Helen of the Old House Part 38

And to-day Maggie's been a lot worse. I--I'm afraid--"

Helen wanted to cry aloud. Was it possible that she had asked the Interpreter only a few hours before if there was really much suffering in the families of the strikers? "You can see Maggie if you want,"

said the mother. "She's in there."

She rose as if to show her visitor to the room.

But Helen said, quickly, "In just a moment. Mrs. Whaley, won't you tell me first--is there--is there no one to help you?" She asked the question timidly, as if fearing to offend.

The other woman answered, hopelessly, "The charity ladies do a little, and the Interpreter and Mary Martin do all they can. But you see, ma'am, there's so many others just like us that there ain't near enough to go 'round."

The significance of the woman's colorless words went to Helen's heart with appalling force--"so many others just like us." This stricken home was not then an exception. With flas.h.i.+ng vividness her mind pictured many rooms similar to the cold and barren apartment where she sat. She visioned as clearly as she saw Mrs. Whaley the many other wives and mothers with Bobbies and Maggies who were caught helplessly in the monstrous net of the strike, as these were caught. She knew now why the Interpreter and Billy Rand worked so hard. And again she felt her cheeks burn with shame as when the old basket maker had said, "For every idle hand--"

Helen Ward had been an active leader in the foreign relief work during the war. Her portrait had even been published in the papers as one who was devoted to the cause of the stricken women and children abroad. But that had all been impersonal, while this--Already in her heart she was echoing the old familiar cry of the comparative few, "If only the people knew! If only they could be made to see as she had been made to see! The people are not so cruel. They simply do not know. They are ignorant, as she was ignorant."

Aloud she was saying to Bobby, as she thrust her purse in the boy's hand, "You must run quickly, Bobby, to the nearest store and get the things that your mother needs first, and have some one telephone for a doctor to come at once."

To the mother she added, hurriedly, as if fearing a protest, "Please, Mrs. Whaley, let me help. I am so sorry I did not know before. Won't you forgive me and let me help you now?"

"Gee!" exclaimed Bobby, who had opened the purse. "Look-ee, mom! Gee!"

As one in a dream, the mother turned from the money in the boy's hand to Helen. "You ain't meanin', ma'am, for us to use all that?"

"Yes--yes--don't be afraid to get what you need--there will be more when that is gone."

The poor woman did not fill the air with loud cries of hysterical grat.i.tude and superlative prayers to G.o.d for His blessing upon this one who had come so miraculously to her relief. For a moment she stood trembling with emotion, while her tearless eyes were fixed upon Helen's face with a look of such grat.i.tude that the young woman was forced to turn away lest her own feeling escape her control. Then, s.n.a.t.c.hing the money from the boy's hands, she said, "I had better go myself, ma'am--Bobby can come along to help carry things. If you"--she hesitated, with a look toward that other room--"if you wouldn't mind stayin' with Maggie till we get back?"

A minute later and Helen was alone in that wretched house in the Flats--alone save for the sick child in the next room.

The door to the street had scarcely closed when a wave of terror swept over her. She started to her feet. She could not do it. She would call Mrs. Whaley back. She would go herself for the needed things. But there was a strength in Helen Ward that few of her most intimate friends, even, realized; and before her hand touched the latch of the door she had command of herself once more. In much the same spirit that her brother John perhaps had faced a lonely night watch in Flanders fields, Adam Ward's daughter forced herself to do this thing that had so unexpectedly fallen to her.

For some minutes she walked the floor, listening to the noises of the neighborhood. Anxiously she opened the door and looked out into the fast, gathering darkness. No one of her own people knew where she was.

She had heard terrible things of Jake Vodell and his creed of terrorism. McIver had pressed it upon her mind that the strikers were all alike in their lawlessness. What if Sam Whaley should return to find her there? She listened--listened.

A faint, moaning sound came from the next room. She went quickly to the doorway, but in the faint light she could see only the shadowy outline of a bed. Taking the lamp she entered fearfully.

Save for the bed, an old box that served as a table, and one chair, this room was as bare as the other. With the lamp in her hand Helen stood beside the bed.

The tiny form of little Maggie was lost under the ragged and dirty coverlet. The child's face in the tangled ma.s.s of her unkempt hair was so wasted and drawn, her eyes, closed under their dark lids, so deeply sunken, and her teeth so exposed by the thin fleshless lips, that she seemed scarcely human. One bony arm with its clawlike hand encircled the rag doll that she had held that day when Helen took the two children into the country.

As Helen looked all her fears vanished. She had no thought, now, of where she was or how she came there. Deep within her she felt the awakening of that mother soul which lives in every woman. She did not shrink in horror from this hideous fruit of Jake Vodell's activity. She did not cry out in pity or sorrow. She uttered no word of protest. As she put the lamp down on the box, her hand did not tremble. Very quietly she placed the chair beside the bed and sat down to watch and wait as motherhood in all ages has watched and waited.

While poor Sam Whaley was busy on some mission a.s.signed to him by his leader, Jake Vodell, and his wife and boy were gone for the food supplied by a stranger to his household, this woman, of the cla.s.s that he had been taught to hate, held alone her vigil at the bedside of the workman's little girl.

A thin, murmuring voice came from the bed. Helen leaned closer. She heard a few incoherent mutterings--then, "No--no--Bobby, yer wouldn't dast blow up the castle. Yer'd maybe kill the princess lady--yer know yer couldn't do that!"

Again the weak little voice sank into low, meaning less murmurs. The tiny, clawlike fingers plucked at the coverlet. "Tain't so, the princess lady _will_ find her jewel of happiness, I tell yer, Bobby, jest like the Interpreter told us--cause her heart is kind--yer know her heart is--kind--kind--"

Silence again. Some one pa.s.sed the house. A dog howled. A child in the house next door cried. Across the street a man's voice was raised in anger.

Suddenly little Maggie's eyes opened wide. "An' the princess lady is a-comin' some day to take Bobby and me away up in the sky to her beautiful palace place where there's flowers and birds an' everythin'

all the time an'--an'--"

The big eyes were fixed on Helen's face as the' young woman stooped over the bed, and the light of a glorious smile transformed the wasted childish features.

"Why--why--yer--yer've come!"

CHAPTER XXV

McIVER'S OPPORTUNITY

When the politician stopped at the cigar stand late that afternoon for a box of the kind he gave his admirers, the philosopher, scratching the revenue label, remarked, "I see by the papers that McIver is still a-stayin'."

"Humph!" grunted the politician with careful diplomacy.

The bank clerk who was particular about his pipe tobacco chimed in, "McIver is a stayer all right when it comes to that."

"Natural born fighter, sir," offered the politician tentatively.

"Game sport, McIver is," agreed the undertaker, taking the place at the show case vacated by the departing bank clerk.

The philosopher, handing out the newcomer's favorite smoke, echoed his customer's admiration. "You bet he's a game sport." He punched the cash register with vigor. "Don't give a hang what it costs the other fellow."

The undertaker laughed.

"I remember one time," said the philosopher, "McIver and a bunch was goin' fis.h.i.+n' up the river. They stopped here early in the morning and while they was gettin' their smokes the judge--who's always handin' out some sort of poetry stuff, you know--he says: 'Well, Jim, we're goin'

to have a fine day anyway. No matter whether we catch anything or not it will be worth the trip just to get out into the country.' Mac, he looked at the judge a minute as if he wanted to bite him--you know what I mean--then he says in that growlin' voice of his, 'That may do for you all right, judge, but I'm here to tell you that when _I_ go fis.h.i.+n'

_I go for fish_.'"

The cigar-store philosopher's story accurately described the dominant trait in the factory man's character. To him business was a sport, a game, a contest of absorbing interest. He entered into it with all the zest and strength of his virile manhood. Mind and body, it absorbed him. And yet, he knew nothing of that true sportsman's pa.s.sion which plays the game for the joy of the game itself. McIver played to win; not for the sake of winning, but for the value of the winnings. Methods were good or bad only as they won or lost. He was incapable of experiencing those larger triumphs which come only in defeat. The Interpreter's philosophy of the "oneness of all" was to McIver the fanciful theory of an impracticable dreamer, who, too feeble to take a man's part in life, contented himself by formulating creeds of weakness that befitted his state. Men were the pieces with which he played his game--they were of varied values, certainly, as are the pieces on a chess table, but they were pieces on the chess table and nothing more.

All of which does not mean that Jim McIver was cruel or unkind. Indeed, he was genuinely and generously interested in many worthy charities, and many a man had appealed to him, and not in vain, for help. But to have permitted these humanitarian instincts to influence his play in the game of business would have been, to his mind, evidence of a weakness that was contemptible. The human element, he held, must, of necessity, be sternly disregarded if one would win.

While his fellow townsmen were discussing him at the cigar stand, and men everywhere in Millsburgh were commenting on his determination to break the strikers to his will at any cost, McIver, at his office, was concluding a conference with a little company of his fellow employers.

It was nearly dark when the conference finally ended and the men went their several ways. McIver, with some work of special importance waiting his attention, telephoned that he would not be home for dinner.

He would finish what he had to do and would dine at the club later in the evening.

The big factory inside the high, board fence was silent. The night came on. Save for the armed men who guarded the place, the owner was alone.

Absorbed in his consideration of the business before him, the man was oblivious of everything but his game. An hour went by. He forgot that he had had no dinner. Another hour--and another.

He was interrupted at last by the entrance of a guard.

"Well, what do you want?" he said, shortly, when the man stood before him.

"There's a woman outside, sir. She insists that she must see you."