Comrades Part 5

Norman braced himself for the ordeal. He had never before dared to test his father's iron will. He had grown accustomed to see strong men bow and cringe before him, and felt a secret contempt for them all.

They were bowing to his millions. And yet the boy knew with intuitive certainty that beneath the mask of quiet dignity and polished military bearing of the man he facetiously called "the Governor" there slumbered a will unique, powerful, and overbearing. More than once he had resented the silent pressure of his positive and aggressive personality. His own budding manhood had begun instinctively to bristle at its approach.

The Colonel started on seeing Norman, and looked at him with a quizzical expression.

"Was there an earthquake this morning, Norman?"

"I didn't feel it, sir--why?"

"You're downstairs rather early."

Norman smiled. "I've been a little lazy, I'm afraid, Governor. But you know I wasn't consulted as to whether I wished to be born. You a.s.sumed a fearful responsibility. You see the results."

The Colonel dropped his paper and looked at Norman a moment.

"Well, upon my word!" he exclaimed. "What's happened?"

"The biggest thing that ever came into my life, Governor," was the low, serious answer.

"What?"

"The decision that hereafter I'd rather be than seem to be, that I'm going to do some thinking for myself."

"And what brought you to this decision?" the father quietly asked.

"I went last night to that Socialist meeting."

"Indeed!"

"Yes," he went on, impetuously, "and I heard the most wonderful appeal to which I ever listened--an appeal which stirred me to the deepest depths of my being. I think it's the biggest movement of the century.

I'm going to study it. I'm going to see what it means. What do you say to it?"

The boy lifted his tall figure with instinctive dignity, and his eyes met his father's in a straight, deep man's gaze.

The faintest smile played about the corners of the Colonel's mouth as he suddenly extended his hand.

"I congratulate you!"

"Congratulate me?" Norman stammered.

"Upon the attainment of your majority. Up to date you have written a few verses and played football. But this is the first evidence you have ever shown of conscious personality. You're in the grub-worm stage as yet, but you're on the move. You're a human being. You have developed the germ of character. And that's the only thing in this world that's worth the candle, my boy. It's funny to hear you say that the appeal of Socialism has worked this miracle. For character is the one thing the scheme of Socialism leaves out of account. A character is the one thing a machine-made society could never produce if given a million years in which to develop the experiment."

"And you don't object?" Norman asked with increasing amazement.

"Certainly not. Study Socialism to your heart's content. Go to the bottom of it. Don't slop over it. Don't accept sentimental mush for facts. Find out for yourself. Read, think, and learn to know your fellow man. When you've picked up a few first principles, and know enough to talk intelligently, I've something to say to you--something I've learned for myself."

The boy looked at his father steadily and spoke with a slight tremor in his voice.

"Governor, you're a bigger man than I thought you were. I like you--even if you are my father."

"Thanks, my boy," the Colonel gravely replied, "I trust we may know each other still better in the future."

CHAPTER IV

AMONG THE SHADOWS

Under the tutelage of Barbara, the young millionaire plunged into the study of Socialism with the zeal of the fresh convert to a holy crusade.

At first he had listened to her stories of the sufferings of the poor and the unemployed with mild incredulity. She laid her warm little hand on his and said:

"Come and see. If you think that Socialism is a dream, I'll show you that capitalism is a nightmare."

He followed her down the ugly pavements of a squalid street into the poorest quarter of the city. She entered a dingy hall and pushed her way through a swarm of filthy children to the rear room. On a bed of rags lay the body of a suicide--a working-man who had shot himself the day before. The wife sat crouching on a broken chair, with eyes staring out of the window at the sunlit skies of a May morning in California. Her body seemed to have turned to stone and her eyes to have frozen in their sockets. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her shoulders drooped, her mouth hung hopelessly open. She was as dead to every sight and sound of earth as though shrouded and buried in six feet of clay instead of sunlight.

Barbara touched her shoulder, but she did not move.

"Have you been sitting there all night, Mrs. Nelson?" she asked, gently.

The woman turned her weak eyes toward the speaker and stared without reply.

"You haven't tasted the food I brought you," Barbara continued.

The drooping figure stirred with sudden energy, as if the realization of the question first asked had begun to stir her intelligence.

"Yes. I set up all night with Jim. He'd a-done as much fer me. There's n.o.body else that cared enough to come. Ye know it ain't respectful to leave your dead alone----"

"But you must eat something," Barbara urged.

"I can't eat--it chokes me." She paused a moment, and looked at Norman in a dazed sort of way. "I tried to eat and something choked me--what was it? O G.o.d, I remember now!" she cried, with strangling emotion.

"They are going to bury him in the potter's field unless we can save him, and I know we can't. He's got an old mother way back East that thinks he's doing well out here. Hit'll kill her dead when she finds out he wuz buried by the city."

"He shan't go to the potter's field," Norman interrupted, looking out of the window.

The woman rose, and tried to speak, but sank sobbing:

"Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!"

When the first flood of grateful emotion had spent itself, she looked up at Norman and said:

"You see, sir, he wasn't strong, and kept losin' his job in Chicago.

We'd heard about California all our lives. We sold out everything and got enough to come. For two years we've made a hard fight, but it was no use. Jim couldn't git work. I tried and I couldn't. Folks have helped us, but he was proud. He wouldn't beg and he wouldn't let me.

He wouldn't sell his gun. I think he always meant to use it that way when he got to the end, and it come yesterday when they give us notice to git out."

She staggered over to the bed and fell across the body, sobbing:

"My poor old boy. He loved me. He was always good to me. I tried to go with him. But I couldn't pull the trigger! I was afraid! I was afraid!"