Youth Challenges Part 14

He was embarra.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sion. He strode threateningly to Bonbright, lips snarling, eyes blazing.

"What do you mean by coming here? What do you want?" he demanded, hoa.r.s.ely. "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 cla.s.s he belonged to be hated with this blighting virulence by the cla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 cla.s.s want of girls of her cla.s.s...."

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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 b.u.t.tons. 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 trans.m.u.ted into heavy determination, lifeless stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s ready for the mold.

The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating direction by heart and mind. No day pa.s.sed 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 acc.u.mulated 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 pa.s.sed 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.