Poor White: A Novel Read online

  CHAPTER XXII

  The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out tofill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder andadmiration of the citizens. He was in an exalted mood and words flowedfrom him. As the motor under its hood purred, so the brain under thegraying old head purred and threw forth words. He talked to the idlersbefore the drug stores in the towns and, when the car started again andthey were out in the open country, his voice, pitched in a high key tomake itself heard above the purring engine, became shrill. Having struckthe shrill tone of the new age the voice went on and on.

  But the voice and the swift-moving car did not stir Clara. She triednot to hear the voice, and fixing her eyes on the soft landscape flowingpast under the moon, tried to think of other times and places. Shethought of nights when she had walked with Kate Chanceller through thestreets of Columbus, and of the silent ride she had taken with Hugh thatnight they were married. Her mind went back into her childhood and sheremembered the long days she had spent riding with her father in thissame valley, going from farm to farm to haggle and dicker for thepurchase of calves and pigs. Her father had not talked then butsometimes, when they had driven far and were homeward bound in thefailing light of evening, words did come to him. She remembered oneevening in the summer after her mother died and when her father oftentook her with him on his drives. They had stopped for the evening mealat the house of a farmer and when they got on the road again, the mooncame out. Something present in the spirit of the night stirred Tom, andhe spoke of his life as a boy in the new country and of his fathers andbrothers. "We worked hard, Clara," he said. "The whole country was newand every acre we planted had to be cleared." The mind of the prosperousfarmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little thingsconcerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting woodalone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time forgetting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollingsto which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were madeand set afire that space might be cleared for planting. In the winterthe boy went to school in the village of Bidwell and as he was even thenan energetic, pushing youth, already intent on getting on in the world,he set traps in the forest and on the banks of streams and walked thetrap line on his way to and from school. In the spring he sent his peltsto the growing town of Cleveland where they were sold. He spoke of themoney he got and of how he had finally saved enough to buy a horse ofhis own.

  Tom had talked of many other things on that night, of the spelling-downsat the schoolhouse in town, of huskings and dances held in the barns andof the evening when he went skating on the river and first met his wife."We took to each other at once," he said softly. "There was a fire builton the bank of the river and after I had skated with her we went and satdown to warm ourselves.

  "We wanted to get married to each other right away," he told Clara. "Iwalked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that Ithought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of myown."

  As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of thefather, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, thatother man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowlyalong the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very faraway. "Everything worth while is very far away," she thought bitterly."The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very farfrom the old sweet things."

  The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing toown and drive fast racing horses. "I used to be half crazy to own fasthorses," he shouted to his son-in-law. "I didn't do it, because owningfast horses meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time.I wanted to go fast: faster than any one else." In a kind of ecstasy hegave the motor more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour.The hot, summer air, fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head."Where would the damned race horses be now," he called, "where wouldyour Maud S. or your J.I.C. be, trying to catch up with me in this car?"

  Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the lightbreeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past,looking like squares on a checker board made for the amusement ofthe child of some giant. The car ran through miles of the low farmingcountry, through the main streets of towns, where the people ran out ofthe stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, throughsleeping bits of woodlands--remnants of the great forests in whichTom had worked as a boy--and across wooden bridges over small streams,beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow andfragrant with blossoms.

  At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turnedthe car back. Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanicaltriumphs of the age in which he had lived. "I've brought you whizzingalong, you and Clara," he said proudly. "I tell you what, Hugh, SteveHunter and I have brought you along fast in more ways that one. You'vegot to give Steve credit for seeing something in you, and you've got togive me credit for putting my money back of your brains. I don't want totake no credit from Steve. There's credit enough for all. All I gotto say for myself is that I saw the hole in the doughnut. Yes, sir, Iwasn't so blind. I saw the hole in the doughnut."

  Tom stopped to light a cigar and then drove on again. "I'll tell youwhat, Hugh," he said, "I wouldn't say so to any one not of my family,but the truth is, I'm the man that's been putting over the big thingsthere in Bidwell. The town is going to be a city now and a mighty bigcity. Towns in this State like Columbus, Toledo and Dayton, had betterlook out for themselves. I'm the man has always kept Steve Hunter steadyand going straight ahead down the track, as this car goes with my handat the steering wheel.

  "You don't know anything about it, and I don't want you should talk,but there are new things coming to Bidwell," he added. "When I was inChicago last month I met a man who has been making rubber buggy andbicycle tires. I'm going in with him and we're going to start a plantfor making automobile-tires right in Bidwell. The tire business is boundto be one of the greatest on earth and they ain't no reason why Bidwellshouldn't be the biggest tire center ever known in the world." Althoughthe car now ran quietly, Tom's voice again became shrill. "There'llbe hundreds of thousands of cars like this tearing over every road inAmerica," he declared. "Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate rightBidwell'll be the great tire town of the world."

  For a long time Tom drove in silence, and when he again began to talk itwas a new mood. He told a tale of life in Bidwell that stirred both Hughand Clara deeply. He was angry and had Clara not been in the car wouldhave become violently profane.

  "I'd like to hang the men who are making trouble in the shops in town,"he broke forth. "You know who I mean, I mean the labor men who aretrying to make trouble for Steve Hunter and me. There's a socialisttalking every night on the street over there. I'll tell you, Hugh, thelaws of this country are wrong." For ten minutes he talked of the labordifficulties in the shops.

  "They better look out," he declared, and was so angry that his voicerose to something like a suppressed scream. "We're inventing newmachines pretty fast now-days," he cried. "Pretty soon we'll do all thework by machines. Then what'll we do? We'll kick all the workers out andlet 'em strike till they're sick, that's what we'll do. They can talktheir fool socialism all they want, but we'll show 'em, the fools."

  His angry mood passed, and as the car turned into the last fifteen-milestretch of road that led to Bidwell, he told the tale that so deeplystirred his passengers. Chuckling softly he told of the struggle ofthe Bidwell harness maker, Joe Wainsworth, to prevent the sale ofmachine-made harness in the community, and of his experience with hisemployee, Jim Gibson. Tom had heard the tale in the bar-room of theBidwell House and it had made a profound impression on his mind. "I'lltell you what," he declared, "I'm going to get in touch with JimGibson. That's the kind of man to handle workers. I only heard about himto-night, but I'm going to see him to-morrow."

  Leaning back in his seat Tom laughed heartily as he told
of thetraveling man who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and the placing ofthe order for the factory-made harness. In some intangible way he feltthat when Jim Gibson laid the order for the harness on the bench in theshop and by the force of his personality compelled Joe Wainsworth tosign, he justified all such men as himself. In imagination he lived inthat moment with Jim, and like Jim the incident aroused his inclinationto boast. "Why, a lot of cheap laboring skates can't down such men asmyself any more than Joe Wainsworth could down that Jim Gibson," hedeclared. "They ain't got the character, you see, that's what thematter, they ain't got the character." Tom touched some mechanismconnected with the engine of the car and it shot suddenly forward."Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the road there," hecried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into the darknessthrough which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe, and on theback seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight andas the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. "The damnfools!" he cried. "They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try.They want to go on in their old hand-made way. Let 'em look out. Let 'emlook out for such men as Jim Gibson and me."

  Down a slight incline in the road shot the car and swept around a widecurve, and then the jumping, dancing light, running far ahead, revealeda sight that made Tom thrust out his foot and jam on the brakes.

  In the road and in the very center of the circle of light, as thoughperforming a scene on the stage, three men were struggling. As the carcame to a stop, so sudden that it pitched both Clara and Hugh out oftheir seats, the struggle came to an end. One of the struggling figures,a small man without coat or hat, had jerked himself away from theothers and started to run toward the fence at the side of the roadand separating it from a grove of trees. A large, broad-shouldered mansprang forward and catching the tail of the fleeing man's coat pulledhim back into the circle of light. His fist shot out and caught thesmall man directly on the mouth. He fell like a dead thing, facedownward in the dust of the road.

  Tom ran the car slowly forward and its headlight continued to play overthe three figures. From a little pocket at the side of his driver's seathe took a revolver. He ran the car quickly to a position near the groupin the road and stopped.

  "What's up?" he asked sharply.

  Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blowthat had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained thetragic happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent hadremembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on thefarm of which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sundayafternoons the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and thetwo people had gone to walk in the very place where he had just beenfound. "I had a hunch he would be out here," he boasted. "I figured itout. Crowds started out of town in all directions, but I cut out alone.Then I happened to see this fellow and just for company I brought himalong." He put up his hand and, looking at Tom, tapped his forehead."Cracked," he declared, "he always was. A fellow I knew saw him once inthat woods," he said pointing. "Somebody had shot a squirrel and he tookon about it as though he had lost a child. I said then he was crazy, andhe has sure proved I was right."

  At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh'sknees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her fatherhad told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth she hadwanted passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing wasdone. In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the menand women in the world who were in secret revolt against the absorptionof the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood asa protesting figure against what her father had become and what shethought her husband had become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and ithad been done. As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth's shop withher father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peaceand quiet of the place. At the thought of the same place, now becomethe scene of a desperate killing, her body shook so that she clutched atHugh's arms, striving to steady herself.

  Ed Hall took the senseless figure of the old man in the road into hisarms and half threw it into the back seat of the car. To Clara it was asthough his rough, misunderstanding hands were on her own body. Thecar started swiftly along the road and Ed told again the story of thenight's happenings. "I tell you, Mr. Hunter is in mighty bad shape, hemay die," he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought himtotally unaffected by what had happened. His face was quiet like herfather's face. The factory superintendent's voice went on explaining hispart in the adventures of the evening. Ignoring the pale workman who satlost in the shadows in a corner of the rear seat, he spoke as thoughhe had undertaken and accomplished the capture of the murderersingle-handed. As he afterwards explained to his wife, Ed felt he hadbeen a fool not to come alone. "I knew I could handle him all right," heexplained. "I wasn't afraid, but I had figured it all out he was crazy.That made me feel shaky. When they were getting up a crowd to go out onthe hunt, I says to myself, I'll go alone. I says to myself, I'll bethe's gone out to that woods on the Riggly farm where he and his wifeused to go on Sundays. I started and then I saw this other man standingon a corner and I made him come with me. He didn't want to come andI wish I'd gone alone. I could have handled him and I'd got all thecredit."

  In the car Ed told the story of the night in the streets of Bidwell.Some one had seen Steve Hunter shot down in the street and had declaredthe harness maker had done it and had then run away. A crowd had gone tothe harness shop and had found the body of Jim Gibson. On the floor ofthe shop were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. "He must havebeen in there and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there withthe man he had killed. It's the craziest thing any man ever done."

  The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrownhim, stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. Hisshirt was torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainlyseen in the uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood thathad dried and was now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale ofhis triumph. "I found him where I said to myself I would. Yes, sir, Ifound him where I said to myself I would."

  The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows ofcheaply built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French'scabbage patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight,working out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the buildingof his plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightenedman crouched on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands andlurched forward, trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him bythe arm and jerked him back. He drew back his arm to strike again butClara's voice, cold and intense with passion, stopped him. "If you touchhim, I'll kill you," she said. "No matter what he does, don't you darestrike him again."

  Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of apolice station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, anda crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o'clock the lights stillburned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With theaid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the frontseat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. "Come on now,we won't hurt you," he said reassuringly, and had got his man free ofthe car when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazedman turned to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a momenthe stood trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first timesaw Hugh, the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darknessin Turner's Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which theearnings of a lifetime had been swept away. "It wasn't me. You did it.You killed Jim Gibson," he screamed, and springing forward sank hisfingers and teeth into Hugh's neck.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his firstmotor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the cityof Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel cityat noon. At three o'
clock his business was finished and he was ready toreturn.

  Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successfulinventor had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly atthe point, of becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, hadbeen lost. He went to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new partsfor the hay-loading machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was ofno importance to the men who would manufacture and sell that worthy,labor-saving tool. Although he did not know it, a young man fromCleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve, had already done what Hughwas striving half-heartedly to do. The machine had been finished andready to market in October three years before, and after repeated testsa lawyer had made formal application for patent. Then it was discoveredthat an Iowa man had already made application for and been granted apatent on a similar apparatus.

  When Tom came to the shop and told him what had happened Hugh had beenready to drop the whole matter, but that was not Tom's notion. "Thedevil!" he said. "Do you think we're going to waste all this money andlabor?"

  Drawings of the Iowa man's machine were secured, and Tom set Hugh at thetask of doing what he called "getting round" the other fellow's patents."Do the best you can and we'll go ahead," he said. "You see we've gotthe money and that means power. Make what changes you can and then we'llgo on with our manufacturing plans. We'll whipsaw this other fellowthrough the courts. We'll fight him till he's sick of fight and thenwe'll buy him out cheap. I've had the fellow looked up and he hasn't anymoney and is a boozer besides. You go ahead. We'll get that fellow allright."

  Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by hisfather-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machinehe had thought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts,changed other parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man's machine, didwhat he could to accomplish his task.

  Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on thework of the Iowa man stood in his way.

  Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after along study of the drawings of the other man's machine, he put them asideand sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by hislamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the manfar away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked onthe same problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man hadno money and was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He washimself at work on the instrument of the man's defeat.

  Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected withthe twisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatusinto new forms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become adistinct, almost understandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said hedrank, got drunk. His own father had been a drunkard. Once a man, thevery man who had been the instrument of his own coming to Bidwell, hadtaken it for granted he was a drunkard. He wondered if some twist oflife might not have made him one.

  Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thoughtof his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of thefilth, the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams ofhis life by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back intothat life. In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who hadbred him. On afternoons of summer days in the river town, when HenryShepard was not about, his father sometimes came to the station where hewas employed. He had begun to earn a little money and his father wantedit to buy drinks. Why?

  There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solvedin wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should havebeen making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived butlittle in the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live thatlife, had been warned and re-warned against living it. The shadowyfigure of the unknown inventor in the state of Iowa, who had beenbrother to himself, who had worked on the same problems and had cometo the same conclusions, slipped away, followed by the almost equallyshadowy figure of his father. Hugh tried to think of himself and his ownlife.

  For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new andintricate task he had set for his mind. His own life was a matter ofhistory. He knew about himself. Having walked far out of town, he turnedand went back toward his shop. His way led through the new city thathad grown up since his coming to Bidwell. Turner's Pike that had beena country road along which on summer evenings lovers strolled to theWheeling station and Pickleville was now a street. All that section ofthe new city was given over to workers' homes and here and there a storehad been built. The Widow McCoy's place was gone and in its place was awarehouse, black and silent under the night sky. How grim the streetin the late night! The berry pickers who once went along the road atevening were now gone forever. Like Ezra French's sons they had perhapsbecome factory hands. Apple and cherry trees once grew along the road.They had dropped their blossoms on the heads of strolling lovers. Theyalso were gone. Hugh had once crept along the road at the heels of EdHall, who walked with his arm about a girl's waist. He had heard Edcomplaining of his lot in life and crying out for new times. It was EdHall who had introduced the piecework plan in the factories of Bidwelland brought about the strike, during which three men had been killed andill-feeling engendered in hundreds of silent workers. That strike hadbeen won by Tom and Steve and they had since that time been victoriousin a larger and more serious strike. Ed Hall was now at the head of anew factory being built along the Wheeling tracks. He was growing fatand was prosperous.

  When Hugh got to his shop he lighted his lamp and again got out thedrawings he had come from home to study. They lay unnoticed on the desk.He looked at his watch. It was two o'clock. "Clara may be awake. I mustgo home," he thought vaguely. He now owned his own motor car and itstood in the road before the shop. Getting in he drove away into thedarkness over the bridge, out of Turner's Pike and along a street linedwith factories and railroad sidings. Some of the factories were workingand were ablaze with lights. Through lighted windows he could see menstationed along benches and bending over huge, iron machines. He hadcome from home that evening to study the work of an unknown man from thefar away state of Iowa, to try to circumvent that man. Then he had goneto walk and to think of himself and his own life. "The evening has beenwasted. I have done nothing," he thought gloomily as his car climbed upa long street lined with the homes of the wealthier citizens of his townand turned into the short stretch of Medina Road still left between thetown and the Butterworth farmhouse.

  * * * * *

  On the day when he went to Pittsburgh, Hugh got to the station wherehe was to take the homeward train at three, and the train did not leaveuntil four. He went into a big waiting-room and sat on a bench in acorner. After a time he arose and going to a stand bought a newspaper,but did not read it. It lay unopened on the bench beside him. Thestation was filled with men, women, and children who moved restlesslyabout. A train came in and a swarm of people departed, were carried intofaraway parts of the country, while new people came into the stationfrom a nearby street. He looked at those who were going out into thetrain shed. "It may be that some of them are going to that town in Iowawhere that fellow lives," he thought. It was odd how thoughts of theunknown Iowa man clung to him.

  One day, during the same summer and but a few months earlier, Hugh hadgone to the town of Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had broughthim to Pittsburgh. How many parts for the hay-loading machine had beencast and later thrown away! They did the work, but he decided each timethat he had infringed on the other man's machine. When that happened hedid not consult Tom. Something within him warned him against doing that.He destroyed the part. "It wasn't what I wanted," he told Tom who hadgrown discouraged with his son-in-law but did not openly voice hisdissatisfaction. "Oh, well, he's lost his pep, marriage has taken thelife out of him. We'll have to get some one else on the job," he said toSteve, who had entirely recovered from the wound received at the handsof Joe Wainsworth.

  On that da
y when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to waitfor his homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Somebrightly colored stones attracted his attention and he picked severalof them up and put them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh hetook them out and held them in his hand. A light came in at a window, along, slanting light that played over the stones. His roving, disturbedmind was caught and held. He rolled the stones back and forth. Thecolors blended and then separated again. When he raised his eyes, awoman and a child on a nearby bench, also attracted by the flashing bitof color held like a flame in his hand, were looking at him intently.

  He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. "What asilly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones like a child,"he thought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into hispockets.

  Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the senseof some indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as itwent on that day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in theshop, when he found himself unable to fix his attention on the printsof the Iowa man's machine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he hadcome into a new level of thought and action. He had been an unconsciousworker, a doer and was now becoming something else. The time of thecomparatively simple struggle with definite things, with iron and steel,had passed. He fought to accept himself, to understand himself, torelate himself with the life about him. The poor white, son of thedefeated dreamer by the river, who had forced himself in advance of hisfellows along the road of mechanical development, was still in advanceof his fellows of the growing Ohio towns. The struggle he was making wasthe struggle his fellows of another generation would one and all have tomake.

  Hugh got into his home-bound train at four o'clock and went into thesmoking car. The somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thoughtsthat had all day been playing through his mind stayed with him. "Whatdifference does it make if the new parts I have ordered for the machinehave to be thrown away?" he thought. "If I never complete the machine,it's all right. The one the Iowa man had made does the work."

  For a long time he struggled with that thought. Tom, Steve, all theBidwell men with whom he had been associated, had a philosophy intowhich the thought did not fit. "When you put your hand to the plow donot turn back," they said. Their language was full of such sayings. Toattempt to do a thing and fail was the great crime, the sin against theHoly Ghost. There was unconscious defiance of a whole civilization inHugh's attitude toward the completion of the parts that would help Tomand his business associates "get around" the Iowa man's patent.

  The train from Pittsburgh went through northern Ohio to a junctionwhere Hugh would get another train for Bidwell. Great booming towns,Youngstown, Akron, Canton, Massillon--manufacturing towns all--lay alongthe way. In the smoker Hugh sat, again playing with the colored stonesheld in his hand. There was relief for his mind in the stones. The lightcontinually played about them, and their color shifted and changed. Onecould look at the stones and get relief from thoughts. Raising hiseyes he looked out of the car window. The train was passing throughYoungstown. His eyes looked along grimy streets of worker's housesclustered closely about huge mills. The same light that had played overthe stones in his hand began to play over his mind, and for a momenthe became not an inventor but a poet. The revolution within had reallybegun. A new declaration of independence wrote itself within him. "Thegods have thrown the towns like stones over the flat country, but thestones have no color. They do not burn and change in the light," hethought.

  Two men who sat in a seat in the westward bound train began to talk,and Hugh listened. One of them had a son in college. "I want him to bea mechanical engineer," he said. "If he doesn't do that I'll get himstarted in business. It's a mechanical age and a business age. I want tosee him succeed. I want him to keep in the spirit of the times."

  Hugh's train was due in Bidwell at ten, but did not arrive until halfafter eleven. He walked from the station through the town toward theButterworth farm.

  At the end of their first year of marriage a daughter had been born toClara, and some time before his trip to Pittsburgh she had told himshe was again pregnant. "She may be sitting up. I must get home," hethought, but when he got to the bridge near the farmhouse, the bridge onwhich he had stood beside Clara that first time they were together, hegot out of the road and went to sit on a fallen log at the edge of agrove of trees.

  "How quiet and peaceful the night!" he thought and leaning forward heldhis long, troubled face in his hands. He wondered why peace and quietwould not come to him, why life would not let him alone. "After all,I've lived a simple life and have done good work," he thought. "Some ofthe things they've said about me are true enough. I've invented machinesthat save useless labor, I've lightened men's labor."

  Hugh tried to cling to that thought, but it would not stay in his mind.All the thoughts that gave his mind peace and quiet flew away like birdsseen on a distant horizon at evening. It had been so ever since thatnight when he was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by the crazedharness maker in the motor. Before that his mind had often beenunsettled, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted men and women and closeassociation with men and women. Often his problem was yet more simple.He wanted a woman, one who would love him and lie close to him at night.He wanted the respect of his fellows in the town where he had come tolive his life. He wanted to succeed at the particular task to which hehad set his hand.

  The attack made upon him by the insane harness maker had at firstseemed to settle all his problems. At the moment when the frightened anddesperate man sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh's neck, something hadhappened to Clara. It was Clara who, with a strength and quickness quiteamazing, had torn the insane man away. All through that evening she hadbeen hating her husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh.The seeds of a child were already alive in her, and when the body of herman was furiously attacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, likethe passing of a shadow over the surface of a river on a windy day, thechange in her attitude toward her husband took place. All that eveningshe had been hating the new age she had thought so perfectly personifiedin the two men, who talked of the making of machines while the beautyof the night was whirled away into the darkness with the cloud of dustthrown into the air by the flying motor. She had been hating Hughand sympathizing with the dead past he and other men like him weredestroying, the past that was represented by the figure of the oldharness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in the old way, by theman who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.

  And then the past rose up to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, andthe claws and teeth sank into Hugh's flesh, into the flesh of the manwhose seed was already alive within her.

  At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Withinher arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength ofthe roots of a tree. To her then and forever after Hugh was no hero,remaking the world, but a perplexed boy hurt by life. He never againescaped out of boyhood in her consciousness of him. With the strengthof a tigress she tore the crazed harness maker away from Hugh, and withsomething of the surface brutality of another Ed Hall, threw him tothe floor of the car. When Ed and the policeman, assisted by severalbystanders, came running forward, she waited almost indifferently whilethey forced the screaming and kicking man through the crowd and in atthe door of the police station.

  For Clara the thing for which she had hungered had, she thought,happened. In quick, sharp tones she ordered her father to drive thecar to a doctor's house and later stood by while the torn and laceratedflesh of Hugh's cheek and neck was bandaged. The thing for which JoeWainsworth stood and that she had thought was so precious to herself nolonger existed in her consciousness, and if later she was for some weeksnervous and half ill, it was not because of any thought given to thefate of the old harness maker.

  The sudden attack out of the town's past had brought Hugh to Clara, hadmade him a living if not quite satisfying companion to her, but it
hadbrought something quite different to Hugh. The bite of the man's teethand the torn places on his cheeks left by the tense fingers had mended,leaving but a slight scar; but a virus had got into his veins. Thedisease of thinking had upset the harness maker's mind and the germ ofthat disease had got into Hugh's blood. It had worked up into his eyesand ears. Words men dropped thoughtlessly and that in the past had beenblown past his ears, as chaff is blown from wheat in the harvest, nowstayed to echo and re-echo in his mind. In the past he had seen townsand factories grow and had accepted without question men's word thatgrowth was invariably good. Now his eyes looked at the towns, atBidwell, Akron, Youngstown, and all the great, new towns scatteredup and down mid-western America as on the train and in the station atPittsburgh he had looked at the colored stones held in his hand. Helooked at the towns and wanted light and color to play over them as theyplayed over the stones, and when that did not happen, his mind, filledwith strange new hungers engendered by the disease of thinking, made upwords over which lights played. "The gods have scattered towns overthe flat lands," his mind had said, as he sat in the smoking car of thetrain, and the phrase came back to him later, as he sat in the darknesson the log with his head held in his hands. It was a good phrase andlights could play over it as they played over the colored stones, but itwould in no way answer the problem of how to "get around" the Iowa's manpatent on the hay loading device.

  Hugh did not get to the Butterworth farmhouse until two o'clock in themorning, but when he got there his wife was awake and waiting for him.She heard his heavy, dragging footsteps in the road as he turned in atthe farm gate, and getting quickly out of bed, threw a cloak over hershoulders and came out to the porch facing the barns. A late moon hadcome up and the barnyard was washed with moonlight. From the barns camethe low, sweet sound of contented animals nibbling at the hay in themangers before them, from a row of sheds back of one of the barns camethe soft bleating of sheep and in a far away field a calf bellowedloudly and was answered by its mother.

  When Hugh stepped into the moonlight around the corner of the house,Clara ran down the steps to meet him, and taking his arm, led him pastthe barns and over the bridge where as a child she had seen the figuresof her fancy advancing towards her. Sensing his troubled state hermother spirit was aroused. He was unfilled by the life he led. Sheunderstood that. It was so with her. By a lane they went to a fencewhere nothing but open fields lay between the farm and the town farbelow. Although she sensed his troubled state, Clara was not thinkingof Hugh's trip to Pittsburgh nor of the problems connected with thecompletion of the hay-loading machine. It may be that like her fathershe had dismissed from her mind all thoughts of him as one who wouldcontinue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age. Thoughtsof his continued success had never meant much to her, but during theevening something had happened to Clara and she wanted to tell him aboutit, to take him into the joy of it. Their first child had been a girland she was sure the next would be a man child. "I felt him to-night,"she said, when they had got to the place by the fence and saw below thelights of the town. "I felt him to-night," she said again, "and oh, hewas strong! He kicked like anything. I am sure this time it's a boy."

  For perhaps ten minutes Clara and Hugh stood by the fence. The diseaseof thinking that was making Hugh useless for the work of his age hadswept away many old things within him and he was not self-conscious inthe presence of his woman. When she told him of the struggle of the manof another generation, striving to be born he put his arm about her andheld her close against his long body. For a time they stood in silence,and then started to return to the house and sleep. As they went pastthe barns and the bunkhouse where several men now slept they heard, asthough coming out of the past, the loud snoring of the rapidly ageingfarm hand, Jim Priest, and then above that sound and above the sound ofthe animals stirring in the barns arose another sound, a sound shrilland intense, greetings perhaps to an unborn Hugh McVey. For some reason,perhaps to announce a shift in crews, the factories of Bidwell that wereengaged in night work set up a great whistling and screaming. The soundran up the hillside and rang in the ears of Hugh as, with his arm aboutClara's shoulders, he went up the steps and in at the farmhouse door.