The Coal War (37 page)

As all believers in fairy-stories know, there are magic words which have power to cause the most massive gates to swing back upon their hinges. It is the modern custom to have these magic words engraved upon little pieces of card-board, which the fortunate possessor has only to present. Silently and majestically the gates gave way, and the bold little electric rang its tinkly bell again, and glided up a long winding avenue lined with pine-trees, coming to a great yellow building trimmed with white, and stopping under the shelter of a porte-cochere with columns big as the pillars of the temples of Karnak.

A man-servant opened the door of the electric, and took it in charge; another man-servant opened the door of the house, and a third stood by to remove the wraps of the guests. Before them went up a broad stair-case, with a carpet of royal purple, woven all in one piece; on one side was the mantel of white marble, six feet high, from a palace in Ferrara, and on the other side were tapestries woven for the popes at Avignon. You might read the prices of these art-treasures ever so often in the society columns of the Western City “Herald”; you might hear malicious doubts of their genuineness in any Western City drawing-room.

“Mr. Warner will wait for me,” said Lucy May, to the servant; and so Hal was free to wander about and improve his artistic sensibilities, while the little lady followed the lackey down a broad corridor, and through a side door, into a passage comparatively low, almost a tunnel. There was another door ahead, and as they approached it the knees of the little lady were trembling, the hands of the little lady were clenched, and the little white teeth were biting the little red lips so hard that the blood almost came. Deep within the little lady soul were voices crying out: “You are not afraid! You are not afraid! You are a daughter of colonial governors and of duchesses from over seas! He is nothing but a pack-peddler—he is common! Common! Common as dirt!”

The servant opened the door, and the little lady went through. But it proved a false alarm, for the corridor continued to another door—it took several such barriers to protect an American man of business from the society-doings of the women-folk of his family! Again the little lady clenched her hands and bit her lip; again the voices spoke, and the servant opened and bowed, and Lucy May passed through, and into the presence of the Coal King.

[8]

It was a common-place looking room, its ceiling low, its walls covered with book-cases and filing-cabinets. At one end was a library-table with a shaded lamp, and a couple of worn leather arm-chairs. Between that and the door stood a chess-table, and before it sat two men. Neither of them moved when the door opened; until the servant's voice broke the silence: “Mrs. Warner, sir.”

One of the men turned and got up—slowly, with what seemed reluctance. He was a heavy man, with a powerful frame, stoop-shouldered, sluggish; his head hung forward, so that when he turned it to look at you, you thought of some animal, swinging from side to side in a menagerie cage. By the eyes, and the folds of the skin, it might have been a hippopotamos; by the set of the jaw and the protruding lip, a bulldog. The old man's hair was grey, and straggly, because he ran his hands in it when he thought. He had on a brown smoking-jacket shiny at the elbows, a pair of baggy black trousers, and ragged green carpet-slippers which might have been a wedding-gift.

The heavy-lidded eyes fixed themselves upon the unexpected caller, a lady in a brocaded opera-cloak of blue silk, with a tiny diadem of a hat on top of soft brown hair; a lady petite, exquisite, with fine, sensitive features, now wearing a look of ineffable serenity, of proud assurance. You might have thought it Queen Titania, come to command some surly old Caliban-monster.

“Good evening, Mr. Harrigan,” she said; and her voice was musical, as poets tell about the voices of mountain-streamlets.

“Good evening, ma'am,” said the old Caliban-monster.

“Mr. Harrigan, I have to talk to you about something personal.”

“Yes, ma'am?” said the monster. (One of the monstrous things about him was that all the ladies of his family together had not been able to break him of that plebian form of address.)

“I shall have to see you alone,” said the little lady; and she looked at the other man, who sat at the chess-table, not having lifted his eyes. He was white-haired, thin and old, with the pale face of a student. Lucy May knew all about him—who in Western City did not know about Jacob Apfel, who had been a dealer in second-hand clothing, and had “staked” Old Peter in his early days, and now lived with the Coal King, collecting bugs and postage-stamps and snuff-boxes by day, and in the evening playing chess with his crony!

“Alone, Mr. Harrigan,” said the little lady, in the voice of the duchesses from over seas.

And the head of Peter Harrigan swung round. “Get out, Jake!” So the old man rose from the chess-table, and without a sound or glance went through a door at the other side of the room.

“Now, ma'am?” said Old Peter.

“Sit down, please, Mr. Harrigan,” said Lucy May. She realized perfectly well that he did not want to sit down, nor to have her sit down; but she was mistress of ceremonies wherever she went, and he, who hated snobbery, cursed it with all the force of his forceful being, was yet bound by it, helpless.

“Mr. Harrigan,” said Lucy May, having put herself at ease, “I have come on a strange errand.”

“Yes, ma'am?” said the uneasy old monster.

“I will begin by mentioning some things I have
not
come for. I don't want any money from you; I am not raising funds for anything.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said the other again. He did not smile, but there was a trace more of humanness in his voice.

“In the next place, I have nothing to do with the affairs of my husband. I gather that you are not on cordial terms with him. I wish you to know that I am not either. I am unhappy about his business—almost as unhappy as you are about yours.”

Not by so much as a flicker of an eye-lid did Old Peter betray his attitude to that remark; but the little lady had that strange sense which enables ladies to feel their way—as bats fly in darkness, dodging a thousand obstructions. She went on, the smile going out of her face, and her voice becoming grave. “Circumstances, Mr. Harrigan, have willed it that your fate and mine are bound together. You don't know it, possibly, but I know it, and you will know it before long. You may not wish this, but it is a fact that I have to play a part in your life, whether for good or evil. So it seemed the sensible thing to come and talk matters out with you.”

Again there was a silence.

“You, Mr. Harrigan, are a lonely and unhappy old man. Life has played a trick on you. You have worked hard, and made a success, but you haven't found happiness—you are embittered, desolate, shut up in yourself. You sit here now and peer out at me, and you're saying: ‘What new kind of dodge is this? What's this one after?' You're saying that, aren't you, Mr. Harrigan?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Old Peter.

“You've got something that everybody wants—that's money; everybody is putting his wits to work, thinking up some way to get at you, some new scheme, some pretence, some ‘spiel', as they call it. There is no end to their devices—charities, reform movements, causes, religions, arts, sciences; a new kind of healer to make you well, a new kind of prophet to save your soul, a new kind of power or dignity or learning to impress you—to separate you from your money! They gather like flies about a honey-pot—you have to shut yourself up in a cage, with servants and guards outside, and miles of iron fence all about you, to keep yourself safe. And even then they break through!”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Old Peter.

[9]

There had come the trace of a smile to the eyes of the old Caliban-monster, and the little lady saw it, and renewed her courage. “You have an impulse towards humanness, Mr. Harrigan—isn't it so? But then the old habit reasserts itself. You say: ‘Watch out now! This is a smooth one, this is the smartest yet—but all the more dangerous for that! She has her graft!' Now listen, Mr. Harrigan—get this clear in your mind. I don't want anything from you, there's nothing you could offer me that I would take. I have money of my own, and as you know, I have my social position—I don't have to come to the Harrigans.”

The little lady was sitting very erect, looking into the eyes of Old Peter with a haughtiness beyond the power of words to convey. “You understand me?”

And she waited for an answer. “Yes, ma'am,” said Old Peter, obediently.

“All right. And then let me mention one other thing about myself—that I'm a woman who can keep her own counsel. I shall not be overpowered by the fact that I have had a private interview with the Coal King. I read somewhere about a Greek philosopher who laid down a receipt for practicing self-control: to walk ten miles on a hot, dusty road, to come to a spring of water, and fill your mouth, and then spit it out without swallowing any; and finally—here's the point—‘Go thy way and tell no man'!”

For the first time there came a really human look upon the old monster's face. But it was only for a moment. “I know what you're after!” said he. “It's that brother-in-law of yours.”

“You are mistaken, Mr. Harrigan. Even though I brought him with me—”

“
What?
” And Old Peter's hands clenched and his lower lip was thrust out farther. “You brought that fellow to my home?”

“You needn't be afraid, Mr. Harrigan—”

“Afraid? Who says afraid?” The old rhinoceros with the scaly hide and the deadly horns glared about him, snorting, scenting his enemy, ready to rush him, trample him to the earth, gore and mangle him!

“Morally afraid of him, Mr. Harrigan,” explained Lucy May, gently.

Old Peter sat up. “I'll not go on with this, ma'am. I'll not discuss that young puppy!”

“I haven't come to discuss him, Mr. Harrigan. Upon my word.”

“What
have
you come to discuss?”

“It's a little hard to make it clear. I might say to discuss my three children.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“My children, and other children—”

“Strikers' children, I suppose!”

“No, Mr. Harrigan, the children of the rich. I have three, and I sit and watch them while they sleep, they're so innocent and lovely, and I think about the world outside—how they have to grow up and go out into it, and there's something there that poisons them, destroys them. I look at my own little ones, and ask, Is it going to happen to them—in spite of everything I can do? Am I going to find myself a heart-broken parent? Shall I have a son who gets drunk, and throws a brick through the window of my home when I refuse to honor his checks—”

Old Peter's face turned scarlet; and the woman stretched out her hands to him imploringly.

“Ah, Mr. Harrigan, we don't change the facts by refusing to mention them! You must know that I know these things—you have publicly cast off one of your sons, and you call the other a nincompoop. And your daughters—they haven't disgraced you, but you've no love for them, nor they for you; they spend your money in things you despise, in empty snobbery. This palace, and the art-junk in it, price-marked and advertised in the papers—”

“It's their mother!” cried the old man, with a gesture of fury. “She's a damned fool!”

“Was she a fool when you married her, Mr. Harrigan?”

“How do I know? What does a man know about the woman he marries?”

The little lady smiled, appreciating an epigram. But Old Peter did not smile; he was on a topic that stirred him to the deeps—fool women, and the fool notions they put into the heads of the young, and the idle, dissolute, addle-pated jackasses they made of them!

[10]

So Lucy May had got her probe into the soul of this lonely, embittered old man, and could ask him why he wanted so much money, which brought him no happiness; why he persisted in forcing his will upon tens of thousands of his fellow-creatures, filling them with terror and hatred, never by any chance with gratitude or affection.

It was the same with industry as with women and children, said Old Peter. You gave jobs and homes to workingmen, but they were incapable of gratitude or understanding, they were self-willed, lazy, turbulent—a prey to self-seekers with glib tongues, to suggestions of jealousy, suspicion and greed. So there was nothing to do but drive them, to keep a strong hand upon them. And he, Peter Harrigan, would do it—they would find they could not cow him, by God—“I beg pardon, ma'am,” said the old rhinoceros, stopping in the middle of his charge.

“That's all right,” said Lucy May. “If we are really going to talk things out, you must be at liberty to swear. But can you honestly be sure, Mr. Harrigan, that there are no real grievances for these agitators to work upon? You see the difference that would make—if there were really something that ought to be changed, and you wouldn't change it, or even hear about it.”

“I've no doubt, ma'am, there's plenty of things they'd like changed. They'd like to get double wages—they'd like to run the industry—”

“They say they don't get their weights, Mr. Harrigan.”

“Well, they lie!”

“You're really sure of that?”

“What rot—to imagine that a concern the size of the General Fuel Company could be run on a system of cheating!”

“But mightn't the bosses be doing it, Mr. Harrigan?”

“I'll not deny that might happen now and then. We have seventy-three properties to run, and many departments in each. I can't get angels for all of them.”

“No, not angels—just men, with men's weaknesses and vices. And you pit them one against another—compare their returns each month, making them compete?”

“Of course, ma'am; there's not a big concern in the country that's not run on that principle.”