Mountain Part 10

"What did you do to your suffragist, anyhow?"

"Oh, she had too much coin for my simple taste. If father learned about her, he couldn't talk anything else.... Not for mine!"

A rattle of knocks on the door broke off the discussion. Several graduate students pushed into the room. "h.e.l.lo, Judson. Going out for supper, Neil?"

He stretched himself up, and reached for a cap. "Pell and I were just about to prowl down to Heublein's."

"Come on, then."

As they crossed Chapel Street, the rubber-lunged news-boys were shouting, "All about the big strike! Street car men to quit to-morrow!"

Pelham purchased a smudgy sheet. While the waiter was double-quicking their orders, all eyes were directed at the leading story.

"Look at this," Ralph Jervis, one of the cla.s.smates, pointed insistently, "the president of the road says he'll break the strike with college men. Let's take a week off, and be blooming motormen!"

A spectacled Senior dissented at once. "It wouldn't be the thing, fellows. Those strikers may be in the right, for all we know."

Jervis howled his disgust. "That's what comes of joining the Socialist Study Club! Falkhaven's a regular anarchist. Why, it's a great idea! Are you on, Neil?"

"Sure!" The Texan roused himself to answer briskly. "If Pell'll come too."

"I'm for it," Pelham a.s.sented quietly.

The constant deference and affection displayed toward his big-hearted roommate hurt him, against his will. For all his ability in studies and on the mat, Pelham was not popular. He had never been accepted in the higher circles of Sheff life, the Colony and Cloister groups; and he in turn held himself aloof from the run of the cla.s.s.

He was a thorough-going sn.o.b, for all his talk of democracy. Anywhere in the South, which held the finest people in the country, a Judson would be known and recognized, and given his proper place. These Yankees, no matter how nice they might be personally, were Republicans; in the South, only negroes and turncoats belonged to that party. At meetings of the Southern Club, he had seconded the resolution asking that negro students be provided with a separate gymnasium and eating hall. It had furnished a week's laugh to the University; hot-headedly, he resented this. He felt that the leading men held him merely on tolerance; he shrank in upon himself.

This feeling of isolation was not entirely unwelcome. He had become used to it in his mountain days. Here it had driven him to the College Library, where he had mastered all its bulky volumes on mining and kindred phases of engineering. He branched from these into higher mathematics, until he could stump his instructor on the fourth dimension. The previous Christmas holiday, he had turned to modern European drama, and had covered what he could find in an amazing short time; although it was not easy to stomach such plays as "The Weavers,"

and some of Shaw's dramatic maunderings.

His college loyalty, and cla.s.s loyalty, in the social sense, continued at a high pitch; and he was among the first to arrive at the office of the New Haven Electric, and to sign up for strike-duty.

He spent an intense morning learning the mechanism of the car--it was not difficult, for a good driver; and he knew automobiles thoroughly.

He was put at a controller on the Savin Rock run, with a halfback for his conductor, and two guards furnished by a Newark agency to aid the uniformed policemen in preserving order through the rioting poorer districts.

The resort was reached, and the return made, in a tiresomely unexciting manner. On the second trip out, a crowd had gathered near the turn by the switching yards, which shouted epithets at the green crew.

"They're a bunch uh mouthin' blackguards, mate," the cheek-scarred guard on the front platform observed with alcoholic familiarity. He dodged a spattering tomato flung jeeringly by a tiny Irishwoman. "All they does is shoot off their mouth."

Pelham found the guard's nearness the main irritation of the ride.

When they neared the same corner on the run in, two women stepped into the street. He slowed the car. They suddenly turned back to the sidewalk. He urged the speed up two notches.

A wagon had been backed across the track. "Clear that off, there." The driver was evidently too asleep, or drunk, to heed.

"You move it," he ordered the guard.

As the man stepped down uneasily, the rush began. Out of the cheap lodging houses and dingy side entrances flooded shouting men, women, children. Bricks, garbage, old bottles thumped against the car sides.

"Better not stop, Judson," the green conductor's shout reached him.

"It'll be hot in a minute."

The guard struggled with the heads of the horses. A whirling broom-handle from the sidewalk knocked him against the wheels. He let go the bits, uncertainly.

"Kill the dam' scabs!"

"To h.e.l.l with 'em!"

"Yah, scabs! Kill the college scabs!"

Pelham swung the heavy switch key dangerously close to the heads of the rioters near the footboard. "Shove off that wagon, there. We're going through."

The horses backed protestingly. The iron rod leapt toward the shrinking crowd. The track was cleared.

Baffled, they surged across the rails in front; car windows were smashed, a turmoil boiled on the rear steps, where policeman and conductor battled with the more incautious attackers. The second guard sneaked off down the alley.

Three or four boarded the front steps. A shrieking woman in the lead caught Pelham's arm. He felt himself dragged toward the door. The swiftness of it dazed him; he could not hit a woman.

"Naw yer don't!" The guard woke up, tore loose the woman with bullying arms. "This rough stuff don't go!" He threw her back into the crowd. An Italian bent at Pelham's feet; a s.h.i.+ny blade snaked toward his leg. He cracked the man's shoulders with the switch key; the knife rang on the cobbles.

Pelham toed the bell vigorously. The car started with a jerk. The front caught one fleeing obstructor, throwing him sideways. Infuriated jeers and howls came from women and children forced aside. A brick splintered the gla.s.s at his right, just missing his head. He broke through, and came into the center of the town.

A dispatcher took charge, placed him on a quieter run, and laid off the Savin Rock line for the day.

He compared experiences with the others at supper. Jervis was in the hospital, with a stove-in rib; Neil's ear wore a bandage; others were laid up wholly or partly. Two of the strikers had been shot in an open battle near the station, and a guard killed; the hospitals were filled with minor injuries. The casualty list beat football, they agreed; and it was better sport!

By the next day, the streets were more orderly. Police reserves patrolled the focal spots, with orders to shoot to kill; mobmen were clubbed on the slightest provocation, and arrested wholesale for vagrancy. The station wagons clanged throughout the streets all day.

Pelham went back to his first run; there was no further tie-up.

He was switched later to the line Neil was on. This route pushed far into the country, and through the depressing filth of a mill suburb.

Jeering lanes of factory men and women lined the roadway; most of them, Pelham judged from the chatter, must be Polacks. There was one persistent group centered around the tail of a cart. Here a woman gesticulated fiercely beneath a red banner.

A stooping giant of a man, six feet three at least, turned from the speaker's words to shake his fist at the approaching car and scream profanely at its driver. "You lousy scab! You dam' thief!"

Pelham, secure in reliance on the bluecoat beside him, stopped the car.

"You're a liar," he said shortly. "Go on about your work, instead of swearing at peaceful citizens."

The man sputtered in frenzy. "This was my run, you----" The profanity spilled recklessly. "Stealing the bread out of working men's mouths, you white-livered scab!"

Pelham turned quickly. "Why don't you arrest that man, officer?"

The protector looked at him coolly; he spat deliberately over the railing. "Fer what? He's only telling the truth. You are a scab, now, ain't you?" He scolded the enraged striker. "Go on, Jimmy. Cool off somewhere. That ain't no way to talk to a motorman from the Yaleses college, that ain't. You don't wanter get run in."

The man cursed himself out of their sight. Pelham drove in more thoughtfully.

Paul, when he learned of it, was not too proud of his son's performance.

There was no use in getting one's head cracked unnecessarily, he wrote.

But he was as pleased as Pelham at the successful crus.h.i.+ng of the strike, which came with startling quickness after the men had been out five days. The union officials made some agreement with the company, and vanished to Boston. Some of the men were taken back, some were not.