The Conflict Part 10

"I understand," said the girl. "About this strike--WHY won't you give the men shorter hours and better pay?"

"Because the company can't afford it. As things are now, there's only enough left for a three per cent dividend after the interest on the bonds is paid."

She had read in the New Day that by a series of tricks the "traction ring" had quadrupled the bonded indebtedness of the roads and multiplied the stock by six, and had pocketed the proceeds of the steal; that three per cent on the enormously inflated capital was in fact eighteen per cent on the actual stock value; that seven per cent on the bonds was in fact twenty-eight per cent on the actual bonded indebtedness; that this traction steal was a fair ill.u.s.tration of how in a score of ways in Remsen City, in a thousand and one ways in all parts of the country, the upper cla.s.s was draining away the substance of the ma.s.ses, was swindling them out of their just wages, was forcing them to pay many times the just prices for every article of civilized use. She had read these things--she had thought about them--she had realized that they were true.

She did not put to her father the question that was on her lips--the next logical question after his answer that the company could not afford to cut the hours lower than fourteen or to raise wages to what was necessary for a man to have if he and his family were to live, not in decency and comfort, but in something less than squalor. She did not put the question because she wished to spare her father--to spare herself the shame of hearing his tricky answer--to spare herself the discomfort of squarely facing a nasty truth.

Instead she said: "I understand. And you have got to look out for the rights of the people who have invested their money."

"If I didn't I'd be cheating them," said Hastings. "And if the men don't like their jobs, why, they can quit and get jobs they do like."

He added, in absolute unconsciousness of his inconsistency, in absolute belief in his own honesty and goodness, "The truth is our company pays as high wages as can be got anywhere. As for them hours--when _I_ was working my way up, _I_ used to put in sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and was mighty glad to do it. This lazy talk of cutting down hours makes me sick. And these fellows that're always kicking on their jobs, I'd like to know what'd become of them and their families if I and men like me didn't provide work for 'em."

"Yes, indeed!" cried Jane, eagerly seizing upon this attractive view of the situation--and resolutely accepting it without question.

In came one of the maids, saying: "There's a man wants to see you, Mr.

Hastings."

"What's his name? What does he want?" inquired Hastings, while Jane made a mental note that she must try to inject at least a little order and form into the manners of announcing visitors.

"He didn't give a name. He just said, 'Tell the old man I want to see him.' I ain't sure, but I think it's d.i.c.k Kelly."

As Lizzie was an ardent Democrat, she spoke the name contemptuously--for d.i.c.k Kelly was the Republican boss. If it had been House, the Democratic boss and Kelly's secret dependent and henchman, she would have said "Mr. Joseph House" in a tone of deep respect.

"Kelly," said Hastings. "Must be something important or he'd 'a telephoned or asked me to see him at my office or at the Lincoln Club.

He never came out here before. Bring him in, Lizzie."

A moment and there appeared in the doorway a man of perhaps forty years who looked like a prosperous contractor who had risen from the ranks.

His figure was notable for its solidity and for the power of the shoulders; but already there were indications that the solidity, come of hard manual labor in early life, was soon to soften into fat under the melting influence of prosperity and the dissipation it put within too easy reach. The striking features of his face were a pair of keen, hard, greenish eyes and a jaw that protruded uglily--the jaw of aggressiveness, not the too prominent jaw of weakness. At sight of Jane he halted awkwardly.

"How're you, Mr. Hastings?" said he.

"h.e.l.lo, d.i.c.k," said the old man. "This is my daughter Jane."

Jane smiled a pleasant recognition of the introduction. Kelly said stiffly, "How're you, ma'am?"

"Want to see me alone, I suppose?" Hastings went on. "You go out on the porch, Jenny."

As soon as Jane disappeared Kelly's stiffness and clumsiness vanished.

To head off Hastings' coming offer of a cigar, he drew one from his pocket and lighted it. "There's h.e.l.l to pay, Mr. Hastings," he began, seating himself near the old man, tilting back in his chair and crossing his legs.

"Well, I reckon you can take care of it," said Hastings calmly.

"Oh, yes, we kin take care of it, all right. Only, I don't want to do nothing without consulting you."

In these two statements Mr. Kelly summed up the whole of politics in Remsen City, in any city anywhere, in the country at large.

Kelly had started life as a blacksmith. But he soon tired of the dullness and toil and started forth to find some path up to where men live by making others work for them instead of plodding along at the hand-to-mouth existence that is the lot of those who live by their own labors alone. He was a safe blower for a while, but wisely soon abandoned that fascinating but precarious and unremunerative career.

From card sharp following the circus and sheet-writer to a bookmaker he graduated into bartender, into proprietor of a doggery. As every saloon is a political club, every saloon-keeper is of necessity a politician. Kelly's woodbox happened to be a convenient place for directing the floaters and the repeaters. Kelly's political importance grew apace. His respectability grew more slowly. But it had grown and was growing.

If you had asked Lizzie, the maid, why she was a Democrat, she would have given no such foolish reason as the average man gives.

She would not have twaddled about principles--when everyone with eyeteeth cut ought to know that principles have departed from politics, now that both parties have been harmonized and organized into agencies of the plutocracy. She would not have said she was a Democrat because her father was, or because all her friends and a.s.sociates were. She would have replied--in pleasantly Americanized Irish:

"I'm a Democrat because when my father got too old to work, Mr. House, the Democrat leader, gave him a job on the elevator at the Court House--though that dirty thief and scoundrel, Kelly, the Republican boss, owned all the judges and county officers. And when my brother lost his place as porter because he took a drink too many, Mr. House gave him a card to the foreman of the gas company, and he went to work at eight a week and is there yet."

Mr. Kelly and Mr. House belong to a maligned and much misunderstood cla.s.s. Whenever you find anywhere in nature an activity of any kind, however pestiferous its activity may seem to you--or however good--you may be sure that if you look deep enough you will find that that activity has a use, arises from a need. The "robber trusts" and the political bosses are interesting examples of this basic truth. They have arisen because science, revolutionizing human society, has compelled it to organize. The organization is crude and clumsy and stupid, as yet, because men are ignorant, are experimenting, are working in the dark. So, the organizing forces are necessarily crude and clumsy and stupid.

Mr. Hastings was--all unconsciously--organizing society industrially.

Mr. Kelly--equally unconscious of the true nature of his activities--was organizing society politically. And as industry and politics are--and ever have been--at bottom two names for identically the same thing, Mr. Hastings and Mr. Kelly were bound sooner or later to get together.

Remsen City was organized like every other large or largish community.

There were two clubs--the Lincoln and the Jefferson--which well enough represented the "respectable elements"--that is, those citizens who were of the upper cla.s.s. There were two other clubs--the Blaine and the Tilden--which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and, rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on.

Martin Hastings--the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though for obvious reasons his political activities were wholly secret and stealthy--was the leading spirit in the Lincoln Club. Jared Olds--Remsen City's richest and most influential Democrat, the head of the gas company and the water company--was foremost in the Jefferson Club. At the Lincoln and the Jefferson you rarely saw any but "gentlemen"--men of established position and fortune, deacons and vestrymen, judges, corporation lawyers and the like. The Blaine and the Tilden housed a livelier and a far less select cla.s.s--the "boys"--the active politicians, the big saloon keepers, the criminal lawyers, the gamblers, the chaps who knew how to round up floaters and to handle gangs of repeaters, the active young sports working for political position, by pitching and carrying for the political leaders, by doing their errands of charity or crookedness or what not. Joe House was the "big shout" at the Tilden; d.i.c.k Kelly could be found every evening on the third--or "wine," or plotting--floor of the Blaine--found holding court. And very respectful indeed were even the most eminent of Lincoln, or Jefferson, respectabilities who sought him out there to ask favors of him.

The bosses tend more and more to become mere flunkeys of the plutocrats. Kelly belonged to the old school of boss, dating from the days when social organization was in the early stages, when the political organizer was feared and even served by the industrial organizer, the embryo plutocrats. He realized how necessary he was to his plutocratic master, and he made that master treat him almost as an equal. He was exacting ever larger pay for taking care of the voters and keeping them fooled; he was getting rich, and had as yet vague aspirations to respectability and fas.h.i.+on. He had stopped drinking, had "cut out the women," had made a beginning toward a less inelegant way of speaking the language. His view of life was what is called cynical. That is, he regarded himself as morally the equal of the respectable rulers of society--or of the preachers who attended to the religious part of the grand industry of "keeping the cow quiet while it was being milked."

But Mr. Kelly was explaining to Martin Hastings what he meant when he said that there was "h.e.l.l to pay":

"That infernal little cuss, Victor Dorn," said he "made a speech in the Court House Square to-day. Of course, none of the decent papers--and they're all decent except his'n--will publish any of it. Still, there was about a thousand people there before he got through--and the thing'll spread."

"Speech?--what about?" said Hastings. "He's always shooting off his mouth. He'd better stop talking and go to work at some honest business."

"He's got on to the fact that this strike is a put-up job--that the company hired labor detectives in Chicago last winter to come down here and get hold of the union. He gave names--amounts paid--the whole d.a.m.n thing."

"Um," said Hastings, rubbing his skinny hands along the s.h.i.+ny pantaloons over his meagre legs. "Um."

"But that ain't all," pursued Kelly. "He read out a list of the men told off to pretend to set fire to the car barns and start the riot--those Chicago chaps, you know."

"I don't know anything about it," said Hastings sharply.

Kelly smiled slightly--amused scorn. It seemed absurd to him for the old man to keep up the pretense of ignorance. In fact, Hastings was ignorant--of the details. He was not quite the aloof plutocrat of the modern school, who permits himself to know nothing of details beyond the dividend rate and similar innocent looking results of causes at which sometimes h.e.l.l itself would shudder. But, while he was more active than the conscience-easing devices now working smoothly made necessary, he never permitted himself to know any unnecessary criminal or wicked fact about his enterprises.

"I don't know," he repeated. "And I don't want to know."

"Anyhow, Dorn gave away the whole thing. He even read a copy of your letter of introduction to the governor--the one you--according to Dorn--gave Fillmore when you sent him up to the Capitol to arrange for the invitation to come after the riot."

Hastings knew that the boss was deliberately "rubbing it in" because Hastings--that is, Hastings' agents had not invited Kelly to a.s.sist in the project for "teaching the labor element a much needed lesson." But knowledge of Kelly's motive did not make the truth he was telling any less true--the absurd mismanagement of the whole affair, with the result that Dorn seemed in the way to change it from a lesson to labor on the folly of revolt against their kind and generous but firm employers into a provoker of fresh and fiercer revolt--effective revolt--political revolt. So, as Kelly "rubbed," Hastings visibly winced and writhed.

Kelly ended his recital with: "The speech created a h.e.l.l of a sensation, Mr. Hastings. That young chap can talk."

"Yes," snapped Hastings. "But he can't do anything else."

"I'm not so sure of that," replied Kelly, who was wise enough to realize the value of a bogey like Dorn--its usefulness for purposes of "throwing a scare into the silk-stocking crowd." "Dorn's getting mighty strong with the people."

"Stuff and nonsense!" retorted Hastings. "They'll listen to any slick tongued rascal that roasts those that are more prosperous than they are. But when it comes to doing anything, they know better. They envy and hate those that give them jobs, but they need the jobs."

"There's a good deal of truth in that, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly, who was nothing if not judicial. "But Dorn's mighty plausible. I hear sensible men saying there's something more'n hot air in his facts and figgures." Kelly paused, and made the pause significant.

"About that last block of traction stock, Mr. Hastings. I thought you were going to let me in on the ground floor. But I ain't heard nothing."