The Iron Heel Read online

  CHAPTER XI

  THE GREAT ADVENTURE

  Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on theferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was notpremeditated. Had they not met accidentally, there would not have beenany warning. Not that the outcome would have been different, however.Father came of stout old Mayflower* stock, and the blood was imperativein him.

  * One of the first ships that carried colonies to America, after the discovery of the New World. Descendants of these original colonists were for a while inordinately proud of their genealogy; but in time the blood became so widely diffused that it ran in the veins practically of all Americans.

  "Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home. "Ernestis a very remarkable young man, and I'd rather see you his wife than thewife of Rockefeller himself or the King of England."

  "What's the matter?" I asked in alarm.

  "The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces--yours and mine. Wicksonas much as told me so. He was very kind--for an oligarch. He offered toreinstate me in the university. What do you think of that? He, Wickson,a sordid money-grabber, has the power to determine whether I shall orshall not teach in the university of the state. But he offered me evenbetter than that--offered to make me president of some great college ofphysical sciences that is being planned--the Oligarchy must get rid ofits surplus somehow, you see.

  "'Do you remember what I told that socialist lover of your daughter's?'he said. 'I told him that we would walk upon the faces of the workingclass. And so we shall. As for you, I have for you a deep respect asa scientist; but if you throw your fortunes in with the workingclass--well, watch out for your face, that is all.' And then he turnedand left me."

  "It means we'll have to marry earlier than you planned," was Ernest'scomment when we told him.

  I could not follow his reasoning, but I was soon to learn it. It was atthis time that the quarterly dividend of the Sierra Mills was paid--or,rather, should have been paid, for father did not receive his. Afterwaiting several days, father wrote to the secretary. Promptly camethe reply that there was no record on the books of father's owning anystock, and a polite request for more explicit information.

  "I'll make it explicit enough, confound him," father declared, anddeparted for the bank to get the stock in question from his safe-depositbox.

  "Ernest is a very remarkable man," he said when he got back and whileI was helping him off with his overcoat. "I repeat, my daughter, thatyoung man of yours is a very remarkable young man."

  I had learned, whenever he praised Ernest in such fashion, to expectdisaster.

  "They have already walked upon my face," father explained. "There was nostock. The box was empty. You and Ernest will have to get married prettyquickly."

  Father insisted on laboratory methods. He brought the Sierra Mills intocourt, but he could not bring the books of the Sierra Mills into court.He did not control the courts, and the Sierra Mills did. That explainedit all. He was thoroughly beaten by the law, and the bare-faced robberyheld good.

  It is almost laughable now, when I look back on it, the way father wasbeaten. He met Wickson accidentally on the street in San Francisco,and he told Wickson that he was a damned scoundrel. And then father wasarrested for attempted assault, fined in the police court, and boundover to keep the peace. It was all so ridiculous that when he gothome he had to laugh himself. But what a furor was raised in thelocal papers! There was grave talk about the bacillus of violence thatinfected all men who embraced socialism; and father, with his long andpeaceful life, was instanced as a shining example of how the bacillusof violence worked. Also, it was asserted by more than one paper thatfather's mind had weakened under the strain of scientific study, andconfinement in a state asylum for the insane was suggested. Nor was thismerely talk. It was an imminent peril. But father was wise enough to seeit. He had the Bishop's experience to lesson from, and he lessonedwell. He kept quiet no matter what injustice was perpetrated on him, andreally, I think, surprised his enemies.

  There was the matter of the house--our home. A mortgage was foreclosedon it, and we had to give up possession. Of course there wasn't anymortgage, and never had been any mortgage. The ground had been boughtoutright, and the house had been paid for when it was built. And houseand lot had always been free and unencumbered. Nevertheless there wasthe mortgage, properly and legally drawn up and signed, with a recordof the payments of interest through a number of years. Father made nooutcry. As he had been robbed of his money, so was he now robbed of hishome. And he had no recourse. The machinery of society was in the handsof those who were bent on breaking him. He was a philosopher at heart,and he was no longer even angry.

  "I am doomed to be broken," he said to me; "but that is no reason that Ishould not try to be shattered as little as possible. These old bones ofmine are fragile, and I've learned my lesson. God knows I don't want tospend my last days in an insane asylum."

  Which reminds me of Bishop Morehouse, whom I have neglected for manypages. But first let me tell of my marriage. In the play of events, mymarriage sinks into insignificance, I know, so I shall barely mentionit.

  "Now we shall become real proletarians," father said, when we weredriven from our home. "I have often envied that young man of yours forhis actual knowledge of the proletariat. Now I shall see and learn formyself."

  Father must have had strong in him the blood of adventure. He lookedupon our catastrophe in the light of an adventure. No anger norbitterness possessed him. He was too philosophic and simple to bevindictive, and he lived too much in the world of mind to miss thecreature comforts we were giving up. So it was, when we moved to SanFrancisco into four wretched rooms in the slum south of Market Street,that he embarked upon the adventure with the joy and enthusiasm ofa child--combined with the clear sight and mental grasp of anextraordinary intellect. He really never crystallized mentally. He hadno false sense of values. Conventional or habitual values meant nothingto him. The only values he recognized were mathematical and scientificfacts. My father was a great man. He had the mind and the soul that onlygreat men have. In ways he was even greater than Ernest, than whom Ihave known none greater.

  Even I found some relief in our change of living. If nothing else, Iwas escaping from the organized ostracism that had been our increasingportion in the university town ever since the enmity of the nascentOligarchy had been incurred. And the change was to me likewiseadventure, and the greatest of all, for it was love-adventure. Thechange in our fortunes had hastened my marriage, and it was as awife that I came to live in the four rooms on Pell Street, in the SanFrancisco slum.

  And this out of all remains: I made Ernest happy. I came into his stormylife, not as a new perturbing force, but as one that made toward peaceand repose. I gave him rest. It was the guerdon of my love for him.It was the one infallible token that I had not failed. To bringforgetfulness, or the light of gladness, into those poor tired eyes ofhis--what greater joy could have blessed me than that?

  Those dear tired eyes. He toiled as few men ever toiled, and all hislifetime he toiled for others. That was the measure of his manhood. Hewas a humanist and a lover. And he, with his incarnate spirit of battle,his gladiator body and his eagle spirit--he was as gentle and tender tome as a poet. He was a poet. A singer in deeds. And all his life he sangthe song of man. And he did it out of sheer love of man, and for man hegave his life and was crucified.

  And all this he did with no hope of future reward. In his conception ofthings there was no future life. He, who fairly burnt with immortality,denied himself immortality--such was the paradox of him. He, so warmin spirit, was dominated by that cold and forbidding philosophy,materialistic monism. I used to refute him by telling him that Imeasured his immortality by the wings of his soul, and that I shouldhave to live endless aeons in order to achieve the full measurement.Whereat he would laugh, and his arms would leap out to me, and he wouldcall me his sweet metaphysician; and the tiredness would pass out of hiseyes,
and into them would flood the happy love-light that was in itselfa new and sufficient advertisement of his immortality.

  Also, he used to call me his dualist, and he would explain how Kant, bymeans of pure reason, had abolished reason, in order to worship God. Andhe drew the parallel and included me guilty of a similar act. And when Ipleaded guilty, but defended the act as highly rational, he but pressedme closer and laughed as only one of God's own lovers could laugh. Iwas wont to deny that heredity and environment could explain his ownoriginality and genius, any more than could the cold groping finger ofscience catch and analyze and classify that elusive essence that lurkedin the constitution of life itself.

  I held that space was an apparition of God, and that soul was aprojection of the character of God; and when he called me his sweetmetaphysician, I called him my immortal materialist. And so we loved andwere happy; and I forgave him his materialism because of his tremendouswork in the world, performed without thought of soul-gain thereby, andbecause of his so exceeding modesty of spirit that prevented him fromhaving pride and regal consciousness of himself and his soul.

  But he had pride. How could he have been an eagle and not have pride?His contention was that it was finer for a finite mortal speck of lifeto feel Godlike, than for a god to feel godlike; and so it was that heexalted what he deemed his mortality. He was fond of quoting a fragmentfrom a certain poem. He had never seen the whole poem, and he had triedvainly to learn its authorship. I here give the fragment, not alonebecause he loved it, but because it epitomized the paradox that he wasin the spirit of him, and his conception of his spirit. For how can aman, with thrilling, and burning, and exaltation, recite the followingand still be mere mortal earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescentform? Here it is:

  "Joy upon joy and gain upon gain Are the destined rights of my birth, And I shout the praise of my endless days To the echoing edge of the earth. Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die To the uttermost end of time, I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss, In every age and clime--

  "The froth of Pride, the tang of Power, The sweet of Womanhood! I drain the lees upon my knees, For oh, the draught is good; I drink to Life, I drink to Death, And smack my lips with song, For when I die, another 'I' shall pass the cup along.

  "The man you drove from Eden's grove Was I, my Lord, was I, And I shall be there when the earth and the air Are rent from sea to sky; For it is my world, my gorgeous world, The world of my dearest woes, From the first faint cry of the newborn To the rack of the woman's throes.

  "Packed with the pulse of an unborn race, Torn with a world's desire, The surging flood of my wild young blood Would quench the judgment fire. I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh To the dust of my earthly goal, From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb To the sheen of my naked soul. Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh The whole world leaps to my will, And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed Shall harrow the earth for its fill. Almighty God, when I drain life's glass Of all its rainbow gleams, The hapless plight of eternal night Shall be none too long for my dreams.

  "The man you drove from Eden's grove Was I, my Lord, was I, And I shall be there when the earth and the air Are rent from sea to sky; For it is my world, my gorgeous world, The world of my dear delight, From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream To the dusk of my own love-night."

  Ernest always overworked. His wonderful constitution kept him up; buteven that constitution could not keep the tired look out of his eyes.His dear, tired eyes! He never slept more than four and one-half hoursa night; yet he never found time to do all the work he wanted to do.He never ceased from his activities as a propagandist, and was alwaysscheduled long in advance for lectures to workingmen's organizations.Then there was the campaign. He did a man's full work in that alone.With the suppression of the socialist publishing houses, his meagreroyalties ceased, and he was hard-put to make a living; for he had tomake a living in addition to all his other labor. He did a great dealof translating for the magazines on scientific and philosophic subjects;and, coming home late at night, worn out from the strain of thecampaign, he would plunge into his translating and toil on well into themorning hours. And in addition to everything, there was his studying.To the day of his death he kept up his studies, and he studiedprodigiously.

  And yet he found time in which to love me and make me happy. But thiswas accomplished only through my merging my life completely into his. Ilearned shorthand and typewriting, and became his secretary. He insistedthat I succeeded in cutting his work in half; and so it was that Ischooled myself to understand his work. Our interests became mutual, andwe worked together and played together.

  And then there were our sweet stolen moments in the midst of ourwork--just a word, or caress, or flash of love-light; and our momentswere sweeter for being stolen. For we lived on the heights, where theair was keen and sparkling, where the toil was for humanity, and wheresordidness and selfishness never entered. We loved love, and our lovewas never smirched by anything less than the best. And this out of allremains: I did not fail. I gave him rest--he who worked so hard forothers, my dear, tired-eyed mortalist.