Youth Challenges Part 48

Bonbright's part in that was enough to keep one man occupied, for, however much he might leave to Mershon, there were countless details that he must decide; innumerable points to be referred to him and discussed. But his chief interest was not in producing a plant to manufacture engines, but in producing a crew of men to operate the plant; not merely hiring capable workingmen, but producing a condition where himself and those working-men would be in accord; where the men would be satisfied, happy in their work; a condition millennial in that the known as labor unrest should be eliminated. He had set himself to find a solution to the age-old problem of capital and labor....

He had not realized how many elements entered into the matter, and what a high degree of specialized knowledge must be brought to the task. In the beginning he had fancied himself as capable of working out the basis for ideal relations between him and his employees as any other.

He soon discovered himself to be all but unequipped for the effort....

It was a saving quality of Bonbright's that he would admit his own futilities. Therefore he called to conference the country's greatest sociologist, Professor Witzer.

The professor, a short, wabbling individual, with watery eyes that could read print splendidly if it were held within six inches of them, and who, when he did read, moved book or paper back and forth in front of his spectacles in a droll, owlish, improbable way, instead of letting his eyes travel across the lines of print, was skeptical at first. He suspected Bonbright of being a youth scratching the itch of a sudden and transient enthusiasm. But he became interested. Bonbright compelled his interest, for he was earnest, intense, not enthusiastic, not effervescing with underdone theories.

"What you want to do, as I understand it," said the professor, "is merely to revolutionize the world and bring on the millennium."

"What I want to do," said Bonbright, "is to formulate a plan that will be fair to labor and fair to me. I want a condition where both of us will be satisfied--and where both will know we are satisfied. It can be done."

"Um!..." said the professor. "Are you, by chance, a socialist?"

"Far from it."

"What are your theories?"

"I haven't any theories. I want facts, working facts. There's no use palavering to the men. What they want and what I want is something concrete. I want to know what they want, and how much of it will be good for them. I want something that will work in dollars and cents, in days' work, in making life more comfortable for the women and children at home. If merely paying wages will do it, then I'll pay the wages...."

"It won't," said the professor. "But it 'll go quite some distance."

"It isn't a matter of sentiment with me," Bonbright said. "It's a matter of business, and peace of mind, and all-around efficiency. I don't mean efficiency in this plant, but efficiency in LIVING.... For the men and their families."

"It can't be done by giving them rest rooms with Turkish rugs nor porcelain bathtubs, nor by installing a moving-picture show for them to watch while they eat lunch," said the professor. "It can't be done with money alone. It would work in isolated cases. Give some men a sufficient wage and they would correct their ways of living; they would learn to live decently, and they would save for the rainy day and for old age. I don't venture an estimate of the proportion.... But there would be the fellows whose increased pay meant only that much more to spend. Mighty little would filter through to improve the conditions of their actual living.... In any scheme there will have to be some way of regulating the use of the money they earn--and that's paternalism."

"Can it be made to work? It's your honest opinion I'm after."

"I don't believe it, but, young man, it will be the most interesting experiment I ever engaged in. Have you any ideas?"

"My basic idea is to pay them enough so they can live in comfort. ..."

"And then you've got to find some machinery to compel them to live in comfort."

"I'd like to see every employee of this concern the owner of his home.

I'd like to feel that no man's wife is a drudge. An astonis.h.i.+ngly large number of wives do was.h.i.+ng, or work out by the day.... And boarders.

The boarder is a problem."

"You HAVE been thinking," said the professor. "Do I understand that you are offering me the chance to work with you on this experiment?"

"Yes."

"I accept.... I never dreamed I'd have a chance to meddle with human lives the way you seem to want to meddle with them...."

So they went to work, and day after day, week after week, their plan grew and expanded and embraced unforeseen intricacies. Bonbright approached it from the practical side always. The professor came to view him with amazement--and with respect.

"I'm sticking my finger into the lives of twenty thousand human beings!" the professor said to himself many times a day, with the joy of the scientist. "I'm being first a.s.sistant to the world's greatest meddler. That young man is headed for a place as one of the world's leaders, or for a lamp-post and a rope.... I wonder which...."

The thing that Bonbright asked himself many, many times was a different sort of question. "Is this the sort of thing she meant? Would she approve of doing this?"

He was not embarked on the project for Ruth's sake. It was not Ruth who had driven him to it, but himself, and the events of his life. But her presence was there.... He was doing his best. He was doing the thing he thought would bring about the condition he desired, and he hoped she would approve if she knew.... But whether she approved or not, he would have persisted along his own way.... If he had never known her, never married her, he would have done the same thing. Some day she would know this, and understand it. It would be another irony for her to bear. The man she had married that she might influence him to ameliorate the conditions of his workingmen was doing far more than she had dreamed of accomplis.h.i.+ng herself--and would have done it if she had never been born....

Neither she nor Bonbright realized, perhaps would never realize, that it is not the individual who brings about changes in the social fabric.

It is not fanatics, not reformers, not inspired leaders. It is the labored working of the ma.s.s, and the working of the ma.s.s brings forth and casts up fanatics, reformers, leaders, when it has gestated them and prepared the way for their birth. The individual is futile; his aims and plans are futile save as they are the outcome of the trend of the ma.s.s....

Ruth was not so fortunate as Bonbright. Her work did not fill her time nor draw her interest. It was merely the thing she did to earn the necessities of life. She was living now in a boarding house on the lower side of the city, where a room might be had for a sum within her means. It was not a comfortable room. It was not a room that could be made comfortable by any arrangement of its occupant. But it was in a clean house, presided over by a woman of years and respectable garrulity.

Six days of the week Ruth worked, and the work became daily more exhausting, demanding more of her nervous organism as her physical organism had less to give. She was not taking care of herself. It is only those who cling to life, who are interested in life and in themselves, who take care of their bodies as they should be taken care of. She had been slight; now she was thin. No one now would have dreamed of calling her the Girl with the Grin. She looked older, lifeless, almost haggard at times. Her condition was not wholly the result of unhappiness. It was due to lack of fresh air and exercise, for she went seldom abroad. It was fear of meeting acquaintances that shut her in her room--fear of meeting Bonbright, fear of encountering Dulac. It was loneliness, too. She made no new acquaintances, and went her way in solitude. She had not so much as a nodding acquaintance with most of her fellow lodgers. Not one of them could boast of conversation with her beyond the briefest pa.s.sing of the day.... At first they gossiped about her, speculated about her, wove crude stories about her.

Some chose to think her exclusive, and endeavored to show her by their bearing that they thought themselves as good as she--and maybe better.

They might have saved themselves their trouble, for she never noticed.

Lack of proper nourishment did its part. Women seem p.r.o.ne to neglect their food. The housewife, if her husband does not come home to the midday meal, contents herself with a snack, hastily picked up, and eaten without interest. Ruth had no appet.i.te. She went to the table three times a day because a certain quant.i.ty of food was a necessity.

She did not eat at Mrs. Moody's table, but "went out to her meals...."

She ate anywhere and everywhere.

Mrs. Moody alone had tried to approach Ruth. Ruth had been courteous, but distant. She wanted no prying into her affairs; no seekers after confidences; no discoverers of her ident.i.ty. For gossip spreads, and one does not know what spot it may reach....

"It hain't healthy for her to set in her room all the time," Mrs. Moody said to the mercenary who helped with the cooking. "And it hain't natural for a girl like her never to have comp'ny. Since she's been here there hain't been a call at the door for her--nor a letter."

"I hain't seen her but once or twict," said the mercenary. "If I was to meet her face to face on the street, I hain't sure I'd know it was her."

"She didn't look good when she come, and she's lookin' worse every day.

First we know we'll have her down on her back.... And then what?...

S'pose she was to be took sudden? Who'd we notify?"

"The horspittle," said the mercenary, callously.

"She's sich a mite of a thing, with them big eyes lookin' sorry all the while. I feel sort of drawed to her. But she won't have no truck with me... nor n.o.body.... She hain't never left nothin' layin' around her room that a body could git any idee about her from. Secretive, I call it."

"Maybe," said the mercenary, "she's got a past."

"One thing's certain, if she don't look better 'fore she looks worse, she won't have a long future."

That seemed to be a true saying. Ruth felt something of it. It was harder for her to get up of mornings, more difficult to drag herself to work and hold up during the day. Sometimes she skipped the evening meal now and went straight home to bed. All she wanted was to rest, to lie down.... One day she fainted in the office....

Her burden was harder to support because it included not grief alone, but remorse, and if one excepts hatred, remorse is the most wearing of the emotions.... As she became weaker, less normal, it preyed on her.

Then, one morning, she fainted as she tried to get out of bed, and lay on the floor until consciousness returned. She dragged herself back into bed and lay there, gazing dully up at the ceiling, suffering no pain... only so tired. She did not speculate about it. Somehow it did not interest her very much. Even not going to work didn't bother her--she had reached that point.

Mrs. Moody had watched her going and coming for several days with growing uneasiness. This morning she knew Ruth had not gone out, and presently the woman slap-slapped up the stairs in her heelless slippers to see about it. She rapped on Ruth's door. There was no response. She rapped again....

"I know you're in there," she said, querulously. "Why don't you answer?"

Inside, Ruth merely moved her head from side to side on the pillow. She heard--but what did it matter?

Mrs. Moody opened the door and stepped inside. She was prepared for what she saw.

"There you be," she said, with a sort of triumphant air, as of one whose prophecy had been fulfilled to the letter, "flat on your back."

Ruth paid no attention.