The Great Adventure

: The Iron Heel

Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on the

ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was not

premeditated. Had they not met accidentally, there would not have been

any warning. Not that the outcome would have been different, however.

Father came of stout old Mayflower* stock, and the blood was imperative

in him.



* One of the first ships that carried colonies o America,

after the discovery of the New World. Descendants of these

original colonists were for a while inordinately proud of

their genealogy; but in time the blood became so widely

diffused that it ran in the veins practically of all

Americans.



"Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home. "Ernest

is a very remarkable young man, and I'd rather see you his wife than the

wife of Rockefeller himself or the King of England."



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



"The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces--yours and mine. Wickson

as much as told me so. He was very kind--for an oligarch. He offered to

reinstate me in the university. What do you think of that? He, Wickson,

a sordid money-grabber, has the power to determine whether I shall or

shall not teach in the university of the state. But he offered me even

better than that--offered to make me president of some great college of

physical sciences that is being planned--the Oligarchy must get rid of

its surplus somehow, you see.



"'Do you remember what I told that socialist lover of your daughter's?'

he said. 'I told him that we would walk upon the faces of the working

class. And so we shall. As for you, I have for you a deep respect as

a scientist; but if you throw your fortunes in with the working

class--well, watch out for your face, that is all.' And then he turned

and left me."



"It means we'll have to marry earlier than you planned," was Ernest's

comment when we told him.



I could not follow his reasoning, but I was soon to learn it. It was at

this time that the quarterly dividend of the Sierra Mills was paid--or,

rather, should have been paid, for father did not receive his. After

waiting several days, father wrote to the secretary. Promptly came

the reply that there was no record on the books of father's owning any

stock, and a polite request for more explicit information.



"I'll make it explicit enough, confound him," father declared, and

departed for the bank to get the stock in question from his safe-deposit

box.



"Ernest is a very remarkable man," he said when he got back and while

I was helping him off with his overcoat. "I repeat, my daughter, that

young man of yours is a very remarkable young man."



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

disaster.



"They have already walked upon my face," father explained. "There was no

stock. The box was empty. You and Ernest will have to get married pretty

quickly."



Father insisted on laboratory methods. He brought the Sierra Mills into

court, but he could not bring the books of the Sierra Mills into court.

He did not control the courts, and the Sierra Mills did. That explained

it all. He was thoroughly beaten by the law, and the bare-faced robbery

held good.



It is almost laughable now, when I look back on it, the way father was

beaten. He met Wickson accidentally on the street in San Francisco,

and he told Wickson that he was a damned scoundrel. And then father was

arrested for attempted assault, fined in the police court, and bound

over to keep the peace. It was all so ridiculous that when he got

home he had to laugh himself. But what a furor was raised in the

local papers! There was grave talk about the bacillus of violence that

infected all men who embraced socialism; and father, with his long and

peaceful life, was instanced as a shining example of how the bacillus

of violence worked. Also, it was asserted by more than one paper that

father's mind had weakened under the strain of scientific study, and

confinement in a state asylum for the insane was suggested. Nor was this

merely talk. It was an imminent peril. But father was wise enough to see

it. He had the Bishop's experience to lesson from, and he lessoned

well. He kept quiet no matter what injustice was perpetrated on him, and

really, I think, surprised his enemies.



There was the matter of the house--our home. A mortgage was foreclosed

on it, and we had to give up possession. Of course there wasn't any

mortgage, and never had been any mortgage. The ground had been bought

outright, and the house had been paid for when it was built. And house

and lot had always been free and unencumbered. Nevertheless there was

the mortgage, properly and legally drawn up and signed, with a record

of the payments of interest through a number of years. Father made no

outcry. As he had been robbed of his money, so was he now robbed of his

home. And he had no recourse. The machinery of society was in the hands

of those who were bent on breaking him. He was a philosopher at heart,

and he was no longer even angry.



"I am doomed to be broken," he said to me; "but that is no reason that I

should not try to be shattered as little as possible. These old bones of

mine are fragile, and I've learned my lesson. God knows I don't want to

spend my last days in an insane asylum."



Which reminds me of Bishop Morehouse, whom I have neglected for many

pages. But first let me tell of my marriage. In the play of events, my

marriage sinks into insignificance, I know, so I shall barely mention

it.



"Now we shall become real proletarians," father said, when we were

driven from our home. "I have often envied that young man of yours for

his actual knowledge of the proletariat. Now I shall see and learn for

myself."



Father must have had strong in him the blood of adventure. He looked

upon our catastrophe in the light of an adventure. No anger nor

bitterness possessed him. He was too philosophic and simple to be

vindictive, and he lived too much in the world of mind to miss the

creature comforts we were giving up. So it was, when we moved to San

Francisco into four wretched rooms in the slum south of Market Street,

that he embarked upon the adventure with the joy and enthusiasm of

a child--combined with the clear sight and mental grasp of an

extraordinary intellect. He really never crystallized mentally. He had

no false sense of values. Conventional or habitual values meant nothing

to him. The only values he recognized were mathematical and scientific

facts. My father was a great man. He had the mind and the soul that only

great men have. In ways he was even greater than Ernest, than whom I

have known none greater.



Even I found some relief in our change of living. If nothing else, I

was escaping from the organized ostracism that had been our increasing

portion in the university town ever since the enmity of the nascent

Oligarchy had been incurred. And the change was to me likewise

adventure, and the greatest of all, for it was love-adventure. The

change in our fortunes had hastened my marriage, and it was as a

wife that I came to live in the four rooms on Pell Street, in the San

Francisco slum.



And this out of all remains: I made Ernest happy. I came into his stormy

life, not as a new perturbing force, but as one that made toward peace

and repose. I gave him rest. It was the guerdon of my love for him.

It was the one infallible token that I had not failed. To bring

forgetfulness, or the light of gladness, into those poor tired eyes of

his--what greater joy could have blessed me than that?



Those dear tired eyes. He toiled as few men ever toiled, and all his

lifetime he toiled for others. That was the measure of his manhood. He

was a humanist and a lover. And he, with his incarnate spirit of battle,

his gladiator body and his eagle spirit--he was as gentle and tender to

me as a poet. He was a poet. A singer in deeds. And all his life he sang

the song of man. And he did it out of sheer love of man, and for man he

gave his life and was crucified.



And all this he did with no hope of future reward. In his conception of

things there was no future life. He, who fairly burnt with immortality,

denied himself immortality--such was the paradox of him. He, so warm

in spirit, was dominated by that cold and forbidding philosophy,

materialistic monism. I used to refute him by telling him that I

measured his immortality by the wings of his soul, and that I should

have to live endless aeons in order to achieve the full measurement.

Whereat he would laugh, and his arms would leap out to me, and he would

call me his sweet metaphysician; and the tiredness would pass out of his

eyes, and into them would flood the happy love-light that was in itself

a new and sufficient advertisement of his immortality.



Also, he used to call me his dualist, and he would explain how Kant, by

means of pure reason, had abolished reason, in order to worship God. And

he drew the parallel and included me guilty of a similar act. And when I

pleaded guilty, but defended the act as highly rational, he but pressed

me closer and laughed as only one of God's own lovers could laugh. I

was wont to deny that heredity and environment could explain his own

originality and genius, any more than could the cold groping finger of

science catch and analyze and classify that elusive essence that lurked

in the constitution of life itself.



I held that space was an apparition of God, and that soul was a

projection of the character of God; and when he called me his sweet

metaphysician, I called him my immortal materialist. And so we loved and

were happy; and I forgave him his materialism because of his tremendous

work in the world, performed without thought of soul-gain thereby, and

because of his so exceeding modesty of spirit that prevented him from

having pride and regal consciousness of himself and his soul.



But he had pride. How could he have been an eagle and not have pride?

His contention was that it was finer for a finite mortal speck of life

to feel Godlike, than for a god to feel godlike; and so it was that he

exalted what he deemed his mortality. He was fond of quoting a fragment

from a certain poem. He had never seen the whole poem, and he had tried

vainly to learn its authorship. I here give the fragment, not alone

because he loved it, but because it epitomized the paradox that he was

in the spirit of him, and his conception of his spirit. For how can a

man, with thrilling, and burning, and exaltation, recite the following

and still be mere mortal earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescent

form? Here it is:



"Joy upon joy and gain upon gain

Are the destined rights of my birth,

And I shout the praise of my endless days

To the echoing edge of the earth.

Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die

To the uttermost end of time,

I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss,

In every age and clime--



"The froth of Pride, the tang of Power,

The sweet of Womanhood!

I drain the lees upon my knees,

For oh, the draught is good;

I drink to Life, I drink to Death,

And smack my lips with song,

For when I die, another 'I' shall pass the cup along.



"The man you drove from Eden's grove

Was I, my Lord, was I,

And I shall be there when the earth and the air

Are rent from sea to sky;

For it is my world, my gorgeous world,

The world of my dearest woes,

From the first faint cry of the newborn

To the rack of the woman's throes.



"Packed with the pulse of an unborn race,

Torn with a world's desire,

The surging flood of my wild young blood

Would quench the judgment fire.

I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh

To the dust of my earthly goal,

From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb

To the sheen of my naked soul.

Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh

The whole world leaps to my will,

And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed

Shall harrow the earth for its fill.

Almighty God, when I drain life's glass

Of all its rainbow gleams,

The hapless plight of eternal night

Shall be none too long for my dreams.



"The man you drove from Eden's grove

Was I, my Lord, was I,

And I shall be there when the earth and the air

Are rent from sea to sky;

For it is my world, my gorgeous world,

The world of my dear delight,

From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream

To the dusk of my own love-night."



Ernest always overworked. His wonderful constitution kept him up; but

even that constitution could not keep the tired look out of his eyes.

His dear, tired eyes! He never slept more than four and one-half hours

a night; yet he never found time to do all the work he wanted to do.

He never ceased from his activities as a propagandist, and was always

scheduled long in advance for lectures to workingmen's organizations.

Then there was the campaign. He did a man's full work in that alone.

With the suppression of the socialist publishing houses, his meagre

royalties ceased, and he was hard-put to make a living; for he had to

make a living in addition to all his other labor. He did a great deal

of translating for the magazines on scientific and philosophic subjects;

and, coming home late at night, worn out from the strain of the

campaign, he would plunge into his translating and toil on well into the

morning hours. And in addition to everything, there was his studying.

To the day of his death he kept up his studies, and he studied

prodigiously.



And yet he found time in which to love me and make me happy. But this

was accomplished only through my merging my life completely into his. I

learned shorthand and typewriting, and became his secretary. He insisted

that I succeeded in cutting his work in half; and so it was that I

schooled myself to understand his work. Our interests became mutual, and

we worked together and played together.



And then there were our sweet stolen moments in the midst of our

work--just a word, or caress, or flash of love-light; and our moments

were sweeter for being stolen. For we lived on the heights, where the

air was keen and sparkling, where the toil was for humanity, and where

sordidness and selfishness never entered. We loved love, and our love

was never smirched by anything less than the best. And this out of all

remains: I did not fail. I gave him rest--he who worked so hard for

others, my dear, tired-eyed mortalist.