Poor White: A Novel Read online

  CHAPTER XXI

  It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fieldsthat stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe forthe cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. Inthe corn fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing thefields lay the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and emptythrough the nights and often during many hours of the day, the nightsilence broken only at long intervals by the clattering hoofs ofhomeward bound horses and the silence of days by creaking wagons. Alongthe roads on a summer evening went the young farm hand in his buggy forwhich he had spent a summer's wage, a long summer of sweaty toil inhot fields. The hoofs of his horse beat a soft tattoo on the roads. Hissweetheart sat beside him and he was in no hurry. All day he had beenat work in the harvest and on the morrow he would work again. It didnot matter. For him the night would last until the cocks in isolatedfarmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse and did not carewhat turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.

  Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now andthen by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon theroads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass infence corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran,flitting away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields werebeautiful too.

  Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois,Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fieldsthe broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting,delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color.As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousandshades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.

  In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Notyet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashinglights--beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summernight--had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, theterrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions ofrubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressedand in prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities.Detroit and Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds ofthousands of motor cars to shriek and scream the nights away on countryroads. Willis was still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford stillworked in a bicycle repair shop in Detroit.

  It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A countrydoctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and atlong intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse waslame walked toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads,hurried toward the lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the placethat had been on other summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossipingberry pickers, things were astir.

  Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in itsown way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution thatgrew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town ofBidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men.Something happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Headswagged, special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the greathive of men was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that hadso suddenly become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were plantedin new soil, in American soil.

  Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motorcar ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads.The motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughterClara with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom hadbrought the car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him hadtaught him the art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early inthe evening he had run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter andson-in-law for their first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him andafter they had started and were clear of the town, Tom turned to him."Now watch me step on her tail," he said proudly, using for the firsttime the motor slang he had picked up from the Cleveland mechanic.

  As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the backseat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years shehad been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she hadmarried. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and thendarkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlinglyincreased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, asher father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of herlife. "Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?"she asked herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, havinggot into a long stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sailthrough the air like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husbandand yet I have no husband, I have been in a man's arms but I haveno lover, I have taken hold of life, but life has slipped through myfingers."

  Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the thingsoutside himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlikeher father. She was baffled by him. There was something in the man shewanted and could not find. "The fault must be in me," she told herself."He's all right, but what's the matter with me?"

  After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had morethan once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On thatnight when he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was awall a blow could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow.The wall was shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay atnight in her husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness ofthe sleeping room.

  Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she andHugh, as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darknessshe put up her hand to touch her husband's face and hair. He lay stilland she had the impression of some great force holding him back, holdingher back. A sharp sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavywith it.

  When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.

  The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly brokeforth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progresstoward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it wereevening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lightedhouse where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness wouldhelp the effort they were both making to tear away the wall. They walkedalong a lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge acrossthe stream that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talkof the work at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. Theycame to a fence where the lane turned and from where they could lookdown the hillside and into the town. He did not look at Clara butstared down the hillside and the words, in regard to the mechanicaldifficulties that had occupied his mind all day, ran on and on. Whenlater they went back to the house he felt a little relieved. "I've saidwords. There is something achieved," he thought.

  * * * * *

  And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motorwith her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftlythrough the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from theButterworth farm, through a dozen residence streets in town and then outupon the long, straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. Ithad skirted the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently andswiftly the fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed likea wolf, bold and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed throughthe troubled air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking thesilence with its persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. Theheadlights also disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed intobarnyards where fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, playedon the sides of barns sent the cattle in fields galloping away intodarkness, and frightened horribly the wild things, the red squirrels andchipmunks that live in wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hatedthe machine and began to hate all machines. Thinking of machinery andthe making of machines had
, she decided, been at the bottom ofher husband's inability to talk with her. Revolt against the wholemechanical impulse of her generation began to take possession of her.

  And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against themachine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom withhis new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summermoon came up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over theshoulders of the hills south of the farmhouse.

  Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth'sshop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victoryover his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he hadbeen telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons andstore, and now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house hewent to a saloon and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and hadother drinks, after which he swaggered through the streets to the doorof the shop. Although he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim didnot lack energy, and his employer's shop was filled with work demandingattention. For a week both he and Joe had been returning to their workbenches every evening. Jim wanted to come because some driving influencewithin made him love the thought of keeping the work always on the move,and Joe because Jim made him come.

  Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on thatevening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by thesuperintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had broughton Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were notorganized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirredthe town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fiftyor sixty men had decided to quit. "We won't work for a fellow like EdHall," they declared. "He sets a scale of prices and then, when we havedriven ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts thescale." Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and twoor three of them, developing unexpected eloquence, began deliveringspeeches on street corners. On the next day the strike spread and forseveral days the shop had been closed. Then a labor organizer came fromCleveland and on the day of his arrival the story ran through the streetthat strike breakers were to be brought in.

  And on that evening of many adventures another element was introducedinto the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Mainand McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildingswere being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel,appeared a man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece workprices at the corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system thatbuilt and maintained factories where the wage scale of the workmen couldbe fixed by the whim or necessity of one man or a group of men. As theman on the box talked, the workmen in the crowd who were of Americanbirth began to shake their heads. They went to one side and gathering ingroups discussed the stranger's words. "I tell you what," said a littleold workman, pulling nervously at his graying mustache, "I'm on strikeand I'm for sticking out until Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire EdHall, but I don't like this kind of talk. I'll tell you what that man'sdoing. He's attacking our Government, that's what he's doing." Theworkmen went off to their homes grumbling. The Government was to them asacred thing, and they did not fancy having their demands for a betterwage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and socialists. Many ofthe laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of pioneers who hadopened up the country where the great sprawling towns were now growinginto cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great Civil War.During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government out of thevery air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books talked hadall been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been Garfield,Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had comeLincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-Americancountry had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forthgas and oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.

  And now there had come among them men who had no reverence forgovernment. What a speaker for the first time dared say openly on thestreets of Bidwell, had already been talked in the shops. The new men,the foreigners coming from many lands, had brought with them strangedoctrines. They began to make acquaintances among the American workmen."Well," they said, "you've had great men here; no doubt you have; butyou're getting a new kind of great men now. These new men are not bornout of people. They're being born out of capital. What is a great man?He's one who has the power. Isn't that a fact? Well, you fellows herehave got to find out that nowadays power comes with the possession ofmoney. Who are the big men of this town?--not some lawyer or politicianwho can make a good speech, but the men who own the factories where youhave to work. Your Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth are the great men ofthis town."

  The socialist, who had come to speak on the streets of Bidwell, wasa Swede, and his wife had come with him. As he talked his wife madefigures on a blackboard. The old story of the trick by which thecitizens of the town had lost their money in the plant-setting machinecompany was revived and told over and over. The Swede, a big man withheavy fists, spoke of the prominent citizens of the town as thieves whoby a trick had robbed their fellows. As he stood on the box besidehis wife, and raising his fists shouted crude sentences condemning thecapitalist class, men who had gone away angry came back to listen.The speaker declared himself a workman like themselves and, unlike thereligious salvationists who occasionally spoke on the streets, did notbeg for money. "I'm a workman like yourselves," he shouted. "Both mywife and myself work until we've saved a little money. Then we come outto some town like this and fight capital until we're busted. We've beenfighting for years now and we'll keep on fighting as long as we live."

  As the orator shouted out his sentences he raised his fist as though tostrike, and looked not unlike one of his ancestors, the Norsemen, whoin old times had sailed far and wide over unknown seas in search of thefighting they loved. The men of Bidwell began to respect him. "Afterall, what he says sounds like mighty good sense," they declared, shakingtheir heads. "Maybe Ed Hall isn't any worse than any one else. We got tobreak up the system. That's a fact. Some of these days we got to breakup the system."

  * * * * *

  Jim Gibson got to the door of Joe's shop at half-past seven o'clock.Several men stood on the sidewalk and he stopped and stood before them,intending to tell again the story of his triumph over his employer.Inside the shop Joe was already at his bench and at work. The men,two of them strikers from the corn-cutting machine plant, complainedbitterly of the difficulty of supporting their families, and a thirdman, a fellow with a big black mustache who smoked a pipe, began torepeat some of the axioms in regard to industrialism and the class warhe had picked up from the socialist orator. Jim listened for a momentand then, turning, put his thumb on his buttocks and wriggled hisfingers. "Oh, hell," he sneered, "what are you fools talking about?You're going to get up a union or get into the socialist party. What'reyou talking about? A union or a party can't help a man who can't lookout for himself."

  The blustering and half intoxicated harness maker stood in the openshop door and told again and in detail the story of his triumph over hisemployer. Then another thought came and he spoke of the twelve hundreddollars Joe had lost in the stock, of the plant-setting machine company."He lost his money and you fellows are going to get licked in thisfight," he declared. "You're all wrong, you fellows, when you talk aboutunions or joining the socialist party. What counts is what a man can dofor himself. Character counts. Yes, sir, character makes a man what heis."

  Jim pounded on his chest and glared about him.

  "Look at me," he said. "I was a drunkard and down and out when I cameto this town; a drunkard, that's what I was and that's what I am. I camehere to this shop to work, and now, if you want to know, ask any onein town who runs this place. The socialist says money is power. Well,there's a man inside here who has the money, but you bet I've got thepower."

  Slapping his knees with his hands Jim laughed heartily. A
week before, atraveling man had come to the shop to sell machine-made harness. Joe hadordered the man out and Jim had called him back. He had placed an orderfor eighteen sets of the harness and had made Joe sign the order. Theharness had arrived that afternoon and was now hung in the shop. "It'shanging in the shop now," Jim cried. "Go see for yourself."

  Triumphantly Jim walked up and down before the men on the sidewalk, andhis voice rang through the shop where Joe sat on his harness-maker'shorse under a swinging lamp hard at work. "I tell you, character's thething that counts," the roaring voice cried. "You see I'm a workingmanlike you fellows, but I don't join a union or a socialist party. I getmy way. My boss Joe in there's a sentimental old fool, that's what heis. All his life he's made harnesses by hand and he thinks that's theonly way. He claims he has pride in his work, that's what he claims."

  Jim laughed again. "Do you know what he did the other day when thattraveler had gone out of the shop and after I had made him sign thatorder?" he asked. "Cried, that's what he did. By God, he did,--sat thereand cried."

  Again Jim laughed, but the workmen on the sidewalk did not join in hismerriment. Going to one of them, the one who had declared his intentionof joining the union, Jim began to berate him. "You think you can lickEd Hall with Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth back of him, eh?" he askedsharply. "Well, I'll tell you what--you can't. All the unions in theworld won't help you. You'll get licked--for why?

  "For why? Because Ed Hall is like me, that's for why. He's gotcharacter, that's what he's got."

  Growing weary of his boasting and the silence of his audience, Jimstarted to walk in at the door, but when one of the workmen, a pale manof fifty with a graying mustache, spoke, he turned to listen. "You're asuck, a suck and a lickspittle, that's what you are," said the pale man,his voice trembling with passion.

  Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalkwith a blow of his fist. Two of the other workmen seemed about to takeup the cause of their fallen brother, but when in spite of their threatsJim stood his ground, they hesitated. They went to help the pale workmanto his feet, and Jim went into the shop and closed the door. Climbingonto his horse he went to work, and the men went off along the sidewalk,still threatening to do what they had not done when the opportunityoffered.

  Joe worked in silence beside his employee and night began to settle downover the disturbed town. Above the clatter of many voices in the streetoutside could be heard the loud voice of the socialist orator who hadtaken up his stand for the evening at a nearby corner. When it hadbecome quite dark outside, the old harness maker climbed down from hishorse and going to the front door opened it softly and looked up anddown the street. Then he closed it again and walked toward the rear ofthe shop. In his hand he held his harness-maker's knife, shaped like ahalf moon and with an extraordinarily sharp circular edge. The harnessmaker's wife had died during the year before and since that time he hadnot slept well at night. Often for a week at a time he did not sleepat all, but lay all night with wide-open eyes, thinking strange, newthoughts. In the daytime and when Jim was not about, he sometimes spenthours sharpening the moon-shaped knife on a piece of leather; and on theday after the incident of the placing of the order for the factory-madeharness he had gone into a hardware store and bought a cheap revolver.He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to the workmen outside.When Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation he had stoppedsewing at the broken harness in his vise and, getting up, had taken theknife from its hiding-place under a pile of leather on a bench to giveits edge a few last caressing strokes.

  Holding the knife in his hand Joe went with shambling steps toward theplace where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed tolie over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenlyceased. Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on whichJim sat, life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-liketread. Joy shone in his eyes. As though warned of something impending,Jim turned and opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but his wordsnever found their way to his lips. The old man made a peculiar halfstep, half leap past the horse, and the knife whipped through the air.At one stroke he had succeeded in practically severing Jim Gibson's headfrom his body.

  There was no sound in the shop. Joe threw the knife into a corner andran quickly past the horse where the body of Jim Gibson sat upright.Then the body fell to the floor with a thump and there was the sharprattle of heels on the board floor. The old man locked the front doorand listened impatiently. When all was again quiet he went to search forthe knife he had thrown away, but could not find it. Taking Jim'sknife from a bench under the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body andclimbed upon his horse to turn out the lights.

  For an hour Joe stayed in the shop with the dead man. The eighteensets of harness shipped from a Cleveland factory had been received thatmorning, and Jim had insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks alongthe shop walls. He had bullied Joe into helping hang the harnesses, andnow Joe took them down alone. One by one they were laid on the floor andwith Jim's knife the old man cut each strap into little pieces that madea pile of litter on the floor reaching to his waist. When that was donehe went again to the rear of the shop, again stepping almost carelesslyover the dead man, and took the revolver out of the pocket of anovercoat that hung by the door.

  Joe went out of the shop by the back door, and having locked itcarefully, crept through an alleyway and into the lighted street wherepeople walked up and down. The next place to his own was a barber shop,and as he hurried along the sidewalk, two young men came out and calledto him. "Hey," they called, "do you believe in factory-made harnessnow-days, Joe Wainsworth? Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-madeharness?"

  Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road.A group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestureswith their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growingcity, past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressinga crowd of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it hadbeen in the moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson.The crowds of people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon bya crowd and hanged to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator aroseabove the murmur of voices in the street. "We've got to take power intoour hands. We've got to carry on our own battle for power," the voicedeclared.

  The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his handcaressing affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat.He intended to kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same roomwith Jim Gibson. In his own way he had always been a very sensitiveman and his only fear was that rough hands fall upon him before he hadcompleted the evening's work. He was quite sure that had his wifebeen alive she would have understood what had happened. She had alwaysunderstood everything he did or said. He remembered his courtship. Hiswife had been a country girl and on Sundays, after their marriage, theyhad gone together to spend the day in the wood. After Joe had broughthis wife to Bidwell they continued the practice. One of his customers, awell-to-do farmer, lived five miles north of town, and on his farm therewas a grove of beech trees. Almost every Sunday for several years he gota horse from the livery stable and took his wife there. After dinner atthe farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for an hour, while the womenwashed the dishes, and then he took his wife and went into the beechforest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches of the trees,and when the two people had remained silent for a time, hundreds ofsquirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them. Joe hadbrought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering littleanimals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered away.One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot oneof the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from thefarmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of atree, and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leanedagainst him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quiveringthing on the ground. When it lay still the
boy came and picked it up.Still Joe said nothing. Taking his wife's arm he walked to where theywere in the habit of sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts toscatter on the ground. The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in theeyes of the man and woman, had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joebegan to cry. He was ashamed and did not want his wife to see, and shepretended she had not seen.

  On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to thefarm and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a longrow of dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town andcame to a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and steppedinto the stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a streetlamp to light a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It wasSteve Hunter, who had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollarsin the stock of the plant-setting machine company, the man who hadbrought the new times to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of allsuch innovations as machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee,Jim Gibson, in cold anger, but now a new kind of anger took possessionof him. Something danced before his eyes and his hands trembled so thathe was afraid the gun he had taken out of his pocket would fall to thesidewalk. It wavered as he raised it and fired, but chance came to hisassistance. Steve Hunter pitched forward to the sidewalk.

  Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of hishand, Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felthis way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leadingdown. It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came outnear the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old dayshad been Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wifeto the farm and the beech forest.

  But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver anddid not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it someway," he thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady ploddingand hiding in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got tothe beech forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where hehad so often sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife besidehim. "I'll rest a little and then I'll think how I can do it," hethought wearily, holding his head in his hands. "I mustn't go to sleep.If they find me they'll hurt me. They'll hurt me before I have a chanceto kill myself. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself,"he repeated, over and over, holding his head in his hands and rockinggently back and forth.