
I--cared--and did as you ask--it wouldn't last."

"It would last," he said. "I KNOW. I've been trying to tell you, to
make you believe that you have crowded everything else out of my life.
There's just you in it.... It would last--and every day and every year
it would grow--more wonderful."

"There must be agreement and sympathy between a husband and his wife,
Mr. Foote.... Oh, I KNOW. In the bigger things. And there we could
never agree. It would make trouble--trouble that couldn't be avoided
nor dodged. It would be there with us every minute--and we'd know it.
You'd know I hated the things you stand for and the things you have to
do.... No man could bear that--to have his wife constantly reproaching
him."

"I think," he said, "that your word would be my law...."

She sat silent, startled. Unasked, unsought, a thought had entered her
mind; a terrifying thought, but a big and vital thought. HER WORD WOULD
BE HIS LAW. Her influence would be upon him.... And he was master of
thousands of her class. He would be master of more thousands.... If she
were his wife--if her word might become his law--how would those
laboring men be affected? Would her word be his law with respect to
them?...

She did not love him, but she did love the Cause she represented, that
her promised husband, Dulac, represented.... Her father had given his
life for it. She had given nothing. Now she could give--herself.... She
could sacrifice herself, she could pass by her love--but would it avail
anything?... This boy loved her, loved her with all his strength and
honesty. He would continue to love her. She believed that.... If, not
loving him, she should marry him, she would be able to hold his
love--and her word would be in some sort his law. She could influence
him--not abruptly, not suddenly, but gradually, cleverly, cunningly.
She could use him for her great purpose. Thousands of men might be
happier, safer from hunger and misery, closer to a realization of their
hope, if she gave herself to this boy.... She was filled with
exaltation--a Joan of Arc listening to her Voices....

It was possible--possible.... And if it were possible, if she could
accomplish this great thing for the Cause, dared she avoid it? Was it
not a holy duty?

Remember her parentage, her training; remember that she had drawn into
her being enthusiasm, fanaticism with the air she breathed in the very
cradle. She was a revolutionist.... Greater crimes than loveless
marriages have been committed in the name of Enthusiasm for a Cause.

She hesitated. What should she say?.... She must think, for a new face
was upon the matter. She must think, and she must talk with Dulac.
Dulac was stronger than she--but he saw eye to eye with her. The things
she set up and worshiped in their shrines he worshiped more
fervently.... She must put the boy off with evasion. She must postpone
her answer until she was certain she saw her duty clearly.

Love of humanity in the mass was in her heart--it shouldered out
fairness to an individual man. She did not think of this. If she had
thought it might not have mattered, for if she were willing to immolate
herself would she not have been as ready to sacrifice one man--for the
good of thousands?

"I-" she began, and was dimly conscious of shame at her duplicity. "I
did not know you--wanted me this way.... Let me think. I can't
answer--to-night. Wait.... Give me time."

His voice was glad as he answered, and its gladness shamed her again.
"Wait.... I'd wait forever. But I don't want to wait forever.... It is
more than I hoped, more than I had the right to hope. I know I took you
by surprise.... Let me have time and the chance to make you love me--to
let you get used to the idea of my loving you. But try not to be long.
I'm impatient--you don't know how impatient...."

"I-I sha'n't be long," she said. "You mustn't build too many hopes...."

He laughed. She had never heard him laugh with such lightness, with
such a note of soul-gladness, before. "Hope.... I shall ea

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