Harangue

I

Capuchin returned to New Freedom moving the waters before him. He had in his pocket a blind draft on a New York bank for a sum fifty thousand dollars more than enough to buy the one important newspaper in the state. At the last moment he had had the inspiration to exaggerate the purchase price; afterward he justified it neatly on the ground that the excess was working capital. He meant to put it all in.

With him to New Freedom went Dwind, to write him a banking law, loaned for that purpose by the Lothian College, and Semicorn, to do what should turn out to be best.

On the train Capuchin talked a great deal, all the time in fact, and Dwind became irritated by it. He wished to be meditating.

“How long have you known Jael?” Capuchin asked him.

“Miss Saint-Leon?” said Dwind, in a tilted tone.

“I mean—” said Capuchin, his face slightly crumpled.

“I knew her in college,” said Dwind, leaving a proper interval for the other’s abashment.

But it was much easier to step on Capuchin than to get off. His secondary reactions were positive. Why shouldn’t he call her Jael? Why should others give themselves airs about taking that privilege? He had called her Jael at tea, and he had got more out of her at one stroke than Dwind had got in hit whole life. So he returned, saying:

“A very strange woman, Jael,” as if he had known her from childhood.

“Why do you say so?” Dwind asked.

“I was only thinking,” Capuchin replied, and said no more.

He had been thinking she was strange. It was about the draft. When he went in for tea the first thing she said was, “How much will that paper cost?” With great presence of wit he mentally added fifty thousand and named the whole figure.

“As a loan or as a gift?” she asked.

This was too unexpected.

“As a loan,” he said. “You might take a mortgage only, as the law is, that would have to be reported. I thought perhaps my note would do. Then nobody need know whose money it is.”

“Your note will do,” she said, and began to write the draft. As she handed it to him he said, “What if I had said as a gift?”

“I should have considered it,” she answered.

He held the draft, twisting and looking at it.

“Of course,” he said, “it would not have occurred to me—I mean, I was thinking only of a loan, but if—”

He could think of no way to say it that would not sound rather bald. She frowned while he hesitated, then smiled a little and said they would leave it as it was. And all the way back to Liberty he kept calling himself a fool and wondering at her hardness in that one moment. He almost told Dwind, wishing somebody’s opinion on what would have happened if he had said gift.

II

The capital of New Freedom was a flat, checkerboard town of six thousand people, clinging to a railroad tangent. It had a trolley line, three banks, one eight-story office building, an Odd Fellows Hall, two movie theatres, nine gas stations, electric lights, a chiropractor, a tourist camp, a country club, no trees, three-quarters-of-a-mile of boulevard with lights down the middle and geometrical spaces indicated for botanical effects.

In first appearances there was no sign of a revolution having taken place. Everything was running. People were going about as usual. They seemed suspicious of strangers, however, and that certainly is not standard equipment in the western specification. There were other signs as the view deepened.

At the Chamber of Commerce the publicity man was clearing out his desk, moving, going away to look for another job of boosting. No more funds for that purpose here.

On an easel in the hotel lobby was a notice: “Rotarian Club Luncheon Postponed.”

One at all sensitive to the atmosphere of a bank would have known at once, just inside the door, that the sky had fallen. And one obtuse in such matters must anyhow have noticed the figure of Anx. Plaino standing in the window of the First National, twice life size, thus magnified by the rage of Jeremiah that was on him. In the other window—the First National was on the main corner with two plate glass windows—in the other was a tombstone, chiselled as follows:

Scarred to the Memory
of the
Freemen’s League
Born with a post-dated check.
Now gone to find its redeemer.
Died (blank)

Against the plate glass, to be read from the outside, was this singular communication to whom and all concerned:

     When the date is filled out on the bottom of that tombstone any man willing to work may borrow money at this bank on his experience and character. Few will have anything else to borrow on. As we started with nothing, so, when the time comes, we can begin all over again. Until then—

Yours truly,

ANX. PLAINO.

This asthmatic old cedar was a landmark on the prairie. His trunk was twisted, his bark was rusty, the law of his growth was run; and yet he was strong, hard in the roots, inclined against the wind. In tenacity he was fanatical. He had put his bank’s assets deep in the salt and was there to stand siege of any length. No compromise desired. His loan window was shut and padlocked.

III

Capuchin had wished his absence to be treated with dignified mystery. Only the governor was supposed to know where he was or when he should return. Nevertheless at the station, besides the governor, were fifty or sixty men, mostly members of the legislature, each one impatient to get his recognition; also two hundred or more curious idlers. The instant he alighted he was surrounded. Many hands were outstretched, some holding papers or waving them to catch his eye. There was a confusion of voices. To all of this he was deaf and blind. Pointing to the name on the end of the railroad station he said to the governor: “Why hasn’t that been changed?”

“They say they won’t,” the governor answered.

“Who says they won’t?” Capuchin shouted. “Give them twenty-four hours or we’ll change it ourselves. We’ll pass a bill to make them elevate their tracks. Tell them that. They won’t, eh!”

Then while brushing himself with his pocket broom he began to shake hands, but with an absent, exasperated air. He stopped and beckoned the governor to come close. “Don’t put anything like that in writing,” he said. “Understand? Intimate it. That’s enough.”

The governor nodded, winked knowingly, and made off. He walked as one does in a furrow, lifting one foot higher than the other, loosely.

Capuchin had forgotten to introduce him to either Dwind or Semicorn. He had forgotten them in fact. He looked around for his bag, which someone had already taken up, and started for his office. The distance was only two squares and he was an hour making it. As he silenced the importunities of one by saying, “All right, all right. We’ll see about it,” or “Fine idea! Bring it to me when I’m not so busy,” and pushed a few steps on, another would break in and again he would stop. One read to him a long typewritten treatise on single tax, and simply could not be stopped. Capuchin put the paper in his pocket. Another had a bill for free seeds, another a bill for gas and fertilizer to be distributed by the state at cost, another a bill to abolish the State Agricultural College on the ground that it had the capitalistic view of production.

Everyone seemed to know that he had no hours, no habits, no time at all, and that the way to get his attention was to dangle an object before it. If it was an interesting object he could not resist the impulse to examine it; and to hold his attention it was necessary only to keep the object moving, until a more interesting one got interposed. Then he turned to that one, forgetting the other instantly.

A voice behind him said, “D’j’u see the speculators boosted wheat two cents?”

Off he went at once on the economics and ethics of grain speculation, treating it not as a subject but as an object. He could see the speculators at their nefarious work. He saw them putting up the price of wheat to discredit him and the Freemen’s League.

Another voice asked, “What are we going to do about it?”

That was a new object. Instantly he visualized the future of New Freedom. The word was integration. He pronounced it as if he had originated its sound and meaning. They were going to integrate the activities of New Freedom, integrate agriculture and industry together, base one upon the other, as it should be, and so achieve economic liberty, spiritual freedom and common prosperity. It had been once like that in a crude way on the farms of their forefathers. Everything they wanted, those forefathers, they raised and made for themselves. The community self-contained. That was it. Farming at the base, then their own grist mills, saw mills, tanneries, boot and shoe shops, spinning wheels, looms, forges, soap kettles, smoke houses. Labor contentedly integrated. Secure from exploitation. Modernly it had to be achieved on a large scale. A whole state regarded as one community. But there was the model in full principle. No speculators. No middlemen. No advertising. No unfair exchange. Idyllic existence realized.

As he talked the object became clearer, even vivid. Much of this he was seeing for the first time. His inspirations came to him in that way, under stress of vocal excitement. And when he spoke in this mood, hearing new and unexpected ideas from himself, he seemed enchanted; a gazing, slightly startled expression played in his eyes.

His office was still where it was at first, in the publishing plant of the Freemen’s League organ. As at last they came to the door his chief organizer broke in with a report on the state of the League, and that stopped him again.

“Go right in,” he said to Dwind and Semicorn. “I’ll be through here in a minute.”

For an hour more he stood there on the pavement, talking, listening a little, making decisions, giving instructions, while Anx. Plaino, as he well knew, was looking on from across the street.

With a dismissing gesture of both hands he broke away and dashed inside. His private office was a room not more than ten feet square. There were two wooden chairs and a sectional bookcase with a hat and some old shoes in it. His desk was half-buried in papers, books, pamphlets and letters that had fallen off all around; what had not fallen of had been slipping the other way toward the center, leaving only a trough or little valley in which he worked.

Semicorn was there alone.

“Where is Mr. Dwind?” Capuchin asked.

“Gone to the hotel,” said Semicorn. “What am I to do?”

Capuchin pressed his temples and covered his eyes, trying to remember everything.

“What are you to do?... Mr. Semicorn... yes.” He looked up, then began dusting his person briskly. “Pending further events, Mr. Semicorn, you will be my fido akatees. That is to say, you will stick around. I need somebody with me all the time. Maybe you can think of a way to keep these people off. You see how it is. I never get any time to think. Come with me now.”

He led the way out through a back door. He was going to buy the newspaper. That he could not forget.

IV

They were still together, fido behaving perfectly, when at nine o’clock that evening Capuchin distinctly remembered Dwind. He was found at the hotel in possession of the bridal suite. He had already dismissed two stenographers and was with weary heroism controlling an impulse to perform a bodily injury upon the third. What restrained him was the fact that he had exhausted the stock. There was not another one in town. In the agony of creative labor he became slightly demented. Afterward he might be very ill and looked forward to it. He was lying deep in a sofa on the back of his neck, one leg drawn up, the other resting on its knee, blood flowing by gravity to the brain cells.

Without greeting Capuchin he complained with the privileged petulance of the sick, “There isn’t a book in your whole God damn town.”

“There’s a library at the state house,” said Capuchin.

Dwind gnashed his teeth and shuddered.

“What book do you need?” Capuchin asked.

“One of those old shoes in your private bookcase. That might be it,” said Dwind.

The place was already littered with books. Every chair had books on it; the bed was piled with them. The wonder was where he had got them. The stenographer was standing, note-book in hand, extremely distraught.

“Read that last paragraph,” said Dwind.

The stenographer read it.

“Delete it,” said Dwind. “No, don’t delete it. Mark it not to go there but in another place when we come to it.... Give me that green book.... Please open the window an inch and a half... from the top.... Thank you.... Mr. Capuchin, either be seated or go away.... No, don’t go away. I need some information. Your constitution is a muddle at the crucial point. You’ve got to change it and I shall have to know beforehand how you are going to do it.... Listen to what I am dictating and you will see. (To the stenographer.) ‘Section nine,’ colon, if you know what a colon is. (Starting as from pain.) Now what!... Inscrutable God, now what!”

It was a loud rapping on the door. Semicorn opened it.

The person who entered was the man from whom Capuchin had bought “The Northwestern Herald” several hours before. His movements were quick and apprehensive; his eyes were like the ant’s and his voice was low and confidential. If he had come to tell them the hotel was burning he would have imparted that information in a guarded manner.

“They told me downstairs I’d find you here,” he said to Capuchin, hardly above a whisper.

“That’s their business downstairs,” said Capuchin. “They know everything. That’s why they run a hotel so badly.”

“I know,” said the ant. “That so, too. It seemed important. I wouldn’t think it professional etiquette not to tell you in time. Still, it’s your own private business I’m meddling with.”

“Tell me what?” Capuchin asked.

“Unless of course you meant to suspend the paper,” said the ant.

“What is it, man? You’ll back into yourself if you are not careful. What is it?”

It was only that when the editorial men of “The Northwestern Herald” learned to whom the paper had been sold, as they did at once, though it wasn’t meant for anybody to know for a day or two, they walked out in a body—the managing editor, all the subordinate editors and all the reporters, save the police reporter who was drunk. There was nobody there to get the paper out, and it was already past nine o’clock.

Having disclosed this extraordinary secret, and in very few words when he came to it, the ant let himself out of the door, closed it gently, and was gone.

Capuchin took up his hat.

“Just a minute,” said Dwind, with a faint, imperious gesture of his wan hand. “I’m under no contract with this one-ring circus. I’m serving it for nothing and all I ask is the courtesy of your attention at this point. I might still be standing out there in the street for that matter. If you are not interested in this thing, neither am I.”

“Could it possibly wait until morning?” asked Capuchin.

“Not possibly,” said Dwind. “If it waits until morning I shall be gone.”

Capuchin was distracted. He was in haste for the banking law. He should not know where else to turn for that piece of Greek. Moreover, if Dwind should go back in a tantrum, thinking he had been ill treated, the effect might be disastrous to further relations with Jones Street.

Turning suddenly he asked, “Mr. Semicorn, did I hear you say or did somebody tell me you once ran a newspaper.”

“I got out an I. W. W. sheet in Seattle for a year,” said Semicorn.

“Good!” said Capuchin. “You get over there and take charge until I come. Only for a few minutes... Now then, Mr. Dwind. Pardon me. What do you say is the matter with the Constitution of New Freedom?”

“‘Section nine,’ colon,” said Dwind to the stenographer, beginning to dictate.

Capuchin did not see the point when it came. Dwind, with suffering of patience, explained it to him; and when he could not help seeing it he began to demur on the ground of political expediency. For some reason he could not clearly state, he did not wish to amend the constitution. The question was how to get public funds into the bank. Capuchin thought it could be done by statute—by a simple law. Dwind said it had to be in the constitution. So they argued it, both insisting. Disputation intoxicated Capuchin, made him slightly delirious, so that he became insensible of time and place. Dwind’s vitality was amazing. He lay perfectly inert, using only enough physical energy to make his words audible and to play with his glasses in a scholarly manner. Holding his mind to the point, he defined it over and over in the same words, with a feeble, expiring voice, but with a doggedness that in the end wore Capuchin down.

“All right, Mr. Dwind, a-l-l right,” he said. “We have to play with your sticks or go home.”

Then he looked at the time. It was two o’clock. He remembered Semicorn, “The Northwestern Herald,” the situation there, and set off in haste to see what had happened, expecting the worst.

What could Semicorn have done? No assistants, no editors, one drunk reporter. Probably there was no paper.

As he came within sight of the building he was relieved to see it lighted. At least they were trying. Coming nearer, he heard the press running. A truck stood at the curb receiving bundled papers from the mailing room as if everything were normal. This was too good.

It occurred to him then that Semicorn was a very reckless young man. What if he had filled the paper with his violent I. W. W. notions! Capuchin’s idea for the paper was to face it about gently. It was an important property with a good deal of influence upon public opinion in the state, especially conservative opinion, and that was what he wished to reach. He had even thought of not bringing it over openly to the Freeman’s League, holding it neutral instead, until some crisis occurred. None of this had he said to Semicorn.

Restraining an impulse to snatch a paper from the mailing room and look at it, he ran up the stairway to the editorial room on the second floor and arrived there breathless, in a panic.

It was one large room full of dimness and tranquillity. The dimness was an effect of the lighting, which was individual to each desk, under green glass shades. The tranquillity, like a convalescense, was that which settles in a newspaper office when the last form is closed, thirty is on the hook and the night’s deed is done. The telegraph operator was locking up his typewriter. Seven men were sitting at small flat-top desks, smoking and reading the paper—seven besides Semicorn, who was at a roll-top desk in the far corner with his head down, writing.

Capuchin fumbled at the latch of the railing gate, let himself through, and hurried to Semicorn’s desk.

“You got her out,” he said. “Mr. Dwind kept me there forever. What’s it like?”

Semicorn handed him a paper and went on writing. Capuchin sat down with it at the nearest desk, looked at the front page, at the back page, then ran through it nervously and stopped at the editorial page. All at a glance as it should be. The news was displayed in the usual manner. The headlines were in the conventional style of verbless obscurity. There were two editorials. One was about the weather and the other was on the need for a city park.

“Where did you get these?” Capuchin asked, pointing to them.

“Found them already in type. Left over,” said Semicorn.

“Good!” said Capuchin. “I was afraid——”

“Yes,” said Semicorn. “I know what you were afraid of.”

Capuchin regarded him with new interest. He was not such a reckless young man. On the contrary, he was remarkably self-possessed. Almost too much that way.

“It looks like a fine job, Mr. Semicorn. A very neat performance, all facts considered. I’m wondering how you did it.”

“Standing on my head,” said Semicorn.

Capuchin looked around the room.

“Where did you get these men?”

“Three from the composing-room. The rest I picked up.”

“Picked them up,” said Capuchin. “They were standing on the galleys, like the editorials, perhaps. Where did you pick them up?”

“They were men I happened to know,” said Semicorn.

“Here in this town? But you were with me all day.”

“Two I met in the crowd that came over from the station with us,” said Semicorn. “You were too busy to notice us.”

“I see,” said Capuchin. He surveyed the seven silent men, all smoking and reading. Two were within hearing; they seemed not to be listening.

“Men like yourself?” he said, regarding Semicorn in a significant manner.

“More or less,” said Semicorn. “A lot of them out here.” Seeing that Capuchin was uneasy he added: “They’re all right. Because they’ve worked on I. W. W. sheets like I have is no reason they can’t do a regular job. Most of them have.”

Capuchin dropped that subject and turned again to the paper. This time he went through it carefully and saw at the top of the editorial page a line of strong black type he had missed before: “Lafe Semicorn, editor.”

He was hotly displeased.

This was not self-possession in Semicorn. It was a bold stroke. And the advantage went with it. How should he undo it; that was, provided he should wish to undo it? Editors cannot be changed every morning like the date line. To take the name down would make the paper ludicrous; but to leave it there would be to accept the young man’s audacity. There was no middle way. His displeasure increased with the difficulty. Semicorn, who had been watching him, came and threw one leg over a corner of the desk.

“I thought we’d better tack a name to the masthead,” he said. “I didn’t suppose you wanted yours there.”

Capuchin stood up and brushed himself carefully all over before speaking.

“I have only this to say, Mr. Semicorn.... No, of course, I didn’t want mine there.... I have only to say this. You are stepping strong. You are stepping very strong, Mr. Semicorn.”

Semicorn was silent. It was necessary for Capuchin to speak again. “But I’m fair to say it was a good journeyman job. That stands up.... Are you at the hotel?”

“Not yet,” said Semicorn. “I haven’t had time.”

“You’ll find a room there. Please come to my office at nine. Then we’ll talk things over.”

“A l l-r i g h t-sir,” said Semicorn, easily and equally, as one sir to another.

V

It did not occur to Capuchin to wonder why at 2:30 A.M., with nothing more to do for the paper, seven men continued to sit at their desks, silently reading. He would have been astonished to see what they did as soon as he was gone. They gathered about Semicorn, all with one shrewd expression of triumph. One placed his two hands on Semicorn’s shoulders from behind. It was a gesture they all understood. Another placed his hands in the same way on the shoulders of that one, then another upon his, and so on until they were in line, very close together. A word was uttered, and they began to march in the prison lockstep. They marched round and round between the desks, intoning in deep grisly voices the following impishness:

Bull of the woods
Bull of the woods
Pull the big prayer
     (Shout) OH!
Bull of the woods
S-s-s! S-s-s! S-s-s!
(Soft, ironic steps to the three hisses.)

Bull of the woods
Bull of the woods
Step on the air
     (Shout) OH!
Bull of the woods
Hi! Hi! Hi!
(Loud feet to this line.)

Bull of the woods
Bull of the woods
Hat in the sky
     (Shout) OH!
Bull of the woods
G-n-u! G-n-u! G-n-u!
(Dead feet to three hollow groans.)

Bull of the woods
Bull of the woods
Tree is found tied
     (Shout) TO!
Bull of the woods
S-h-h! S-h-h! S-h-h!
(Furtive feet.)

A scene more weird than sinister, representing the humor of wobblies. A wobbly is a member of the I. W. W. Those letters stand for International Workers of the World.

They stand also for adventure, vagabondage, the truant life, combat, the stone of David, ganghood, sharing, love of destruction, outlawry, secret power, signs and cabals.

These are values and attitudes that lie close to the wayward spirit and belong naturally to youth. Imagine a fraternity of men in whom the spirit of youth has not been over-thrown by self-discipline and wisdom and who for that reason are unable to make the commonplace adjustments to reality; imagine again that they are conscious of their maladjustments and propose to make society over in accord with those values and attitudes of youth. There you have an engaging picture of the I. W. W. In that aspect it is or was a romantic order, peculiar to this country notwithstanding its grand big name, and one that could not have come to exist anywhere else in the world.

Presently of course it becomes complicated in many ugly ways.

In youth, where it is a measure of years, the love of destruction, the lust for combat, the impulse to lawlessness, all those memories of an immature race time, seldom produce any serious consequences. Knowledge and experience are lacking. Men in the same case of spirit, with the knowledge of adult experience, may and often do become dangerous. Infantile minds with full brute power. They translate the phantasy into facts of violence inimical to the peace and comfort of others. Then forcible repressions, reprisals, fear, hatred and crime.

The first intention of the I. W. W. was to organize the unskilled labor of the country. Workers in construction gangs, gandy dancers, riggers-up, lumberjacks and harvesters—industrial nomads who sleep in bunks and carry their belongings. This kind of labor had been neglected by the craft unions. Or it was that the great labor organizations consisting of federated craft unions had been unable to get hold of the unskilled workers. Naturally so. Men do not wish to be organized with the stigma of an unskilled status. This is contrary to the American spirit. They want to rise in the world. But it cannot be said to them that their hope is in rising, for that is to say they are low in the scale to begin with. It is difficult, you see. The craft unions, jealous of their own advantages, had nothing worth while to say to these people. What the I. W. W. leaders said to them was:

“All labor is alike. All wage earning is slavery. Let us organize as slaves, rise, destroy the boss and be free. This is war! Class war! The employer and the wage slave have nothing in common. They are enemies forever. In one big union of all wage slaves we shall have the power to ruin capital simply by withholding our hands, by giving the least for the most, by secret acts of sabotage. Thereby we destroy private profit. When we have destroyed private profit we have destroyed the wage system. When we have done that we may take the means of production into our own hands and the world is set free.”

This creed gave the unskilled a sense of union, a vision of power and a wild crusading errand. One thing more. It gave them a feeling of pride in their status of inferiority, which under this doctrine was an artificial status, a condition wickedly imposed upon them by the capitalist class. This feeling came through in their songs, one of which was “Hallelujah! I’m a Bum,” and in the names by which they were pleased to admire themselves, for example, Wobblies. It amused them to be undignified. All the greater was the offence they gave to the oppressor; so much the keener was their fancy of power.

The I. W. W. creed spread very fast in the lumber camps. First there. That explains many of its metaphors. The boss of a lumber camp is called bull of the woods. Later, of course, bull of the woods comes to have a general meaning. It means any boss whatever, anyone possessing the authority to allot tasks and direct men at labor.

It spread rapidly throughout the west. Its appeal to the self-conscious unskilled worker was very strong. That was not all. Because of its romantic basis in the rebel spirit it attracted irreconcilables of every type. The true hobo who had never had anything to affiliate with before and was thrilled by this loose garment of importance. The tramp printer, or, that is to say, surviving examples of that historic species, he whom words and words hath made a little mad. Newspaper men in a state of must. The restless, the failures, the defiant of whatever kind, cast off by society’s centrifugal process of riddance. Stray geese. Wild geese. Men half-solitary and half-gregarious. Unable to live either within the conventional frame of society or altogether outside of it.

In this distress they invent a theory. They are not wrong. Society is wrong. They will make it over. This vague notion of purpose saves them from the utter loneliness of the outcast, and their feud with what is becomes their bond with one another.

The token of this is a red card, representing membership in the one big union that shall overturn the wage system, abolish the slavery of unwilling toil, make all men equal and set the world free. A little more. There must be some revenge. This is human. The boss shall not get off so easily. No. They will put the boss to work. Another song: “When the Whistle Blows for the Boss to Go to Work.”

The red card went far and thin. The order was never important in point of numbers. But as you might suppose, it was militant and vocal. It devoted more of its resources to propaganda than any other labor organization ever did. It had members who could write and talk. Well, all fanatics can write and talk, even the illiterate, and often with surprising effect.

What was the good of all this feeling that was in them of inferiority exalted and become mighty if they could not express it? They expressed it in newspapers of their own and in violent speech-making. True, men going about with a credo like that, propagating it with intent to be offensive, would get into trouble with the authorities. All the better. That was what they liked most.

When their evangels were seized on the streets of a capitalist town and clapped into jail or when one of their newspapers was suppressed, they organized what they called a free speech fight. Word would go out to all the I. W. W. offices, “Here is a fight. If you have any loose Wobblies send them to it.” There were always Wobblies loose, and at this call they would rush to the scene and talk their wildest, on purpose to get themselves put into jail. The idea was to overwhelm the jails, which in many instances they did. It was something to be doing, it was advertising, modern style, and it was fun. Such fun! and taken always so seriously by the intellectual radicals of the east, as for instance by the company in Jones street, that it became their foremost activity; and continued until the western municipalities became at length as wise they ought to have been at first, so that instead of putting the Wobblies in jail, there to be entertained at the taxpayer’s expense, they fanned them out of town. That was much less fun. Often the tramping was rough.

Well, Semicorn and his seven, doing the lockstep at 2:30 A.M. in the editorial room of “The Northwestern Herald,” were all red card men. They were vocal organs of that fraternity. All of them had been in prison for free speech, and all of them were more or less trained in newspaper work. Three, including Semicorn, had served as editors of I. W. W. papers; the others had sometime worked on regular papers as reporters, sub-editors and editorial writers. All of them could write in a coarse, salty style, best of course when their emotions were acting, that is, when they were attacking something by the name of system. Semicorn himself wrote very well. Like most of the others he had two languages. One was the language he talked, especially when excited. It was full of strange idioms, vulgar, ungrammatical. The other was the one he could write.

It was by no means an incompetent crew in the craft sense. Semicorn’s account of how he had got it together was mostly true.

It will be recalled that Capuchin, on meeting Semicorn for the first time at Jael’s house in Jones street, was moved suddenly to invite him out to New Freedom and suggested an editorial job for him there. Several hours later when Semicorn said he accepted the invitation Capuchin had almost forgotten it. This was notice to Semicorn of Capuchin’s character. He understood him perfectly. Always to be taken provisionally. Nevertheless he felt sure that an editorial job would develop and that was what he wanted; he was so sure of it that he persuaded two red card men to go with him to New Freedom. They were on the same train. Two more appeared, as he said, in the crowd at the station. That was luck, but it was not strange, since New Freedom, hitherto very hostile to the Wobblies, now became a warm sanctuary for them.

On arriving that evening at the “Northwestern Herald” office to take charge until Capuchin should come, the first thing he did was to look to the situation in the composing-room. There, among the printers, two more red card men revealed themselves. These he transferred to the editorial side. Then they were seven.

And at this moment they were exulting at having entrenched themselves. What would come of it? Not one of them had the faintest idea. They might find themselves in the street tomorrow. But whatever came of it, it was fun. So, in that humor, they were hanging the bull of the woods before going to bed.

Semicorn took three of them with him to one room in the hotel. They won it by lot. The others slept in the “Herald” office.

VI

Capuchin rose early the next morning, came at eight-thirty to his office, and was soon fuming under the notion that Semicorn was tardy. Having made a pretty clear guess as to what had happened, he was really worried about the paper. You do not pick up a staff of seven men at nine o’clock in the evening as a gift of Providence. There was some canniness in it.

He knew the Wobblies and understood their ways. Generally speaking, he liked them. When they began coming in numbers to New Freedom, attracted by the Freemen’s League fight, he hired some of them for his canvassing organization—to sell the League, as he always said. They were effective enough, yet gave him a great deal of trouble by getting their propaganda mixed up with his. Several he had been obliged to dismiss for that reason. Not that he objected to their propaganda, only that it was not League propaganda, and that alone he wished to spread by invariable words. He believed the repetition of one idea very important. The dismissed Wobblies were sore, naturally, and made some ugly remarks about repression of speech. However, he handled them carefully and no enmity arose openly.

They understood him, too. Once for a year he had been mayor of a small western town where they came to stage a free speech fight. He met them with a permit, and said: “Denounce anything you dislike but the army. I don’t care about the army myself, but there’s a camp of regulars out there a few miles and they are a rough, touchy lot. That’s all. You can’t get yourself put in jail here for anything you say.” That spoiled the fun.

Yes, he liked them personally. They had much rebellion in common. But here was another figure of facts. The paper. He was in the absurd position of having got it away from the enemy on the extreme right only to let it fall into the hands of these reckless and dubious allies on the extreme left. Sure, they had no shadow of right in the case. Still, it would be no easy matter to get them out. They were in house, on the rug; they had nothing to lose and they loved any kind of uproar.

Semicorn arrived promptly at nine o’clock. As he entered, Capuchin made believe to be deeply engrossed in some papers on his desk. Semicorn seated himself, rolled a cigarette and waited.

“Sit down, Mr. Semicorn,” said Capuchin. Then he looked up. “You are already seated, Mr. Semicorn. You have a way of seating yourself.”

Semicorn made no reply to this, nor did he betray any reaction whatever. He sat there gazing steadily at Capuchin, still waiting, as if nothing had been said. His countenance was square, plumb and innocent, set with blue eyes and touched with color just a little too high to be a true mark of health. Not an impassive face. On the contrary, sensitive; and yet astonishingly impenetrable.

Until that moment Capuchin had not decided what he should say. When he spoke again his voice was combative and his words came hissing through his clenched teeth.

“I like you, Mr. Semicorn,” he said. “I don’t like you, Mr. Semicorn. That brings us to the third point. You squeeze me, Mr. Semicorn. You will admit that you squeeze me. Suppose I say, ‘Mr. Semicorn, I have decided to make you editor of the “Herald”.’ What will Mr. Semicorn be thinking? He will be chortling and saying to himself, Tm already editor of the “Herald,” in blackface type.’ If I say, ‘Mr. Semicorn, I’ve decided not to make you editor of the “Herald”,’ what will Mr. Semicorn be thinking? He will be thinking to himself what a hell of a row he and his Wobbly friends can make about getting out. It’s like trying to put out the cat. I have the cat by the belly. That’s a bad way to have it. Look at me with a free speech fight on my hands in New Freedom! That’s what you would try to make of it. I know you.”

This was all so pat to the truth that Semicorn smiled.

“It’s when you smile I like you,” said Capuchin. “Now listen. I know Wobblies. The trouble is they can’t play any tune but their own. They play that one wrong. Each man sings it to suit himself. Very bad for the tune. That’s why you get nowhere. Free speech is all right in matters of personal opinion. But where you’ve got a practical purpose in view you might as well have free trombones in a band. Take these workers of mine, selling the League all over the place. I tell them what to say. They are drilled in it. They are not permitted to add one word of their own. And it works. It works like water on a stone. Now take the paper. This is practical politics, understand. I was thinking I’d keep it neutral for a while. A big gun in the brush. That’s impossible since your name has appeared on it. All right. We’ll bring it straight over to the League with a roar. Everything for the best. But it’s got to be a League paper, not an I. W. W. paper. It’s got to sing the League tune and no other. I know how far it’s safe to scare people, and that’s never as far as you’d like. Remember, Mr. Semicorn, I don’t know you. I assume you are competent to run the paper. Assume it. You did a good job last night, except—well, never mind that. But you’ll have to run it as I say, and promise, or we’ll have our fight now and get it done with.”

“That’s clean,” said Semicorn. “Now I’ll tell you how I see it. To begin with, I’m Wobbly clear through. Maybe I’m cracked on it. Anyway, that’s where I live ‘n’ no other place. I’d squeeze you or the Freemen’s League or God Almighty for the I. W. W. Do you get that?”

He was cool, thoughtful.

Capuchin, leaning forward on the edge of his chair, nodded.

“And we all sing that tune by ear,” Semicorn continued. “But since you’ve put it the way you have, this is how I see it, as I was going to say. For a piece of the way we can all ride together. We’re going the same direction. As far as that is that, we can ride together; I’ll run the paper exactly as you say, if you leave me there. All square. No tricks. And when I think we can’t ride any further together I’ll let you know in time. How’s that?”

“Mr. Semicorn,” said Capuchin, rising and putting out his hand, “I’m glad to meet you.”

That was settled.

VII

Semicorn was in fact a most reasonable young man, under a riding agreement, as was to appear almost at once.

Finding after all that the constitution need not be amended, Dwind finished the banking law and went to bed. Capuchin sent it the next morning to the governor with instructions peremptory. The instructions were that the legislature was to suspend all rules and enact it immediately.

Late in the afternoon Semicorn called him on the telephone.

“News from the capitol,” he said.

“Good!” said Capuchin, all of a sudden feeling his part. He was the engineer of great events. He was as one sitting at the hub of a vast wheel of change, controlling its movements, receiving reports from every point of the circumference. Here was a new use for the “Herald.” Department of intelligence. Semicorn had got this. He was the right man there.

“Yes, Mr. Semicorn,” he said. “What is it?”

“Your bank bill was beaten. The legislature killed it.”

That was all; and it was true.

What had occurred was grotesque. Capuchin’s messenger, who happened to be a person the governor detested, walked into the official presence unannounced, delivered the bill and the instructions about it, and walked out again, flicking the ashes of his cigar on the official carpet.

The governor said to himself, “Huh! Who does he think I am?”

Then he said to himself, “I’m the governor of this state.”

Never until this moment had he related himself egotistically to that fact; it was a strange, accidental fact. He walked about, saying it over and over in wonder. “I am the governor of this state.” He began to think what it meant. He could call out the militia or declare martial law. And he said again, “Who does he think I am?” this time with the emphasis on he, meaning Capuchin himself.

But he feared Capuchin. There was the bill on his desk. He was obliged to act. Calling his clerk he said, “Tell Hemstead and Swanson to come up here.” Hemstead was Speaker of the House; Swanson was President of the Senate.

When they appeared, the governor said to them: “Here’s a bill from Capuchin and he says suspend the rules and pass it. That’s all I know about it. Take it.”

The governor’s ego malady communicated itself to Hemstead and Swanson, who in the same way had been so far too bewildered by arriving suddenly on the public stage to become conscious of themselves as actors upon it. Now each one said to himself, “Who am I?”

It somehow got into the air. What the governor did to them they in turn did to the legislators, who were told to pass a bill they could not understand and to ask no questions. Each legislator asked himself, “Who am I?”

The rules were suspended, the bill was read, and the vote was no. Then the legislators resolved themselves a recess in order to grumble. They grumbled all the louder because they were not sure of what they had done and felt guilty and uneasy.

Fifteen minutes after receiving Semicorn’s message Capuchin walked in to see the governor.

“What’s happened to the bill?” he asked, in an Adam-where-art-thou tone.

“I sent it down right away with your instructions on it,” said the governor. “Why?”

“I hear they’ve killed it,” said Capuchin.

The governor was scared. He had never dreamed of a result like that. Forgetting who he was, he got up and went himself to see. When he returned he was out of breath from running up the stairway.

“That takes down anything,” he said. “They did kill it, deader than a snake.”

“Get them up here,” said Capuchin. “All of them.”

They straggled in, edged in, pushed one another in, one crossed the threshold on tip-toe and half a dozen followed in like manner, thinking it was etiquette. Two or three lurched in with a specious air of pugnacity. Hemstead and Swanson came last, as befitted their dignity, to show they could not be hurried.

A curious assortment and here at its worst from awkwardness of stage fright and embarrassment. It represented both the least and the best the League could do. Most of the folkmotes had sent their strongest men. In several cases, however, they had nominated candidates in a spirit of waggery, not expecting them to win; and others had been elected for no better reason than that they needed the job. Two members of that legislature could neither read nor write. Of parliamentary procedure they had no sense whatever. And of course they distrusted the few survivors of the over-turned order who tried to show them the way. There was some snickering during the suspense, until Capuchin began to speak.

“We’ve dropped a monkey wrench in the gear box,” he said, speaking gravely. “The governor ought to have told you.”

“I ought to of! I ought to of! I didn’t know anything about it,” said the governor.

An inarticulate murmuring began among the legislators. Here and there a voice crystallized. That was it. What the governor just said. Nobody knowed a blame thing about it. They wasn’t voting machines. Maybe it was wrong. What then? A new animal it was. Couldn’t make nary head nor tail out of it.

This was a kind of situation Capuchin could handle perfectly. His tone was familiar, conversational, authoritative, and it included them. They were uppermost in fact. It was their bill, not his.

However, it was his fault in one way. He should have told them about it beforehand. That was to say, he should have had the time. But he was obliged to do many things at once. Particularly, just at this time, he had been up to his neck in new hay. It was something they would like to hear about. He had got control of “The Northwestern Herald.” Tomorrow they should see. It would come out for the League, heart and fist.

Now about the bill. They didn’t understand it. Was that the trouble? Well, hear from him a secret. Neither did he understand it. He was not a banker. In fact, they had not a banker among them and thank God for that. Yet it was necessary to have a state bank in order that they should be able to create and control their own credit instead of buying it at ten per cent from the vultures, such men as Anx. Plaino. He had thought about this a long time, and then had gone to the Lothian College of Social Science in New York for aid. Did they know what the Lothian College was? It was a school on the people’s side—a school to teach the people precisely those things the privileged few had made so much mystery of, like finance and economics—a school to tell people what they could do, not what they couldn’t do. From the Lothian College he had borrowed a famous expert, had brought him to Liberty expressly to write that law. They would find him at the hotel, in bed, spent, sick, from the strain of writing it in haste, and all for nothing. A token of his interest in the people’s cause.

By this time they were all repenting and anxious to get back and pass the bill. He detained them to say how the intellectual radicals in the east were watching them, how the success of their experiment would change the face of society, and that the towers of privilege were quaking. They must remember this, and never do anything in pique to make one another ridiculous.

“Now wait,” he said. “This kind of emergency may rise again. I mean the need to pass a law quickly because the situation requires it. A law maybe that you cannot understand, even one that I cannot myself explain, in detail, except to say what it will do. Nobody understands everything. It’s a complicated world. Lots of things you have to take on the other fellow’s word. You don’t understand what the doctor is doing to you, do you? But you pay him to do it. Pick the right doctor. That’s the way. Now I think of something. Do you see this?” He pointed to his necktie—a red one—and began taking it off. “The governor will keep this,” he said. “Remember what it looks like. When the reading clerk down-stairs wears this tie you may know that what he is reading is our stuff, guaranteed. That’s our medicine, even though you can’t read the prescription.”

That amused them. What ill feeling was left went off in laughter. And of course they passed the bank bill at once.

Late that evening Capuchin went to the “Herald” office and asked Semicorn what kind of news story had been written on the incident of the day.

“Two,” said Semicorn, handing him the manuscripts.

One was a complete narrative of the facts, including Capuchin’s talk to the legislators. The other was a brief statement, in effect that the legislature had enacted a law authorizing a state bank; the law and the bank’s charter followed, and there was no mention of any mishap.

“That, of course,” said Capuchin.

Semicorn nodded.

“While we’re on this subject,” he said, “I mean, finding out what’s news ‘n’ what ain’t ‘n’ what to suppress, here’s another item. You’ve got a Russian Communist up there in the legislature. He’s heard they socialized women in Soviet Russia and he’s introduced a bill to do it here.”

“I know who that is,” said Capuchin. “Don’t print it.”

He said this without looking at the copy Semicorn held out to him.

“Suppressed,” said Semicorn, pleasantly, tossing it aside.

“Mr. Semicorn, we needn’t be so frank with one another,” said Capuchin. “Suppressed is a—ah—a bad word. A very bad word. Besides, it only means not to print.”

Semicorn grinned and Capuchin smiled.

From the railing gate Capuchin looked back. Semicorn was as he had seen him the first night here, head down, writing. “A most reasonable young man,” Capuchin thought. Yet there was somewhere in his mind a reservation. He kept looking. “Too reasonable,” he thought. To that he added, “But honest,” and let the gate slam.

VIII

There will never be a complete history of the next four years in New Freedom. The formal records, such as they were, have been scattered, lost, destroyed. The emotional records are interesting, but, alas! untrustworthy.

No two persons agree as to, first, what happened; secondly, why it happened. Nor is there anywhere a clear view of what was meant to happen. There is no such view in the after-light; there was no such view at the time. Ideas of communism, ideas of state socialism, ideas of proletarianism, an idea of a kind of idyllic existence under the theory that men are naturally good and wise and sympathetic, artificially made wicked and selfish—all of these ideas revolved in one confusion. At the center of it was Capuchin, acting.

Others deliberated, thought how and why and to what end; what ruled him was a compulsion to act. The use of a new day was to start a new thing. His wheel had to be kept turning, faster and faster. That it should fly apart was inevitable by a physical law. So perhaps the conflict of theories had after all nothing to do with the sequel.

As that approached he passed under the delusion of being himself the portent. The New Freedom idea was Capuchin. As he grew tyrannical his followers became fanatical. The idea was propagated in other states and went very far. He began to dream of power—national power, world power. The Napoleonic mentality is much more common than we know.

As to his character, there were two irreconcilable opinions: one, that he was in fact honest and did nothing with himself in view; the other, that he was temperamentally and morally dishonest, with the ego motive uppermost. In these opinions people were not divided as you might suppose—friends on the one side and enemies on the other. No. Some of his bitterest enemies believed he was honest; some of his closest friends said he was not and were his friends still, for no reason they could ever explain.

Proofs meant nothing. When he was taken in falsehood or had broken a promise he would say, “Well, of course. But what else could I have done?” Then there was no saying what was right or what was wrong. It turned on a question of intent; and it was almost impossible to believe that the puzzled candor with which he asked that question had not its well in noble and disinterested intentions. You had either to take it so, and say, “That’s Capuchin,” as if he were somehow exempt from the common assay, or dismiss him brutally as a knave. But you could never be quite sure. Those who denounced him as a knave were all the more scurrilous about it precisely because they were not sure; the verdict required therefore to be emotionally fortified.

His actions were never thought through beforehand. They continually involved him in complicated dilemmas. The Devil is cute. There are situations, as everyone knows, in which, though you are blameless, you cannot escape the sin of duplicity and a sense of guilt. That was the kind of situation that seemed to haunt Capuchin. The perversities of circumstance were forever obliging him to practice subtlety, concealment, misrepresentation of one state of facts in order to protect another; and it was as if he did this against his will, his moral nature bleeding on the altar.

True, he himself created the circumstance. You had to remember that. Again the reservation. Never did he create the whole circumstance—only the beginning of it, releasing and setting in motion forces he could not control. Often, one would think, he did this in the humor of a disbelieving child that opens the forbidden chest to see what is in it or pulls the lever to see what will happen. All the genii he called up were of dual principle, good and bad. They presented the good side first, then turned out badly and left him in the lurch.

His father, also named George, was born in Ireland and trained for the priesthood. On the day when he was to have been ordained he embraced God’s other intention and then migrated to the United States with his lovely, wonder-eyed bride. His purpose was fixed and he pursued it directly. It was to lose himself in the west.

For livelihood he turned his hand to the nearest thing, which was newspapering. Successively he owned or edited thirteen newspapers, all but two of them in small mining towns. After his marriage he turned infidel. Afterward, not before; probably therefore as an emotional defence in the guise of an intellectual conviction. He professed a deep scorn for success, conceived a rage against industrial civilization and held classical education in contempt, or much of any education got out of books. Yet he was himself a brilliant scholar.

In religion his wife went her own way, which was a believing, devout way, not very zealous. Sprites were as real to her as the trees and shrubs. She saw them, and all of her children were afraid of the dark. They were nine. The family was desperately poor and never owned a house. This was because small newspapers pay badly; it was also because when one did pay the profits were swallowed up in mining stock speculation. Its existence was a series of happenings. Its memories were of feasts after famine, of famine again, of sudden up-rootings, of arriving at new places, once in the middle of the night at a place where there were no lights, and they stumbled miles through the dark on a mountain road, holding hands. The girls were encouraged to marry; the boys to get out on their own. When the mother died the youngest was sixteen. She had seen it through. In the coffin with her the father buried a manuscript on which he had been working for twenty years. Then he went to live alone in the mouth of a canyon, with no pencil, no paper, no book of any kind, and died there in meditation.

Young George was the third boy, the runt of the progeny, the most imaginative and resourceful of the nine. His first job was in the composing-room of a newspaper, at the age of fourteen. From typesetting to writing was a short step. Besides, he had his father’s knack for it. At twenty-four he had a newspaper of his own. It failed. Then another. That failed. Next he became editor of an established paper in Nevada. From editorship to politics is a shorter step than from typesetting to writing. He got himself elected mayor of the town. That was where he had his experience with the Wobblies.

Naturally he was an emotional radical. How he came to be such he never knew. Given his history, anyone else would know. He got it with his blood.

Like his father he held a low opinion of material success; with the same contradiction, he had tried several shortcuts to fortune. Never did he gamble in mining stocks. From that form of collision with luck the family has been injured deeply; there was a fanatical prejudice against it. But he had promoted two irrigation schemes at a time when there was a craze for converting worthless desert land into gardens of fabulous fertility. They failed. The bondholders lost their money; the settlers lost everything. They never got the water. The cost of bringing it to them turned out to be prohibitive. Capuchin lost his time. He had nothing else to lose. Nobody accused or suspected him of fraud. Too quick an imagination. Too little reflection on the facts. That was the trouble.

His heart went out to the stranded settlers. Weeping with them, he denounced the bondholders for wanting their money, the engineers for having made bad plans, the contractors for extortion—everyone but himself. Of course if it had turned out differently he might have made a great deal of money. It was after the second of these two land schemes, while he was wandering at large in search of new opportunity, that he found the worn-out newspaper he told them about in Jael’s house. There his career began.

In the New Freedom cast was one other volatile actionist, but of a different and more dangerous type. He foresaw the consequences and intended them. This was Semicorn.

IX

Now to disentangle the principal events, bring them out of the mist and relate them in a coherent manner.

The state bank was the beginning; it was also the end. Capuchin named it the People’s Bank of the State of New Freedom. It got its capital from the state to begin with and the state guaranteed its deposits. For president he chose a man named Parshall, who had a small National bank in a nearby town but was much more interested in politics than in banking. Long before this he had attached himself to the Freemen’s League, believing it would come to control the state, as it had, and thinking it might reward him for his services. His bank was one of the few places where Capuchin had been able to get cash on the League members’ post-dated checks. Parshall cashed them, in fact, until the Federal bank examiner threatened to shut him up.

The League did reward him, though much below his expectations, by electing him to the legislature. He was still hopeful. He did not particularly wish to become head of the bank. Capuchin pressed him, however, and he accepted. Capuchin wanted him in the job because he was a reasonable man.

But to set up a bank you need more than a charter, a sum of capital and a figurehead. You require, besides, organization, personnel, rules, methods, working policies and what not. A very complicated mechanism it is, not so much in principle as in part and detail. Dwind had framed the principles. Lesser and other experts were needed for the rest. Parshall was incompetent even to visualize the problem. There was plenty of banking talent in the state, none of it available. It was either too unfriendly to be willing to help or so willing as to be open to suspicion. No sabotage here.

Capuchin appealed to Jael. Had she this talent in her Lothian College? She had. From the faculty, the student body and the alumni it was picked and sent out to him. Some of it was loaned; some of it was to be retained permanently in the service of New Freedom.

From this precedent a practice developed.

The next problem in the affairs of the bank was to organize a farm loan bureau. Agricultural loans represent one of the separate anxieties of banking. The demand for them was tremendous, and it had to be met. This was the people’s bank. Was it not their own credit the farmers were asking for? But if it were simply dealt out to them on request, as they expected, there would soon be nothing left for other purposes, such as the state elevators and the state flour mill. Here was a dangerous riddle. Had the Lothian College some farm loan experts? It certainly had, for it was taking just then special pains to study the mind of the radical western farmer. So another lot of brains was dispatched from New York to New Freedom, some loaned and some to stay, as before.

Then as the implications of putting a state into business began vaguely to be realized by Capuchin, who himself knew nothing of business on the practical side, he asked for experts in such matter as production, distribution, co-operative buying and selling, cost accounting, management, transportation, price phenomena, construction.

The science of economics opened up to him like a new book, enchanting and mysterious. He drew a chart. At the top a board of advisers. Below, a series of bureaus, one for each department of specialized economic knowledge. These bureaus were to have the last word of wisdom on the subject given.

It should work like this: Take the flour mill. First the state says there shall be a flour mill. That is a question of public policy. Very good. Then it goes to the board of economic advisers. The board calls on the bureau of—of—of what? One has been left out. There must be a bureau of general survey to know every physical fact about the state of course.

Now—the board of economic advisers calls upon the bureau of general survey to say where the flour mill shall be put, then on the bureau of production to say how large the mill shall be in view of the country’s total flour production and probable increase of demand, then on the bureau of distribution to say where and how the flour shall be sold, and so on, until you come to the bureau of construction, which is to build it, and will know of course the latest and most efficient thing in the shape of a flour mill; last of all the bureau of management which is to say how the mill shall be operated. All scientific!

Nearly all of these advisers and bureau heads the Lothian College provided. There was consequently much going to and fro, with never fewer than ten of the Lothian faculty on the western scene either as helpers loaned or as observers, so that Jael at length took a large house in Liberty, furnished and staffed it, and made it a rendezvous and club.

She passed a good deal of time there herself, especially in summer; so did various members of the Jones street company, as guests. There came also radical students of social science, honest seekers of the new way, from all over the country, then from all over the world as the noise spread. Her house in Liberty, where she entertained them all, or where they entertained themselves, came to be referred to as Little Jones street. Customs and manners were the same in both places.

New Freedom’s first year was one of great formations.

The state elevators began to rise.

The flour mill took form.

The Freemen’s League, on money borrowed at the bank, bought three newspapers in other towns and so gained complete control of the press throughout the state. There were no other papers to reckon with, only two or three weak ones, afraid to attack the League and not intelligent enough to do so effectively if they had possessed the courage.

There was a boom in private building, on borrowed money; and the demand for building materials was so great that Capuchin conceived the notion of co-operative lumber yards. He put it through the League, members subscribing the capital with post-dated checks; these were cashed at the People’s Bank.

A chain of co-operative retail stores was set up in the same way.

In the autumn the Legislature voted to build a state meat packing plant and three state creameries.

In the elections that year the League won everything it had not carried before; also it somewhat improved the average character of its office holders, everybody being now very serious.

There was one disagreeable fact, to be mentioned in its right place—that is to say, last. The state itself had borrowed so much money from the People’s Bank to carry on all these new affairs that in order to pay any of it back, to pay even the interest, it was obliged to increase taxation.

In the second year all prospects broadened, though nothing yet was quite realized. The elevators were finished and began to receive grain. However, the true use and benefit of them could not be fairly tested. The grain crop at large was short and dear. New Freedom had the luck to bring off a good crop and sold it out of the fields at high prices. There was no need for much storage; and the private elevator people paid as much for grain as the state elevators paid, sometimes a little more. When they paid more it was supposed that capital was in a conspiracy to discredit the people’s experiment.

The flour mill was completed and about ready to be brought into operation. The meat packing plant and the three creameries were building.

The Legislature voted itself an increase of pay, voted also a subsidy to be paid to the sugar beet growers on the ground that the price they received from the refiners for their beets was unfair; it appointed a commission to report a plan for a ten-million dollar state-owned beet sugar factory, which of course would pay a fair price for beets.

Again to be mentioned last was the aggravation of a cumulative fact. The state’s borrowing from the People’s Bank had enormously increased; the cost of administering public affairs had risen prodigiously. It was necessary to double taxes.

Capuchin tried in every way to avoid this. He had caused the state to offer a bond issue in the east—bonds of New Freedom, guaranteed by the People’s Bank, secured by the thrift and assets of a happy people. But as Dwind had told him in Jael’s house two years before, the east would not touch the bonds. To save the issue from disgrace the People’s Bank bought most of it. That was a stupid thing to do. The strain upon its resources was already terrific.

Nevertheless, the third year was one of ecstasy. For one thing, the idea of the Freemen’s League had begun to sell in an amazing manner outside of the state. The apparent prosperity of New Freedom’s farmers plus the zealotry of Capuchin’s highly drilled body of canvassers made it sell among the radical-minded farmers elsewhere.

It assumed suddenly a formidable political shape. Demagogic politicians were counting it. A member of the United States Senate, big enough to think of himself as a candidate for president, began to make speeches endorsing its aims. All of this gave the people of New Freedom, the Leaguers, that is, a sense of vast importance in their home-made political clothes. They were path breakers to a new time. They had, beyond their own concerns, an errand to go for the common good. A destiny, perhaps; a luminous place in history. The religious projection occurred. That they were performing an economic miracle was not enough to believe. They were overcoming a principle of evil. They became intolerant of doubt and heresy, bigots, fanatics, mystics.

And now Capuchin began to appear in a magnified form before them. In the beginning his contacts with them were all personal, his words with them informal and conversational. Then as creative activities more absorbed him contacts of any kind began to be neglected and that was bad.

Suddenly he got the notion of arranging mass picnics. Leaguers and their friends to the number of several thousand at a time were gathered up on special trains and taken to see the flour mill or the meat packing plant. Everything was free, including the barbecue.

They were treated as masters of all they saw. To the superintendent of the flour mill they spoke as if he were working for each one of them personally. They admired the evidence of their power, ran their fingers through the flour—their flour! their grain! their own mill grinding it!—and were satisfied. At the meat packing plant they saw strings of refrigerator cars loading dressed beef for export to Europe, and were thrilled.

They forgot that they themselves were paying for everything, including the railroad fares and the barbecue. All such expenditures had to come out of taxes. They did not know their flour was selling at a loss for the reason that the cost of making it was more than flour was worth. Nor did they know that those iced cars full of dressed beef often returned as they went away, that is, full, because the product was not sold and there was nothing to do but to bring it back and burn it. Thousands of tons of it had already been destroyed in that way secretly.

It was perhaps just as well they did not know. These were festive occasions. Capuchin invariably appeared before the picnic was over and made them a speech that moved them higher in self-satisfaction. One day he arrived and departed by airplane. This dramatized him properly in the popular sense; it proved what a busy and omnipresent person he was. The effect was so satisfying that he adopted that mode of personal transportation.

In the same way he brought Freemen’s Leaguers and their friends from other states to wonder at New Freedom’s things, so that they might see for themselves what they could do when they had become strong enough to take control of their own. That was advertising; it helped to sell the League afar. Who paid the outsiders’ expenses in and back was never quite clear.

X

And this was the year of the plague. Not a visitation of Providence. Not an affliction of the earth mother nor one of the human body. A disease of the mind. A pestilence of the divine faculty. The common imagination was seized with a speculative mania. These people, whose black beast had been private profit, now all as with one impulse began to chase the bawdy bubble.

The ease with which they had found the capital in the procrastinated form of post-dated checks for co-operative stores and lumber yards was a revelation. It was also a temptation to the instincts of greed and cunning.

Some of the same men who had canvassed the Leaguers for subscriptions to those two authorized projects, now went among them selling shares in mythical undertakings. Shares in a great steel and iron plant, though there was neither iron nor coking coal in New Freedom. Shares in a farm implement factory, in an automobile plant, in a textile plant for converting New Freedom’s flax crop into the finest linen fabrics, in an airship line to carry garden truck daily to markets in the east, mining companies, oil companies, even at last a grain trading corporation to gamble in grain on the Chicago Board of Trade for the people’s profit.

The selling arguments were in a language the Leaguers had learnt by heart. Farm implements to wit. Everyone knew how dear they were, everyone thought the price of them wicked and unreasonable, everyone believed the implement trust made enormous dividends. Who paid those dividends, really? The farmers of course. Why should they? Why not manufacture their own implements and make dividends for themselves? And automobiles. To become little Henry Fords they had only to make automobiles as Ford made them. Then they should have the automobiles and the profit, too.

Post-dated checks were accepted in payment for these shares. The checks were cashed at the People’s Bank. The promoters and canvassers took two-thirds of the proceeds for themselves; from the balance the nefarious expenses were deducted; what was left was not enough to worry about. It was out-right swindling.

In all cases, except as to the mining and oil schemes, the canvassers had letters written on Freemen’s League paper, signed by Capuchin. These letters never specifically recommended the thing itself. What they did was to endorse the general idea of creating in New Freedom a chain of industrial activities that should make the state economically self-contained. Everything for themselves. He was very keen for that idea. It was the idea of integration that came to him suddenly on the street that day of his return from New York with Dwind and Semicorn.

Yet the canvassers used these letters in a way to make it appear that Capuchin vouched for their wares. Afterward, when it was too late, he repudiated the letters, saying they had been got from him in unguarded moments and that he himself had been the worst deceived. This was probably so. At least none of the money fraudulently so taken ever touched him, or if it did the fact was not discovered.

And this also was the first year of lean crops since New Freedom was named. That would have been so in any case. It was New Freedom’s turn to be on the wrong side of the weather. Nevertheless it was true that agriculture had been neglected. The farmers spent too much of their time sitting on the fences talking politics, economics and schemes for getting rich, much in the same spirit, one can imagine, as that in which people after Luther discussed the Bible, having found a free way of their own to the kingdom of Heaven. If the fields of New Freedom looked not as green as usual, why fret about that? Everyone had bought shares in something that was going to bring him big dividends; moreover, at the very worst, one now could borrow money at low rates of interest instead of having to pawn oneself to the 10 per cent vultures.

But the crops were very bad; so bad, that thousands of those post-dated checks, made in the Spring to be paid after harvest, could not be paid. The People’s Bank, having cashed them in advance, was obliged to carry them as loans.

There was a new sound in the land, a sound of murmuring. It was indistinct because it was not informed. Nobody knew the facts. Capuchin himself did not know them; he would not look at them.

The condition of the bank was such that if it had been subject to national law the Federal authorities would have obliged it to close its doors. Yet it went on lending; it could not stop.

Capuchin called upon his economic experts to review New Freedom’s achievements, which they did, filling the League’s newspapers with laudatory essays, all of course in good faith, since everyone was defending his own work.

All news of an adverse character came from outside. Newspapers in New York and Chicago, also eastern magazines, printed much damaging matter about the stock swindling, the wasteful working of the state’s business, the perilous use of credit. These the League’s newspaper denounced as Wall street organs; they had sent their spies to New Freedom with specific instructions as to what they were to find out.

On the other hand, the radical publications of the cast, such as Grinling’s weekly, “The People’s Witness,” went on beating the timbrels and singing the song of praise. These utterances the League’s newspapers printed in full. Nobody knew really what to believe.

The year ended, as each of the others had ended, with one more river to cross. Only this was Marah, indeed; the waters were very bitter, and nothing to heal them with.

Taxes were more than doubled, and this time there was no plausible excuse.

Where were the profits from their own things that were to have made the people rejoice?

One of the largest items in the state’s budget was “Loss from Operations.” No particulars.

The fact was that nothing state-owned had earned a profit; nothing the League owned had earned a profit. Privately owned stores were out-trading the co-operative stores; privately owned lumber yards were competing successfully with those of the League. The private lumber yards sold for cash and locked their gates at night. Those of the League sold on credit and at night people helped themselves, which was even cheaper. Were these not the people’s materials? All of the League’s newspapers were wells of loss. And nobody had the facts. It was not only that the facts were suppressed. Nowhere did they head up. They were scattered, unrelated, lost in confusion.

XI

Jael did not know what to believe.

She had spent the Christmas holidays in Liberty, professedly to entertain a party of eastern friends at Little Jones street; really with intent to resolve the doubts that were rising in her. She saw as much as possible of Capuchin, and studied him; he had never been more confident, she thought. He was communicative on all general matters, vague as to all particulars.

She had the governor to dinner, then two or three at a time all of the principal state officials, and at last Parshall, president of the People’s Bank, who had a fat body and thin legs. His eyes were set high in his head. He made her think of a frog imitating a bird, and depressed her horribly.

Her total impression of them was that of men rushing headlong through a mist, over strange ground. Her uneasiness grew. It was at the rim of her feelings, below the edge of her mind. She could not explain it. If she asked herself whom she doubted or what her misgivings were, she found no answer.

She was walking alone to the station to take a train for the east when she saw a crowd in front of Anx. Plaino’s bank; and she crossed the street to see what was there of so much interest. By this time nearly everyone in Liberty knew her at sight, but there was more than courtesy in the eagerness with which they made way for her at the window. They treated her as a privileged spectator, or as part of the show, and she was conscious of being curiously regarded.

In a pine chair beside the tombstone,—“Scarred to the Memory of the Freemen’s League,”—that Plaino had kept there all this time, now sat a stonecutter, tools in hand, trying not to look self-conscious.

“Look!” someone said, calling her attention to the bottom of the tombstone where the blank space had been left for the year of the League’s demise.

Three numerals had been freshly chiselled there: 1, 9, 1.

On the window glass, to be read from the sidewalk, was a communication. It read:

“This mason will sit here every day except Sundays and legal holidays until the Freemen’s League is a political corpse. Then with one more figure he will complete its mortuary emblem. Meanwhile let every man see to it that his foot standeth in an even place. Yours truly, Anx. Plaino.”

As she went on she got a full view of old Plaino himself, standing in the other window. He had been standing there three years. Figure of prophecy. Augur of disaster, foretelling it by signs its authors could not interpret.

Jael’s first reaction was one of contempt. How puerile! How infantile the people in their curiosities! Hold out to them an image, an image of anything, no matter how crude it may be, and they cannot help staring at it. But hold out to them a thought—ah! that was different. How easily they could help thinking!

What was she saying? People! Well, she, too, had looked. She had crossed the street to look, simply because she saw others looking. Moreover, having looked, she could not get the impression out of her eyes—that image of one sour old reactionary’s verdict on the Freemen’s League. Therefore he was shrewd. The same verdict delivered to the ears would be much less effective. It is easier to forget what one hears than what one sees.

She remembered Capuchin’s first account of Plaino. An asthmatic old man who had never made public speeches and then suddenly developed an oratorical gift under tense emotion and became at Once the League’s most dangerous adversary. She remembered the episode of the horse dander, and thought it very cruel.

Another thing she recalled with acute interest. Only a few weeks before this her most trusted banker in New York had mentioned the fact that she was transferring large sums of money to the People’s Bank at New Freedom, and asked her if she knew anything about it. She knew nothing about its accounts, she said, if that was what he meant. Then he had warned her; he had heard the bank was not in good condition. She had said, “You have been hearing from Old Anxiety, perhaps,” not at all serious. And her banker had said, “Anx. Plaino, you mean. Yes. He is a strange old party. But you will find he is never wrong in his facts. I should be willing to take his bare word on the facts, in any situation, to any amount.”

Anyhow, she could not get Plaino and his absurd tombstone out of her head, and this annoyed her extremely.

A few days later in Jones street, after dinner, when only Fitzjerald, Dwind, Grinling and Miss Lillibridge were present, and Dr. Rabba who was never counted, she surprised Dwind by asking him out of the clear this question:

“Is it possible, Dwind, for an institution like the People’s Bank of New Freedom to fail?”

And she was startled by his reply.

“Quite possible,” he said, calmly.

“Is such a thing probable, though?” she asked.

“Quite probable,” he said. It might have been the weather he was speaking of.

“Why do you say so?” she asked.

Dwind assumed his authoritative manner, speaking in that weary, plaintive voice, which nevertheless had extraordinary power of emphasis.

“For two reasons,” he said. “The first is Mr. Capuchin. That minnesinger! Vessel of imbecility! Shakespearian ass!”

“How long have you concealed these sentiments about Mr. Capuchin?” Jael asked, uncontrollably amused by men in this aspect.

“For more than three years,” said Dwind, which meant from the moment of first meeting him. “The other reason, if you want it,” he continued, “is that nowhere in all that Punch and Judy show is there anybody to say no. The machine is running wild. I mean the bank. They’ve forgotten where the throttle is. If they remembered, still nobody would dare to close it, for that would be to say no.”

This unexpected comment from Dwind was ominous and important, and left everyone silent. It meant that he was preparing a moral alibi beforehand, in case the bank should fail; for he had written the law and could not avoid some responsibility in the matter.

Jael was the first to speak.

“When people take control of their own affairs, take it into their own hands, I mean, how shall no be managed? I don’t see how. They will not say no to themselves. Who shall say it for them or to them? And if one does, or may, that one rules them again, isn’t it?”

With his head tilted back, eyes almost closed, Dwind merely gazed at her down his nose, from a great distance away. Grinling leaned on the table, took his head in his hand, and began tracing a pattern with a spoon on the linen. They were expecting him to bring forth a thought, but at that instant, much to the surprise of the whole company, Dr. Rabba made an unhistorical observation, for him very original.

“Why say no to the people?” he sighed. He said people always in a petting tone, similar to that with which he cajoled his food. “Why?” he sighed again. “The people will do wrong. Yes. They will make mistakes. Yes. Well, and so? They hurt only themselves. They will learn. But we ourselves have this passion to say no for them. We have this passion to rule them. That is why they never learn.”

“Bravo! oh, excellent doctor,” Fitzjerald boomed. “The people are themselves the people. Let them alone. Perfect solution.”

Dr. Rabbba turned red all over his great bald head. He thought Fitzjerald was making fun of him.

“Nevertheless, it is true,” he said. “Once—I am not sure but I think so—once it was so. Once the people were not ruled, and they learned how not to hurt themselves. To say no is God’s business.” He sighed deeply as he added, “And God says it enough. No?”

Nobody answered him. His sigh for a long time was the last sound. Grinling, instead of answering Jael, began talking to Dwind about Capuchin. These two were opposite at the long board, half-way down. Jael looked at Fitzjerald, who was the nearest guest.

“You have never been to New Freedom, Angus.”

“I’m eccentric,” said Fitzjerald. “Moreover, I should be the white Egyptian vulture in that country.”

“Be not so sure,” said Jael. “Your comments might be devastating. They would be, you know. Still, you might have a little look at us. Friendly like.”

“I mean to,” he said. “My magnum opus has broken down. I need to go traveling. Luckily, I’ve come into funds.”

“A death?” Jael asked.

“Yes, though not a bereavement. A very old aunt whom I never saw. The tree is almost extinct. I am the only limb of it left.”

De Grouse came in at that moment; then an anaemic woman who had been on trial all day for disseminating birth control literature and was secretly disappointed at not having been sent to jail; after her a British labor radical and a new communist from Russia. New Freedom had been forgotten entirely for the evening but for a telegram handed to Jael by Miss Lillibridge. It was from Capuchin, to say he was on his way to New York.

XII

Jael was at breakfast alone the next day, about noon, when Capuchin arrived. She had the morning paper propped up before her and was just reading the news that Parshall had resigned as President of the People’s Bank and gone to live in California. Ground, ill health. No successor had been named. There were rumors of dissension in the Freemen’s League, the paper said, and a sense of disillusionment among the people.

Capuchin couldn’t remember whether he had eaten his breakfast or should be hungry. First he said he was not hungry; then he said he was. When food was before him he devoured it angrily in large quantities and gulped his coffee steam first.

He had a somewhat soiled appearance, from having traveled in haste, without all of the necessary things, and was unshaven.

Not at all fastidious as a rule about the way men looked, Jael noticed his unkemptness and was not admiring it, perhaps because he was thinking so well of himself. There was no reason why he should not have taken the time to shave and change his linen. It was not that he had not thought of it. He had, and then decided to appear as he was, with the notion that such carelessness’ was privileged and somehow enhanced his significance as a man of action. He had the vanity to believe it would be admired. Men are not admired of women for the reasons they think nor ever when and as they fancy themselves; always otherwise for different reasons, reasons they never guess, and in moments they are least conscious of.

Never before had Capuchin impressed Jael so unfavorably. It occurred to her that she disliked him.

“Mr. Parshall has left you,” she said, nodding her head at the news.

“It’s out, is it?” said Capuchin. “You do read the newspapers. I haven’t read them.”

Jael’s wit, alert and critical, instantly penetrated this large and silly make-believe of not having seen the newspapers. He had. “Well, he’s gone,” he added. “He’d better not talk. He hasn’t so far. I’ve warned him not to.”

“About what?” Jael asked.

“Anything at all, said Capuchin. “That’s the understanding. He’s a scoundrel at large.”

“Is it serious?”

“It will be serious for him if he doesn’t hold his smoke,” said Capuchin. His answers were short, almost rude. This was not as he had meant the conversation to begin. So he changed it forcibly.

He wished to talk first about Plaino. That old crater had been gathering heat and wickedness for some time and was now on the point of becoming active. A red card printer working in a job office where Plaino was having tons of anti-League matter printed had brought him examples of it. None of it had yet appeared, but when it did they should have their hands full.

“Did you bring any of it along? I’d like to see it,” said Jael.

He had not. She would see enough of it.

“What is it like?” she asked.

“It’s only a lot of immaterial stuff we all know,” he said. “I mean things we know ourselves and don’t talk about. Nothing important by itself. It’s the way he brings it all together. Facts about the mill and the packing plant and so on. Temporary facts such as people make too much of because they don’t understand the difficulties. Naturally you can’t tell them everything—every little thing that happens or goes wrong. You don’t tell yourself everything, do you?”

“I try to,” said Jael.

“Maybe you do,” he said, looking at her and then away. “As I say, it isn’t so much anything Plaino’s got as the way he puts it together to make it look as if we had been concealing our whole back yard.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?” said Jael. “You have been concealing it. You’ve suppressed these facts for fear they would make the people uneasy. Now when somebody begins to tell them it is you are uneasy.”

“Semicorn uses that word suppress,” said Capuchin, irritably. “Suppress! Suppress! What does it mean? There’s no such thing as saying everything, telling everything, printing everything. Why did we get control of the press to begin with? So we could print our own news in our own way. That was why. No other reason. Now everybody says we’ve been suppressing the facts. I don’t like the word. If you leave out the vitals of truth, on purpose, that is suppression. We’ve never done that. We’ve printed what was vital. The truth as we saw it.”

He was becoming unpleasantly excited.

“Well, go on. What more of Plaino?” said Jael.

“He hasn’t started to yet, that I know of,” said Capuchin, “but what I’m afraid of is he will attack Mr. Dwind’s bank. If we got a run on the bank I don’t know what might happen.”

“Mr. Dwind’s bank,” said Jael, repeating him.

“Yes,” said Capuchin, doggedly. “We took it just as he said. We didn’t even read the law, not until afterward.”

“You think Plaino would do that?” Jael asked.

“Do that! He would do anything. He would start a run on his own bank if he thought that would hurt the League.”

“Well, go on again,” said Jael.

“The day I left,” said Capuchin, “we had a meeting of the directors. I’m not a director, you know. I’m not in it at all, in fact. Only of course I was there. Parshall’s quitting had brought matters to a head. The only trouble with the bank is it needs money. Its assets are good. As the saying is, they’re frozen. That means they can’t be turned into money. They’re very tight for ready money, the bank is. If they had a run on it, they tell me, they couldn’t hold out an hour.”

“Yes,” said Jael.

Her coldness, touched with irony, damaged his style and caused him to do his worst. She was forcing him to the point, not as he intended coming to it, but in her way.

“That’s all,” he said. “It’s what I’ve come to see you for. If you could take over some of those assets for cash, those farmers’ notes and unpaid checks, some flour mill bills, perhaps,... or, if you didn’t like that, a deposit in cash would help.... It’s all perfectly good, understand.”

“I’ve already put a lot of money there, you know,” said Jael. “My bankers have warned me it isn’t safe.”

That statement set him off on a wild philippic against Wall street, bankers, privileged interests.

Of course they would tell her it wasn’t safe. They were in a conspiracy to ruin the bank. Any other bank in the same circumstances would have only to take its frozen paper to Minneapolis, Chicago or New York and get bright, new Federal money for it. Could the People’s Bank do this? No, indeed. Why? Because the U. S. Treasury, the Federal government itself, had joined in that conspiracy.

Jael let him go.

When he subsided, she said: “On one condition. The condition is that I may send auditors of my own to go over the books of the People’s Bank. On their report I shall decide.”

This was the most unexpected thing she could have said. Capuchin was injured, estranged; also, as she could see, alarmed.

“There are no honest auditors,” he said, beginning to walk rapidly to and fro with a singular gesture of the arms, working them as if he had dumbbells in his fists, with an upward slant. “They will make a bad report,” he said. “They’d have to. They are prejudiced to begin with. I wouldn’t trust one of them with my hat.”

She was firm and silent.

“How long do you suppose it would take?” he asked, presently.

“I could send them today,” she said. “I should follow them myself and be there to see they lost no time.”

Suddenly he veered around.

“Good!” he said. “Plenty good!” He shook hands with her twice. “Everything’s all right,” he added. “There’s nothing that can’t be properly explained, unless maybe some of Parshall’s work, and he’s gone. He was really...! Well, I’d hate to tell you. A bad worker. That’s all.”

With that he went.

Jael sat musing.

Putting it on the frog. Dwind unloading on Capuchin. Now Capuchin unloading on Dwind and Parshall.

She was disgusted. The specific facts as they afterward developed surprised her not at all. She had already a complete sense of the situation. Dwind’s revelation the night before followed by this interview with Capuchin left her in no doubt of the disagreeable truth. The New Freedom experiment was in desperate trouble.

Two questions were before her. One was a question of immediate measures. That could not be settled until she had got a report on the bank. She called to Miss Lillibridge to get her banker on the telephone, the one who had warned her; she told him what she needed. That night six expert accountants departed for Liberty, with a formal letter from Jael to Capuchin saying these were the auditors and please to let them see the books.

The other question was complicated. What of her personal relation to New Freedom?

Her pride was in it. The pride of the Lothian College was in it. But it was much more than a matter of pride. That she had got a great deal of money involved in it gave her no anxiety. She had parted with the money freely, in the belief that it was promoting a social service. This had been the first outlet for her wealth that was both adequate and satisfying. It fulfilled her desire, which was to employ it in a manner to justify her father’s acquisition of it to begin with and her custody of it afterward. All of her other works, the Lothian College included, scarcely absorbed her annual income. Here she was putting forth the principal, not merely the accretions, and that gave her the feeling she wanted.

She was not insensible of the praise bestowed upon her by the illuminati nor of the public esteem in which she was held, even by many who disbelieved in the things she did. Yet in all matters a realist, she knew her own motives. They were not unselfish. The chief one was to redeem the Saint-Leon millions from the stigma they bore when she received them. In this she had succeeded.

Now she asked herself if she would give the whole of her fortune to save the New Freedom experiment. After hard and honest reflection she answered herself, saying, “Yes, provided—” Yes. Provided what? Provided the experiment was sound. Was it? There was the root of the question. Grave doubts tormented her.

To say nothing of the money, the best radical intelligence there was had gone into it. The Lothian College people had gone so far in their work with Capuchin as to make a scientific study of the people by racial groups in order to conduct the propaganda efficiently. The Swedes, for example, loved to be entertained in a joyous manner; the Norwegians preferred long speeches, to which they would listen stolidly for hours on end. So, picnics for Swedes were not like picnics for Norwegians. They had taken pains to that degree. They had said in the beginning—Dwind, for one, had said it, as she distinctly recalled—that here was the perfect opportunity to prove the case of the people against capitalism.

Well, they had had the situation entirely in their own hands. No assistance had been withheld. And what had they done with it?

A bank full of frozen assets.

Unloading the blame on one another.

Afraid of one asthmatic old man who was threatening to tell the facts.

Afraid themselves to tell the facts.

Suppressing them in the people’s own newspapers.

Had they been too intelligent? too clever? What had they left out? Was it wisdom? innate knowing? a way of reference above intelligence? Or had this disappointment been inevitable in human contradiction?

She had been trying to make Fitzjerald talk about it, his view being always so contrary; but he had turned her off, except once to make an oracular observation, which was, “You cannot dispense with the principle of growth. You may know all about a tree and yet you cannot invent one.”

Lately she had submerged herself in history. Was there any clear meaning in the historical process? She saw this process as an endless chain turning on a wheel of which only a segment of the upper rim was visible. People rising, rising, rising, as far back as one could see. Rising always to overthrow something, overthrowing it, then recreating it again, not invariably in the same detail but in the same principle. Seeing it in this way became a phantasy.

It occurred to her that if only the people had the wit to walk slowly backward against the direction of the wheel they might stay up forever; instead, they looked back and stood still and were forever carried on by the endless chain, rising with it suddenly to the plane of view, crossing that plane in an arc, disappearing again to the right.

They knew what they wanted. To be free!

From the moment of appearing out of obscurity at the left to the moment of disappearing into it again at the right, all the way through the arc, they were chanting: “Freedom! Freedom! We know a way to be free!”

She could not make out whether they were fast to the chain actually or merely behaved in that way under a fixed delusion of locomotion, or of progress, from a sense of movement in time, unable to distinguish between that and a movement of their own making.

From this reading, which was voracious and absorbed her whole imagination, she emerged with no convictions. Only much more doubt.

Formulas for freedom such as formerly she had not examined critically now started echoes in her mind, echoes of the song she heard in her phantasy of the wheel, the rim, the endless chain turning upon it—the song, “Freedom! Freedom! We know a way to be free!”

What were the Russians saying night after night at her board? That song again.

She was not horrified at anything the Russians had done to set themselves free. The fact that troubled her was that they had smashed the Romanoff rule only to bind themselves to a dictatorship that condemned dissenters to exile and death, limited liberty more than it had been limited before and repressed free speech, saying what tyranny always says, “This is for the good of people.”

At this time she made a random note of her mind.

“When people talk of freedom,” she wrote, “do they know what they mean? I do not. Where is this freedom? In nature? There every living thing must obey the law. The penalty for revolt is sudden death. People cannot be economically free. They have their bodies to keep. They cannot be spiritually free. Fear is their bondage. Fear of God or fear of the unknown. I, myself, now that I walk alone, thinking my own thoughts, am I free? I deliver myself from the opinions of others and find myself bound by the tyranny of doubt. One may believe a false thing and still act. One who doubts is spread taut between yes and no. That one cannot move at all, not even in agony.”

On reading what she had written she said, “Sounds like Angus. Even more so.” Then she tore it up, remembering as she did it the words of her strange father, that she had his mind and it would be her curse. Was that why she tore it up? She asked herself. No. She went back. First the writing. Next the association of it with Angus. Then a memory of her father; his words about her mind. But just beneath and much more poignant, though unacknowledged, was the recollection of what he had said at the same time about the kind of man she ought to marry. One with red hair. One like Angus. And it was that had made her tear the piece of writing up. Symbolic gesture, dismissing a troublesome thought. “I think too much,” she said, drifting the fragments slowly into the waste basket.

What did at last determine her attitude toward New Freedom was nothing that occurred in her mind. It was feeling. A feeling of personal responsibility and a feeling of loyalty to the Lothian College people. They did believe earnestly in what they were doing. Such sincerity, even wrongly applied, could not be wasted. It was bound to prove something. And the least she could do would be to stand by them.

XIII

Meanwhile in New Freedom that tide which overcometh every tide before was rising fast.

When Jael arrived at Liberty, three days behind her bank auditors, Anx. Plaino was not in his window; vibrations of him were in the air. There had just been a collision in the public square between men handing his pamphlets out of sacks and persons calling themselves Leaguers who were in fact—at least the leaders of them were—Wobblies aching for a fight. Plaino’s men had been driven off. Then he had placed them on the steps of his own bank. That was where Jael saw them. She passed them on purpose to receive a pamphlet, which she read as she walked.

The big title was in red ink:

“THE TRUTH IS SORE”

Beneath it a statement in italics, in effect that since the Freemen’s League controlled the press and had refused to print his matter either as news or as advertising at full space rates he was obliged to resort to this method of reaching the public with the facts. The word facts in bold capitals. This was the first of a series of pamphlets. They would be mailed as they came forth to every voter in the state, for the U. S. Mail was still neutral; they could be had also in any quantity on request at the bank. On the back was a photograph of the tombstone; below it a prediction that the missing numeral at the bottom of the stone would be filled in the morning after the next election, in November. “This is not a fact,” he was careful to say. “It is a prediction. Everything else in this pamphlet is fact.” Fact again in capitals.

It was light on the old man’s character that nobody doubted his facts. If he said it was so it was. And not one of his facts was ever disproved. The controversy turned on their meaning and interpretation. Everyone wondered where he had got his information. He knew more about the affairs of the state, the People’s Bank and the League as one whole in three parts than any other person inside or outside, and his sources never failed him.

In the first pamphlet he confined himself to the state owned and co-operative business ventures. He told what the flour mill had cost, which was more than the people knew, and how that cost compared per unit of capacity with the cost of the great flour mills in the country. It was nearly double. Then he told what it was costing to make flour in that mill and what the loss was per barrel. The state would save money to shut it up. He told the same story of the meat packing plant, and gave the exact dates on which thousands of tons of good dressed beef had ben brought home and burned. There was similar treatment of the co-operative stores and lumber yards and of the state creameries.

To Jael’s immense relief there was not a word about the People’s Bank. She wondered at this, and wondered even more after she had read the preliminary report of her auditors. It was available that evening.

The bank was hopelessly insolvent. Moreover, its insolvency involved the finances of the whole state. The state itself was insolvent, in this way. Under Dwind’s law not only the state but also the political sub-divisions, meaning counties, townships, school districts and towns, were required to keep their money on deposit in the People’s Bank. The largest of these public funds was the school fund, and it was gone. It had been loaned away to farmers, to the Freemen’s League, to unknown persons, to the state for its unprofitable business undertakings.

In the bank’s vaults were reams of long over-due post-dated checks, some that might become good in time, thousands that were utterly bad. The books were in a state of chaos. Liabilities appeared as assets.

On warrants representing people’s grain stored in the people’s elevators more money had been loaned than the grain was worth; the price had fallen since it went into storage, and no one had either the authority or the courage to make the farmers sell it and pay off the bank.

There were some blind accounts. One was Account X. All the bank’s bookkeepers knew about this was that Parshall had said it was all right. Account X owed the bank more than a million dollars. Then there was a loan of a million-and-a-half to the Louisiana Company, secured by promissory notes. This, the bank’s bookkeepers said, could be explained only by Mr. Capuchin.

And there was almost no cash in the till.

She sent one of her auditors off to California to question Parshall about Account X, and waited for Capuchin, who had been reported out of town but was coming in to dinner.

He arrived in a humor that was new to her. She was expecting him to look worried. Not at all. He was inflated. Everything about him, his gestures, his edges, the contortions of his mouth in talking, seemed slightly exaggerated; and he had in him some secret which he held to his own advantage. Jael wondered. Was he so infatuated as not to realize the seriousness of the situation? Or was he acting?

It was both. Under attack he experienced an ecstasy of exalted innocence. All his deeds, whatever their character, stood before him gilded in the light of perfect intention. The view intoxicated his mind. It was not enough that he himself should see it. He expected others to see and admire it. Yet it was very frail. In some bare corner of his mind he was aware of its frailty, else he would not have been always so quick and jealous to defend it, would not have defended it with such subtlety, would not have ben so inflamed and unforgiving toward those who declined to accept it.

This was the state in which Jael now observed him. And the impression she got of him that he was acting a rôle was at the same time true. That was another thing.

He had been in a panic about the bank. He could not answer for the effect of its failure upon his Leaguers. His interview with Jael in New York a few days before had been most unsatisfactory. For a moment, when she was so cold and named the condition, which was to see the books, he had thought everything lost. Then suddenly he had veered round and accepted the condition heartily. Here the perfect illustration of one way his mind worked. Not to have accepted her condition would of course have been fatal. On the other hand, there was no reason to suppose that a disclosure of the bank’s condition would not also be fatal. He did not deliberately choose. What prompted him to accept was the precognition of an idea that was yet to appear. He felt it somewhere. For hours afterward he struggled to get hold of it. Then it came to him.

The red card printer who brought to him the advance copy of Plaino’s first pamphlet had said that the second one, not yet in type, would be an attack on the Lothian College people. This information had not impressed him at the time. In talking with Jael he had forgotten to mention it. Now suddenly, in relation to the bank, it became very important. It made it possible to hang the bank on Jael and her Lothians. She would find herself publicly identified with it; her reputation would be bound up with it. Therefore she could not afford to let it fail. She would feel obliged to stand by it. Thus, Plaino had played into his hands.

There was the immediate difficulty that Plaino’s next pamphlet would not be out for a month whereas the bank required help at once. Therefore, it was imperative to know what was in that next pamphlet in order to confront her with it. Ever since his return to Liberty he had been praying, bribing, cajoling the red card printer to get him a look at it, and only this day he had succeeded. The printer had smuggled out the manuscript. It was all that he could have wished it to be.

Now coming to this interview with Jael he had rehearsed himself carefully in what he should say and how he should say it.

Jael was surprised that his first words were, “Well, what do you think of Old Anxiety’s blunderbuss,” when he should have had the bank on his mind, as it was on hers.

“It doesn’t matter what I think of it,” she said. “What are you going to say about it? How does the ‘Herald’ answer it tomorrow?”

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

He was helping himself to food and affected an absent manner toward the subject. “That hasn’t been decided,” he said again, having his dinner before him. “I thought we had better confer, talk it over together, so as to present a united front when we came to it.”

She understood that he was talking carefully, with some purpose in view, and waited.

“I’ve seen what’s to go in the next pamphlet,” he said.

She said nothing, though he gazed at her steadily in a way that made her uncomfortable and resentful.

“It’s an attack on you, the Lothian College, all your people here,” he said.

She noticed that he said your people here.

“Have you got it with you?” she asked.

“No, it isn’t in print yet. I’ve seen the printer’s copy.” She waited. “Very interesting,” he said. She waited. “Facts I knew and put out of my mind and some I didn’t know myself,” he said.

“As accurate as the facts in his first pamphlet?” Jael asked.

“So far as I know,” he said. “As to the facts here, he’s got them all straight. How Mr. Dwind was loaned to us by the Lothian College to write the bank’s law and charter, that Lothian College people to the number of forty are in state jobs here, costing nearly two hundred thousand a year, and so on. Also the fact that it was your money bought the ‘Herald.’ I can’t imagine how he got hold of that. He has been bribing people in our midst. Some of our own.”

He became much interested in his food again.

“Anything else?” Jael asked.

“Yes,” he said, pretending to be somewhat reluctant. “He attacks the Lothian College itself. When he comes to that I cannot say how straight his facts are. You would know. And all about this house. He’s got that. A lot of information about the people who’ve been here visiting, especially anarchists. We know what an anarchist is. Most people don’t. The name scares them.”

Now she began to see where he was heading out. Putting her on the defensive.

“What about the Lothian College in particular?” she asked.

“He calls it a school of anarchy,” said Capuchin. “He likes the word. He knows how people take it. Well, that’s nothing, is it? But he’s gone and got hold of some books written by members of the Lothian faculty. Prints extracts from them. One a book against marriage. One against private ownership of land. We’ve got to remember we are dealing with people who get married and own land. I’m afraid that stuff will do us a good deal of harm. Oh, yes, and he reprints from the New York newspapers several years ago the story of the president of the Lothian College publicly at a dinner taking a woman to live with him unmarried.”

“You think that will hurt,” said Jael, commenting.

“I know these people,” he said. “I know about how far you can go with them. The land question alone. You can’t talk about state ownership of land around here, not even in theory. Everybody’s got land. The man who wrote that book is here in one of the state bureaus.” He finished eating. “However,” he said, “everything will come right if only we can keep the bank on its legs.”

Jael was very angry. Putting her and the Lothians on the defensive in front of himself!

“What do you know about Account X?” she asked him, bluntly.

“Oh, you’ve heard from your figure worms?” he said.

“I thought you might be able to tell us something about Account X,” she said, “while we are waiting to hear from Parshall.”

“How are you going to hear from Parshall?”

“I’ve sent a man to see him. They said at the bank he was the man to ask.”

For a moment his eyes wandered.

“I strongly urge you to stop him,” he said. “If Parshall is stirred up he may talk. If the bank begins to be talked about that’s good-bye.” He was thoughtful. “I can tell you all there is to know about that account,” he said. “The money was lost in wheat speculation.” Seeing her look of amazement, he explained. “The first mistake was to lend the farmers too much money on their grain. Then the price began to fall. The Chicago speculators were putting it down. It was Parshall’s idea that we could beat them and put the price back to where it belonged. The motive was all right. We were doing it for the farmers of New Freedom. But the idea was bad. It turned out that way.”

“And the Louisiana Company. What do you know about that?” Jael asked.

This time his eyes did not wander. He was expecting the question.

“They would be suspicious of that,” he said. “I suppose they told you I carry the Louisiana Company around in my pocket. That may appear to be so. It doesn’t belong to me. I have never so regarded it. It’s for the League when the time comes to speak of it. Maybe I ought to have told somebody. I wanted to prove it first. It’s in the gristle yet. You need some imagination to see it.”

He had been speaking injuredly. Then, as he saw it all clearly again, his imagination burgeoned and his voice lifted. The Louisiana Company was all for grace and redemption. It would repay ten-fold every kind of loss the state had suffered. It owned and held under option a vast tract of land in Louisiana, on a river, with a wonderful site for a power dam. The plan had two features. One was to develop hydro-electric power with which to manufacture at very low cost nitrogenous fertilizer, such as New Freedom needed badly, and distribute it to the people without profit. The other feature was a winter colony in the warm south. Every New Freedom farmer and his family to have a bungalow and some irrigated acres there. A refuge from the rigors of the northern winter climate and the means to carry on agriculture through the whole year. Change, besides; the excitement of change. Joyous migrations twice a year to keep them happy.

She questioned him about the land. He had never seen it. The engineers had reported on it. She should see their reports the next day. Others had seen it. All reports were excellent. It was cutover timber land, he admitted, yet to be cleared of the stumps. Nothing had been built or begun. There was only the land and the idea.

This chimera astonished her even more than the explanation of Account X. She was speechless. There he sat, still glowing with the vision, visibly emotional about it. His eyes were hot. His hair, a little long, was brushed straight back over his ears, showing his baby white temples in which the blue veins throbbed. As absurdly meritorious as a school boy from having recited a grand piece. And he was saying, “It’s not to be talked about yet. I’ve denied that I have anything to do with it. That’s necessary.”

Another irrigation scheme, in fact. This very good reason for its not being talked about was unknown to Jael. She had never heard of his two disastrous ventures in irrigation.

For a while neither of them spoke. He did not wish to ask what she had decided to do about the bank, if anything. He wished her to say, and she did.

“My auditors tell me the People’s Bank is insolvent,” she said.

“I knew they would tell you that,” he said.

“I have made up my mind,” she said. “There are two conditions. I will help the bank provided, first, a new board of directors shall be named, to include three practical bankers, and provided, also, that I shall approve of the next president.”

Capuchin spoke slowly, as if he were thinking out loud. “As to the directors... yes... they are named by the legislature. It is in Mr. Dwind’s law that way.... As to the president... he is elected by the directors. That also is according to Mr. Dwind’s law.... I don’t see—”

“I’m not asking you to see,” she said. “I’m laying down conditions. The bank is in my hands, remember. I can shut it up.”

“How?” he asked. And she knew instantly that he had been waiting for her to make this threat. His manner was victorious. “How?” he repeated.

“By demanding the money I have there,” she said. “The bank cannot pay me. It would be obliged to say it was insolvent.”

“You would not dare,” he said.

That was the point he had been coming to all this time. It was true. She had made an empty gesture; also, she had underrated his cunning.

“Or,” she said, “I could simply do nothing and let it shut up in its own way.”

He rose from the table.

“Even if you mean it now,” he said, “you will change your mind. Not on my account. Not that, of course. Not for the League, either. For your own sake.”

That was true. She knew it was true as he was saying it; she had not faced it herself.

“Think about it some more,” he said very affably. “I’ll come in tomorrow evening.”

They shook hands. This was a rite he never omitted, or if he did it was a sign of enmity.

Jael’s emotions were so intensely disagreeable that she became physically uncomfortable. She was ashamed of him and ashamed of herself. “A stultifying experience,” she thought, reflecting on the interview as a whole. Her impulse was to wash her hands or change her clothes. Then she did a thing she had never thought of doing. The resolve formed itself unawares in her mind. It startled her a little, yet she did not pause to examine it.

Capuchin had not been gone more than five minutes when she set forth, walking rapidly. It was a still, cold night. The moon was full. Her mind became tranquil and knew perfectly what it was doing; yet she had not considered what she should say to him and was vaguely wondering how to begin as she rang Anx. Plaino’s door bell.

“Come in!” a voice said. She heard it faintly. It was a loud voice to be heard at all. There were double doors at the entrance vestibule and double windows around the house. It was a square brick dwelling, ugly and unpretentious. Plaino had been a widower for twenty years. He had no children and lived here alone with two servants, a man outside and a woman to keep house. The woman had gone to bed.

The doors were not locked. Jael let herself into the vestibule, which was dark; then into the hall, which was dimly lighted. Plaino’s hat, muffler and overcoat were hanging there on a polished steer’s horn; his rubbers were beneath them. The outer peeling of him, grim and censorious, creased by his daily activities, shapen by his personality. He himself was in a room to the right and called again, “Come in!”

The door was ajar. She pushed it open, and saw only the top of his head. He sat in a Morris chair with his back to the door, reading the Scriptures. Without looking, he said a third time, “Come in!” now with some impatience in his voice. Jael walked around and stood facing him. He took off his glasses, looked at her, and said, “Oh!”

She noticed that he wore about the house an old gray coat out at the elbows. In this state of relaxation he looked very old. A pastel portrait of a woman, probably his wife, and “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence” were the only two pictures in the room.

“I’m Jael Saint-Leon,” she said.

“I know you,” he said. “Push the papers off that chair and sit down.”

She felt a little awe of him. Of old men she knew almost nothing and a man of this kind, old or young, was outside her experience. It had occurred to her to mention the fact that her banker in New York knew him and spoke most excellently of his character. When she came to say it there seemed no point to it. It was unimportant.

She said, “Mr. Plaino, do you know the condition of the People’s Bank?”

“I do,” he said, “and so do you.”

“You know it perhaps much better than I do,” she said.

“Much better,” he said.

“Are you going to attack it?” she asked.

He looked at her for a long time through his glasses, holding them at arm’s length. Then he said, “‘For the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth. A woman shall compass a man.’”

“I didn’t realize,” she said, “how abrupt that question would sound. The reason I ask is this. I want to save the bank if possible. I feel some responsibility for it. It isn’t a question of money. I am willing to put the money in. You know what the question is. I had thought of asking you to take charge of it, or to form a committee of bankers for that purpose, but that seems not to be feasible. There are difficulties in the law. The legislature names the directors and the directors name the president. What I have come to ask you for is advice.”

He kept looking at her through his glasses, holding them far and near. His hands were uncommonly long and thin, hardly wider than the thickness of his wrists. It was not there his strength lay.

“I am going to attack it,” he said.

“Even though I tell you I am willing to help it through.”

“The daughter of David Saint-Leon does not want advice,” he said, thoughtfully. “That is not what she comes to me for. She wants information. They have been telling her she must save their bank. They have been telling her that unless she fills its till again with money it will fail. They speak to her in dread accents of a run. I tell her better. They walk in lies. ‘T’aint that they are afraid of. Their fear is that when they have no more money to lend the people will turn against them.”

“I must be very stupid,” said Jael. “Somewhere I lose the point.”

“This is not a bank like any other bank,” he said. “If it were, Anx. Plaino should not attack it. Never. Shall iron break iron? ‘T’aint natural. ‘T’aint in the writing. What do they say? They say if a run started on their bank they couldn’t last an hour. That’s true. But it can’t happen. When we speak of a run on a bank what do we mean? We mean the depositors get scared and come all at one time and demand their money back. If the bank can’t give them their money it fails. This bank has no money. Its till is empty. Yet I tell you if that fact were published in the newspapers, still there would be no run on the bank. Why not? You want to know why not? Why, because the people already have the money. The bank does not owe the people. The people owe the bank. Can you imagine people coming in a panic all at one time to pay the bank what they owe it?”

“But the bank does owe a great deal of money,” said Jael.

“Not to the people,” he said. “That’s the riddle. Now follow me. To whom does a bank owe money? Any bank? To its depositors. You know that. Very well. But who are the depositors in this bank? Not the people, mind you. You are one. I think you are the only private depositor it has. You are not going to demand your money back, are you? You are not going to start a run on the bank, are you? Who are the other depositors? They are the counties, the towns, the townships, the schools districts, the state itself, all required by law to keep their funds on deposit there. Those funds are gone. The bank is liable for them. Follow me. To whom is it liable? Not to persons. A county is not a person, is it? A town is not a person. The state is not a person. They are political forms, these depositors, with no blood to run cold, no organs of fear, nothing of their own to lose. They are not going to make a run on the bank. Don’t you see what has happened? The counties, the towns, the state—they have been collecting taxes from the people and putting the money—the people’s money—into this bank; and the bank has ladled it out to the people as if it were fable honey. When the people come awake to the fact that it was their own labor, not fable honey, they were beguiled to consume in a delirium of extravagance they will destroy the bank. You cannot stop them. Nobody can. It will be an act of political sanity. Meanwhile there will be no run on the bank. Don’t let them befuddle you on that point. The people have eaten their honey.”

He was looking at her again in that peculiar way, with one eye closed, trying her first through one lens and then the other.

“I’m greatly obliged to you for giving me this view of it,” she said, rising. She held out her hand. The touch of his was limp. He was already adjusting his glasses to their natural use and looking for his place in the Scriptures, lying open on his knee. He called after her, saying: “Slam the outside door so I can hear it.”

“Good night,” she said.

He waited to hear the door slam and then remembered to say good night.

As she walked slowly home it occurred to her that the old man might have had a subtle motive, namely, to turn her from her thought of helping the bank, for if she did help it—that is, put it in funds again so that it could go on lending—its political power would continue. Nevertheless, he had made it logically clear that its problem was primarily political, not financial. Being a state bank, it was supreme. No outside authority could touch it or oblige it to confess its insolvency. And since there were no individual depositors to come clamoring for their money, it could simply stand there with a grand and vacant stare. The people had already got out everything there was in it. The people were debtors, not creditors. How extraordinary!

Her mind was made up.

XIV

When Capuchin arrived at Little Jones street for dinner the next evening the scene was unexpected and strange to his humor. He resented both the presence of a large company of Lothians and the jollity among them, in which Jael herself was taking part. They were singing an old western ballad that one had found and brought in about a dying miner; and they were improvising musical sounds for accompaniment, from glasses on the table and from an empty copper pot muffled with a napkin and used as a drum.

Jael smiled at him pleasantly, indicated that he was to sit at her right, where a place was ready, and turned again to her friends, saying: “Almost perfect. Now! Once more.”

His displeasure increased. Never had these Lothian people regarded him with becoming respect. Who was he to be treated as one of them? They had not even taken the trouble to greet him collectively. One had said hello; another had waved a hand; Jael herself had not spoken to him. He fumed and ate, thinking how he should like to fire the whole crew out of their jobs; and just as he was beginning to debate the feasibility of doing it Jael leaned toward him, saying, beneath the singing:

“Your Lothians will all resign tomorrow. Having resigned, they will tender their services to the state for one dollar a year. You can take them back on that basis, if you want them. Hereafter I shall pay their salaries myself.”

Before he could answer she turned her attention to the ballad and called for it to be repeated.

Presently again she leaned toward him, saying, with the air of having just remembered, “I’ve stopped the man that was on his way to see Parshall, as you wished,” and gave him no chance to speak.

The singing was followed by conversation, serious, audacious, witty. Jael gave it her whole attention, joined heartily in the laughter, and when there was a sign of its letting down she herself set it off again. This went on for more than an hour, Capuchin becoming all the time more dour and aggrieved, until at last he lost his wits and did what she was expecting.

“What have you decided to do about the bank?” he asked. His tone and manner said also, “This is no time for such frivolous goings on.”

She answered him casually, with her attention divided between what she was saying to him and what the Lothians at that moment were saying to one another. “I’ve decided,” she said, “to do... to do nothing... for a while. Let’s wait to see... what will happen.” Then immediately she seemed to forget him.

For several minutes he sat quite still. Color began to show in his face. He rose from the table, meaning it to be noticed that he was offended, and said good night without offering to shake hands. Jael said good night very sweetly and let him go.

A rage possessed him. He had been treated lightly by Jael and her companions. In the act of disappointing him she had belittled and mortified him. His ego floundered in distress. A venomous worm with its tail afire, striking at anything but itself.

Notwithstanding the casualness of her manner, which was of course malicious, Jael had picked her words carefully. She had not been final, only procrastinating. All she had said was that she meant to wait. It was still her private intention to aid the bank if the situation should desperately require it. This she did not say. To have said it would have defeated her purpose, which was to try both facts and motives according to Plaino’s version of them.

It was Capuchin’s misfortune not to see this. His power of intuition failed him.

Moreover, from the light Plaino had opened to her, Jael’s understanding of the case was clearer than his. Her natural impulse was to be candid in all matters. But she had begun to suspect him. It was quite probable, she thought, that he had not been frank with her. On this one point her suspicion was unfounded. Although Plaino was right, as events proved, his view was original. There were other bankers who did not see it as he saw it. Dwind himself did not see it. Capuchin knew nothing about banking, nor did any of his associates understand it in principle. All of them did honestly fear what they said they feared, namely, a run on the bank; besides fearing, as Plaino correctly said, the political consequences of its being unable to continue making popular loans to the people.

Aimlessly, his mind in hot turmoil, Capuchin walked to the “Herald” office, went to the editorial room and sat at a vacant desk.

Presently Semicorn came and bent himself over the desk, resting his two hands upon it.

“The Dowager Empress has been conferring with Anx. Plaino,” he said.

“You mean Miss Saint-Leon?”

“Yes. She went to his house last night. Did you know that?”

“Yes.... Yes, of course—I knew that,” said Capuchin, lying for his vanity’s sake. He must be supposed to know everything that happened.

Semicorn straightened up, spread his hands in the air, and walked away.

After some restless moving about, twice dusting himself with particular care, Capuchin went over to his desk.

“You run a very fine information service, Mr. Semicorn. I compliment you. A very competent service. I suppose you know what they talked about?”

“Who?” said Semicorn, indifferently.

“Plaino and Miss Saint-Leon, last night.”

“Yes,” said Semicorn, going right on with his work. “I know what they talked about.”

Capuchin hated to ask. It made him feel small. He waited for some time. Semicorn waited, too, and continued reading his galley proofs.

“Well, what?” Capuchin asked. He was extremely irritated at Semicorn for obliging him to ask. Instantly that paltry emotion was swallowed up in astonishment, for with no warning of sizzle or smoke, Semicorn exploded.

His seizures came that way. They were probably as unexpected to him as to others, like attacks of mania or visitation of epilepsy. They were not frequent. For long periods he would go along presenting the character of a man exceptionally self-restrained, meeting placidly, or with a sense of humor, circumstances such as cause ordinary beings to lose their tempers. Then suddenly, with no acute provocation, sometimes for no reason whatever that one might know, he became violently excited. There was in him some principle of inflammability which once it began to act deprived him of self-control. In those moments he lost all sense of fitness and whereness, together with the acquired faculty of speaking grammatically. His voice, at other times pleasant and level, became distorted and high, with a note of frenzy in it; his physical appearance changed. The passing of the paroxysm was as swift as its onset. One instant he would be raving; the next he would be his normal self again, speaking in his natural voice, as if nothing had happened.

At Capuchin’s question he threw down his proofs and blue pencil, rose, kicked away his chair, and tore the green eyeshade off his forehead.

“Defeat!” he shouted. “The people’s defeat! That’s what they talked about.”

“Not so loud, Mr. Semicorn,” said Capuchin. “Not so loud, please.”

“Defeat!” Semicorn shouted again and louder. “I’m telling y’ what they talked about. How do I know? She’s a capitalis, ain’t she? A woman that her own bankers don’t know how rich she is. All her talk for th’ people is bull. Monkey kissing. Not so loud? Not so loud? Who’s going t’tell me how loud? They didn’ say nothing loud. Them that their language is money never talk loud. You don’t suppose they know each other on sight. Maybe they don’t. They’re both capitalis. That’s all you got to know. One night when you’re in bed ‘n’ ain’t looking they come together like evil spirits. Them as know themselves by stink ‘n’ spots. I don’t care a God damn for your Freeman’s League. A billygoat in skirts. I’m riding it like you are because it’s going my way. I do hate like hell to see y’ get sold out in the night by a she capitalis.”

As he began, so he subsided, with the effect of a rocket, only that it shocked the mind instead of the eye. Bringing back his chair, he sat down, adjusted the green eyeshade and took up his work.

“Mr. Semicorn, will you come to my office, please,” said Capuchin.

“When?”

“Now. I want to talk this out with you.”

Semicorn had only to put on his hat. He never wore an overcoat. Neither of them spoke until they were inside Capuchin’s office, with the door locked. Capuchin started to turn on the light, then changed his mind, and they sat in semi-darkness. By the light from a street lamp through the window they could see each others’ forms and that was all.

“I am impressed by what you say, Mr. Semicorn.”

Capuchin spoke in a low voice. Semicorn was rolling a cigarette and said nothing. But he was surprised. He had been prepared to hear that his ride with the Freemen’s League was finished. That was what he expected. Unaware of the estrangement between Capuchin and Jael he very naturally supposed that an attack upon her would be deemed an unpardonable offence.

XV

What had happened to Capuchin is easily explained. Jael’s behaviour that evening—her air of indifference, her decision, her unexplained change of feeling—had disappointed him in a crucial manner. His vanity had been trampled. His plans were upset. Above all that he was mystified. Something extremely prejudicial had taken place; he could not imagine what it was. He was groping for an explanation when Semicorn confronted him with the news that Jael had visited Plaino the night before. He was too amazed to see at once the implications of this fact. It was still unrelated, standing there in the center of his mind as an object of wonder, when Semicorn began his harangue.

Suddenly it assumed a sinister meaning. It explained everything clearly.

Semicorn’s suggestion that Jael had betrayed him, the people, the Freemen’s League, fell upon fertile soil, for Capuchin’s nature was such as derives a keen morbid pleasure from the fact, or it may be only the suspicion, of having been betrayed. In the first place, as the victim of betrayal, one is confirmed in one’s bad opinion of people. They are more wicked than oneself. Secondly, betrayal perfectly excuses one’s own failures. Thirdly, it excites two powerful emotions—a sense of injury and the passion of self-pity—and so leads directly to the delusion of persecution, which, becoming a mania, is the ideal refuge of the deformed soul. Finally, his ego anger, which at first had no place to strike, now found its relief in a conviction of Jael’s depravity. It fused with his righteous indignation. The same object for both. She had offended him in the personal relation. That was one thing. She was discovered, besides, to have betrayed the people’s cause, and that was treason.

Semicorn’s feelings toward Jael were impersonal, rather contemptuous. She had turned out as he expected.

Plaino was his object. Not that he disliked Plaino in any personal way but that Plaino embodied capitalism, stood forth as its monstrous figure; and capitalism he hated with a destructive, insane passion.

What hatched between them, those two, brooding in the darkness of Capuchin’s unlighted office, was a reckless understanding. Capuchin with his cheeks in his hands, his elbows on the edge of his desk, his chair tilted forward on its two front legs, talking to the wall. Semicorn sitting solidly in his chair, very straight, his legs crossed, incessantly smoking. The fire of the cigarette made his face intermittently visible in a dull red glow.

The understanding was that the “Herald” and the other League newspapers, all using the same matter, were to attack Plaino without restraint. Semicorn could go as far in that direction as he pleased. Then the next morning they were to announce the state’s farewell to the Lothians—that they were going to resign in a body and that their resignations would be accepted.

This of course might be regarded as a political move, forestalling Plaino’s attack upon them. It had that aspect. But it was also a direct hit at Jael, and lest there should be any doubt on this point there was to be editorial comment on the news, expressing the great relief of the state to be rid of its Lothians, and this was to be followed by specific comment on their disabilities. They were to be represented as theorists, impractical, notorious for disagreement. Their contribution to the cause of New Freedom had cost more than it was worth. And finally it was to be said that the founder of the Lothian College, professing to embrace advanced social theories, was, alas! nevertheless herself a capitalist whose great fortune rested on the principle of private profit. Capuchin undertook himself to write these Lothian editorials and bring them in.

Semicorn returned alone to the “Herald” office. Throwing off his hat, he sauntered to the middle of the editorial room, put his hands to his mouth, yelled “Hi! Hi!! HI!!!,” then turned and walked calmly to his desk. His Wobbly friends rose, followed him and stood in a ring, waiting for the news.

“Leave to shoot,” he said. “Go as far as we like. Will we surprise them?”

He was pulling Plaino material out of a pigeon hole as he spoke. It was ready. He meant to take the “Herald” so far on the first impulse that there would be no getting back, and he did.

Capuchin was amazed when he saw the paper the next morning. As it was past eleven o’clock when he and Semicorn parted the night before, and as he supposed the attack on Plaino would require to be worked up, he was expecting a news item on the Lothians and nothing more.

The news about the Lothians was there, properly displayed; but most of the front page was devoted to Plaino. There was a cartoon of him in the act of foreclosing a chattel mortgage. He had stripped the farm of its implements, its horses and live stock, eren the precious bag of seed, leaving only the pine hut and five figures of despair—these a woman sitting in the doorway with her head in her lap, three children clinging to her and a man cursing the landscape, all in desperate need of famine relief. Beneath the cartoon was a list of several hundred chattel mortgage foreclosures, taken at random from the county records, with nothing to show they were not all of Plaino’s doing.

It was grossly unfair. For so long as anybody could remember Plaino had not foreclosed a mortgage. His maxim was that a banker who loaned wisely was never obliged to do so.

To Semicorn, however, the objection that Plaino himself was not that kind of person would have seemed the merest quibbling. Plaino was a symbol, not a man. He represented the system that did foreclose mortgages. If he was not that kind of person he ought not to represent that system. And as for the borrower’s responsibility, in having borrowed too much or for having failed to make profitable use of what he borrowed, that he would not consider. Why should he, in fact, beginning as he did with the premise that all things belonged by right to the people? What they borrowed was already their own.

The character of the whole paper had changed. Anyone would have known it was the work of I. W. W. radicals. A spirit of brutality pervaded it. The cartoon was brutal in both idea and execution. So were certain headlines here and there, with no reference to Plaino. Several industrial accidents, a mine explosion, a railroad wreck, a suicide, and a routine statistical item from the Labor Bureau of New York State on unemployment, were gathered together under one black headline:

“Dividends!”

That kind of touch had gone all through the news columns. Strikers were referred to as wage slaves. The trial of a communist agitator in New England on a charge of murder was a frame-up; the defendant was a victim. It was all in the headlines. The news itself was in no case altered.

Capuchin knew better. All his blunders were infantile, proceeding from the fact that he had no power of reflection, no control of the externalized idea. His mind played creatively with things to be, imagined whole and perfect in one stroke of inspiration. But as they appeared in the turmoil of reality with the shape of practical problems they were as unreal to him as an ark full of toy beasts come suddenly to life in full size. Of the New Freedom phantasy too many things had come true. The Freemen’s League a red political cloud filling five states with awe. Whirling in it, a bankrupt people’s bank; a packing plant, a flour mill, cooperative stores, creameries, and lumber yards, all insolvent; the Louisiana Company that nobody would understand. Now the “Herald” in an I. W. W. frame, which was not at all what he meant it to be. He could not stop them. They would whirl faster and faster until something happened. That was as far as he could think. Until something happened.

It was certain, as in a state of poise he himself had been the first to see, that such a paper as this one Semicorn had just made would alienate all the conservative elements of the Freemen’s League. He had boasted that he knew how far it was safe to go with these people; he did know. On the other hand, his agents in the field, selling the League away from home, had been clamoring for more radicalism. It would be easier to sell the League, they said, if its views were more radical. That was undoubtedly true. So, although it was that affairs were going badly in New Freedom, it was possible by making them worse to spread the power of the Freemen’s League much faster abroad. His power it was. In this respect he was the political strategist who makes a stir abroad to divert attention from disasters near. Anyway, it was his rule when in doubt to hit. Gazing at the “Herald” that morning he swelled with a sense of combat. Here was hitting! When he saw Semicorn he complimented him on the Plaino stuff.

XVI

Jael’s reactions were bitter. She realized how unjust the “Herald’s” handling of Plaino was. That did not concern her so much. This was apparently a way men had of fighting; she had no doubt of the old man’s ability in any case to take care of himself. Besides, the “Herald’s” violence, she thought, would probably defeat its own purpose. But the treatment of her Lothians—that was insulting, vile, quite unforgivable.

It was a relief that Capuchin came no more to Little Jones Street, for she would not have known what to say to him. And now the stark question—what should she do?

It was not only that she could see no way to retire gracefully, although naturally she could not help thinking of that also. Merely to turn her back on the scene and reduce her orbit to the old Jones Street pattern seemed quite impossible, and not merely in terms of personal chagrin. Much more than her own pride was involved. There was some moral value to be upheld, if only she could see what that was. It seemed very important to save something intangible. This might be an attitude or a point of view, and she had neither. For several days her thoughts were in a state of confusion.

Meanwhile, there was the practical fact of having forty Lothians on her hands. They had resigned, their resignations had been accepted, and now they were out of work. They had all been uprooted and transplanted. This was her responsibility. Some were willing to return to New York; the college could absorb them in its faculty or place them in social research work. Others did not wish to return. It was while meditating what to do with them that she began to revolve an idea the germ of which had been dormant in her mind for a long time.

Going to and fro between New York and New Freedom had produced more than once that occasion in which everything one knows falls away, even one’s name and identity; things hitherto unknown, beyond good and evil, assume terrific importance. She became aware of the great mystery of the earth mother. Always it was west of the Mississippi river this happened, sometimes in the swooning glimpse one may remember but never recall, sometimes in dreaming reverie of which the mystical truth alone without object or subject may be remembered. Some inner region of herself became in these moments vast, co-terminous with the limits of the universe, pulsating with a knowledge the mind cannot share. These experiences left her wordless. She could neither describe nor define them.

Once it occurred to her in rational meditation that the life she knew, life as it appeared from the Jones street point of view, must either renew itself in the soil or perish. Directly or indirectly all those indescribable emotions associated themselves with the earth—the fundamental mother.

There was nothing new in the thought. It was as old as the nostalgia of city dwellers. There had been many trials of going back, of renewing life in that way by intelligent intention to forestall necessity. She turned to the literature of these experiments and was surprised at the extent of it. She read the fascinating history of Brook Farm, also that of the Oneida Community. In an obvious sense every such experiment had failed. That is, not one of them endured. No matter. In a spiritual sense they had not failed. The mistake was to suppose they might succeed materially. That was neither their point nor their meaning. In every case some vital principle had been renewed to go on with, and those in whom it was renewed had gone on.

Well now, in view of her problem, the idea of a soil colony, an adventure of prodigals with nature, opened a vista. It was the happy alternative.

She broached it to the Lothians and they were enthusiastic. They spent several evenings together setting out the rules to govern it, all very simple. Thirty subscribed. Then she went forth to find the suitable location, which turned out to be a place fifty miles from Liberty where there was available a large tract of land in the valley of the river flowing north; the land sloped gently to the hills that rose abruptly on the west in strange, grotesque formations. It was already somewhat developed. The romantic feature was a very old house that had been an inn on the cattle trail. She named it the Lothian Farm and proceeded to equip it on a considerable scale.

In finding this place she saw more of the country than she had seen before, and it grew upon her; also for the first time she came into direct contact with the people, not as they might present themselves in groups at Freemen’s League meetings and picnics—people as they lived and worked. She talked with them, ate with them, passed nights and evenings with them, and expanded sympathetically.

First of all, the contrasts impressed her deeply. Success and failure divided by a road. Independence and well-being on one side; aching discontent and poor living on the other side. The same soil, the same sun, the same seed.

What made this great difference? Not opportunity to begin with. Nearly every highly developed farm, with big barns, swelling herds, strong fences and comfortable dwellings, had the pioneer history. Settlers, a strong man and a good wife, nothing to begin with but their hands, access to the soil and the habit of toil. Often the hut they first raised over their heads had been preserved as an heirloom in the flower garden; all the children had been born in it.

And the running story on the other side of the road was of one general character, too. Wistful expectations, inexperience, something that was to have happened and didn’t.

Presently she could foretell by the look of a farm whether the people upon it would be Leaguers or anti-Leaguers and the degree in which they would be either. The successful farmers were not necessarily more intelligent than the unsuccessful, though very often they were; invariably, however, their intelligence was practical, not imaginative, and they had besides a kind of restraining wisdom. They were not satisfied. All of them, no matter how successful, had specific grievances, and many of them had been hoping through the Freemen’s League to remove certain economic evils; but now they were turning away from it in disgust.

The weak farmers, on the other hand, were still for it; the more unfortunate they were the more ardently they were for it, to the point of being fanatical. Capuchin was their demi-urge, their one hope in place of everything else that had not happened, the mighty leveller. Their notion of levelment was simple. The privileged few, those who had got or taken theirs, the strong in brief, were all to be levelled down while they themselves were to be levelled up.

Jael found herself thinking much more about these who were weak than about those who were strong. Wherein was their weakness? In some significant way they were all alike, though apparently so unlike, and for a, long time she could not get hold of it.

Some were lazy. The squatter type, with nothing of their own to lose, and a low, cunning interest in politics. Not so many of these. More numerous were those whose works seemed foredoomed to fail. On this gray side of the road, in fact, was every kind of temperament save one. The successful temperament was not there. Nevertheless, that was the side of the road on which the humanities and sympathies were rich; it was the more hospitable side, and Jael found herself preferring it. The people were more likable than those on the other side, likable as children were.

And this was at last the word she had been wanting to express a common fact about them. They were children precisely in the sense of lacking what children lack, namely, judgment and wisdom. In everything else—will, passions, sentiments, knowledge of facts, activity of imagination—they were grown up; and one had to know them well to realize what it was they were doing to defeat themselves. Rejecting reality, as children do, because it is not what they wish to believe.

It was true they had been exploited. They were obliged to think that was why they had failed. It was not the reason. They were susceptible to begin with; they had been led by imagination into a struggle with nature for which they were unprepared by understanding, by experience, by any economic test. There were some, to be sure, whose trouble was stupidity and ignorance, such as would have failed anywhere at anything.

At this time, however, Jael was less interested in economic analysis than in a new way of regarding life from an emotional approach. She was down on rational thinking. Deliberately to give herself up to feeling alone had become a conscious aesthetic experience. She knew what she was doing. That was the pleasure of it. She could say, “Now I am feeling,” and enjoy it, just as she could say, “Now I am reasoning,” and enjoy that. Feeling was the new enjoyment.

Seeing and feeling all these people on the unsuccessful side of the road as children gave her a strange, intense pleasure. What they needed to know more about was nature and how to live with her alone by their own strength—not economics, not politics, not how to have the comforts, manners and distractions of the city brought to them, but how to do without the very things they were petulantly demanding. She had an impulse to go among them saying: “Your problem is not economic. Stop thinking of this machine civilization, its wonders and cruelties. You must find a spiritual way with nature. Turn to the impersonal mother.”

How futile it would be! No one would listen. It was Capuchin’s language they understood—the language of the demagogue.

In one of these moments of pure feeling she identified herself with the earth, unable to impart wisdom to her children otherwise than through the language of experience—a language painfully pieced together by many generations that may be altogether lost in one.

She was now at the age of thirty-five, and that part of her which was woman, not mind, was asserting its hunger.

XVII

Developing the spirit and means of Lothian Farm was a task strange and interesting enough to absorb Jael’s energies. She passed all of her time either there or at Little Jones Street, as an executive base; and of course followed the way of political events in New Freedom, now having the rôle of spectator only.

Capuchin, Semicorn, all the very radical elements of the Freemen’s League, grew more and more reckless.

The “Herald’s” campaign against Plaino became scandalous and personal. This was inevitable in human nature. It is all very plausible to begin, as the Semicorns do, by saying it is impersonal, that it is the system one attacks, not the man, or the man only as an accidental fact in his function of representing the system. But it is not possible to hate an abstract thing. Capitalism, for example, cannot be visualized as a system. It cannot be hated as a system. Emotion requires a definite object, responsible to the senses. This is proved by the necessity, which every demagogue obeys, of erecting human symbols of it to begin with. Presently the fact of representation becomes dim and the symbol itself is hated, as in the opposite case the deity is forgotten and the effigy worshipped. And so it was here.

At the outset, Semicorn and his associates believed in the idea of what they were doing; if in the doing of it they should happen to be unfair to an individual, to Plaino, namely, that was of no consequence. Worse luck to him; he ought not to be that symbol. Eventually they came to believe what they wrote about him as a person, and to hate him as a person; and so it was also with their readers. Plaino himself was the monster. All the rage, the fear, the recriminatory passions rising among the fanatical Leaguers, especially toward the end when they began to have a premonition of defeat, centered upon him. And he did provoke them exceedingly. The intensity of his purpose gave him a super-human, menacing aspect.

He came on with his pamphlet against the Lothians, their retirement notwithstanding. Then was one devoted wholly to Mr. Capuchin, setting forth his record complete, with all the facts about his unfortunate irrigation schemes long before anybody here had heard of him.

Politically, no doubt, the most effective pamphlet was one entitled, “Confiscating Your Land by Taxation.” This was a thesis to prove that if taxes went on increasing at the same rate for another four years they would amount to more than the value of the land. The people would be unable to pay them. Therefore they would lose their land; it would default to the state and private ownership of the soil would cease. Very shrewdly he quoted some of the Lothian theorists who advocated state ownership of land as against private ownership; so that one might infer some such end had been in view from the beginning. This argument cut deeply into the minds and feelings of the farmers.

In the last pamphlet he exposed the bank. His information about it was exact. He knew of the grain speculations and of Capuchin’s Louisiana Company. The bank was empty. The school funds were gone. He demanded that Parshall be brought home and indicted.

Nevertheless, for reasons which he had explained to Jael, there was no run on the bank; it did not fail. It merely stood there as a rotten tree, unable to fall. Indeed, the revelation of its insolvency caused thousands of people who owed it money to wish it might fail, thinking naïvely that in such case their indebtedness to it would be wiped out. Another result also was in accord with his predictions. For several months people had been murmuring against their bank because it had stopped lending money; and now, having got from Plaino’s pamphlet the notion that the reason why it had stopped lending money was that the insiders had looted it, they were furious.

The excitement was progressive. Each of Plaino’s pamphlets stepped it higher, and as the November election approached nobody’s fuse was quite safe.

Capuchin had smashed his airplane. He was afraid to replace it, lest that be a reminder to the Leaguers of the state’s swollen expenditures. So now he was racing about in a motor car with a gorgeous phantasy of himself. The Great Defender, fighting for the people, back to the abyss. Whatever happened his glory was prepared; for even more thrilling than the thought of desperate victory was the thought of dramatic defeat—of falling backward into the yawning darkness, heroically brandishing the fragments of his weapon, an imperishable phrase on his lips, a cry of dismay from the people. All that was lacking was the immortal phrase. He had not been able to invent one that satisfied him.

His speeches were accusatory, exhortive, more and more rhetorical. The forces of capitalism were arrayed against them. The eyes of the world were upon them. The fight for freedom had to be fought all over again. Privilege was powerful and thirsted for revenge. They had made mistakes, naturally. Profiteers also made great mistakes. The difference was that the profiteers capitalized their mistakes and expected the people to pay dividends upon them forever, whereas the people, having made their own mistakes, would pay for them once and be done, taking to themselves thereafter the profit. It was a brilliant, prodigious performance, but empty for all that, having no substance of fact. Continually he was met with the cry, “Talk about Plaino’s facts!” He could not talk about them because they were facts. The alternative was to defame him, asperse his motives, inflame feeling against him, which he did in a dangerous manner.

His power was expiring. In paradox, never had the flame of it been so high and vivid, the adoration of it so ecstatic.

Between man and multitude a time comes when one acts upon the other in a manner to glorify both. The man is not then himself. He is, even to himself, the figure reflected in the people’s eyes. The people, though they look at him, do not see him. They see a symbol of themselves. As they think they are, so the symbol is. When it speaks they hear themselves. At last occurs the emotional act of deification. In whose image were people made to begin with? Here now is an image of themselves in the likeness of their creator. The pattern is returned to its maker and the translation is complete.

Toward the end he began to rebuke them, saying: “We are losing. I tell you this to be remembered. We are losing because, being tempted, ye turn away.”

Once after he had said this to them at the end of a violent speech a slow, powerful voice was raised, saying:

“There has appeared among us one like Christ.”

To this many voices groaned, “A-a-a-men!” A scoffer who whistled derisively was roughly handled at the door.

Yet this Capuchin was a little man, about to be rejected as a symbol and utterly forgotten.

That the League was losing everybody knew. The extent of the disaster was unforeseen. It was total.

Everywhere the Freemen’s Leaguers were chased into the ground. Not one official head survived.

The edifice of folkmotes collapsed.

Three hours after the close of the polls Plaino’s stone-cutter began to chisel the last numeral at the bottom of the famous tombstone in his bank window, and two tall candles were set in front of it to burn all night.