Pierce and John slept in the mayor’s house that night. No meals were served in the great dining room but servants brought platters of sandwiches and cold meats into the parlor which had become the center of the city’s control, and the men ate little and drank much. Pierce went to bed in a stupor of weariness and was awakened again by gun shots in the morning. When he had dressed and hastened downstairs he found that the first contingents of the Army had arrived, had met the overflow of the mob in an open space near a hall, and had dispersed them. Meantime the meeting in the hall had gone on behind locked doors.
By noon six more policemen were wounded. Still no one knew or counted the number of wounded in the unarmed mob. The rioters continued to take their dead away as soon as they fell.
In the disordered parlor Pierce sat all day listening, suggesting, conferring, but underneath activity he was aware of a deep empty silence. What did this war mean, here in the heart of his country? Who were the enemies — and for whom did he fight? He left his own questions unanswered.
The strange war ended the next day in a foolish way which only confused him the more, A crowd of Bohemian women, angered because two of their lads had been killed the night before, gathered together from the small Bohemian villages on the outskirts of the city. They fought fiercely, out of outraged motherhood, until in the middle of the evening the hardbitten Regulars appeared and dispersed them. By the middle of the next day the rioters had been overcome and the city took stock of its wounds. Shops had been looted and men robbed. A farmer coming into the city with his vegetables had been waylaid and beaten and his little store of money taken away. To the unrest of the working people had been added the selfishness of petty thieves and the lawlessness of gangsters.
“We’ve licked them,” the mayor sighed, and wiped his bald head with a handkerchief so dirty that it left a smear of black across his face.
“Wait,” Pierce said and opened a telegram that a boy held at his elbow.
It announced the attack of a mob in San Francisco upon Chinatown.
“I’m going,” John said. “I’ll drive these communists into the Pacific Ocean and hold ’em under!”
“I am going home,” Pierce said heavily.
The strikes subsided and the war ended slowly as the weeks passed. Everywhere the mob was put down by Regulars from the Federal Army. In his library Pierce studied the newspapers and approved, but with deep disquiet. Of course the mob must be put down. Order must be upheld. He could not hide from himself that he was profoundly relieved when Malvern stood safe once more upon a subdued working class. But, out of his disquiet, he now recommended and worked for substantial wage increases. He wrote long, detailed letters to every member of the Board of Directors. To Henry Mallows he wrote with peculiar insistence: “I tell you, I have seen the faces of these men and women — yes, women, too. They are savage with despair. In the interest of our own security we must grant them enough for life, even if our own dividends shrink for a while.”
To Jim McCagney he wrote: “We overbuilt. Let’s face our own mistake. We went too fast for the country. But the country will catch up with us if we can be willing to make less profit for the next few years. It’s a great country, and we haven’t begun to produce what we can. I’m a farmer and I know.”
At Malvern he steadily set himself to bigger crops and finer animals, as his duty to the nation.
But underneath all his efforts he still knew secret terror. He woke at night in a sweat, seeing the faces of the mob. In his dreams they were mixed up strangely with Tom and Tom’s house and the faces of Tom’s children — yes, and of Georgia’s. He woke frightened even on the clear bright mornings of autumn and harvest and the peace which followed the summer’s storms.
“We’ve got to do something about the poor,” he told Lucinda again and again and at the next Board meeting in a restored Baltimore he argued his fellow members into setting up a relief department in the company for the benefit of the sick and aged and those who had suffered from accident in their work.
He met the solid opposition of everyone, even of John MacBain.
“We licked them with the help of the Army, and that’s how we’ll have to lick them always,” John declared.
But Pierce argued his case stubbornly. “For our own safety it is better to have contented workingmen than discontented ones.”
“You can’t satisfy workingmen,” Jonathan Yates said with his thin tired smile. He was more relentless than any of them, now that he had risen above his fellows.
“We’ve got to be realistic,” Henry Mallows said. His narrow face hardened. He tore the gold band from a slender cigar and lit it. Perfume spread in the air with the smoke. “Anything that doesn’t bring in returns to the stockholders—” he went on.
John MacBain looked at him with the repulsion he would have showed a snake. “Oh hell,” he said suddenly. “I’m with Pierce Delaney, after all.”
“And I,” Pierce said quietly, “consider it the height of realism and self-interest for the rich to be generous to the poor. There is a point, Mallows, where it is good business to keep workingmen alive.”
But it was not until the next year, when the new decade began and the depression was over, that Pierce succeeded in establishing his relief department. Six thousand dollars were laid aside, and within the first five months almost six hundred people were aided in one way or another.
In his library at Malvern, Pierce read the reports and approved them and felt that with his own hands he was building a dam against the disaster of the future.
Chapter Eight
THE DANGEROUS DECADE PASSED, AND THE INEXPLICABLE tides of prosperity rolled over the country again. At Malvern, Pierce put up new greenhouses and stables. When John MacBain came in January his land hunger grew beyond control.
Pierce had made the library into his business office, and was dreaming of a new south wing which would be the formal library for the house. The plans lay on the great oak table in the middle of the room. Less and less often now did Pierce leave home and more and more men came to Malvern to see him. They were glad to come for the house was famous. Secretly Pierce was somewhat ashamed of the new livery which Lucinda had designed for the men servants. The crimson and yellow seemed to him absurd. But he humored her in all things and laughed with his friends gently behind her back. Lucinda was still pretty enough to be excused for follies.
Pierce stood before the great window and surveyed his lands, now white under a foot of soft snow. “John, you might as well sell me your place — I’ve rented all these years.”
John, sitting in a wing chair by the roaring fire, was studying a sheet of paper. “I’ll leave the house as a summer place for you and Mollie,” Pierce went on.
John did not look up. “I don’t want that house,” he said drily. “I haven’t been in it for a handful of years and you know it.”
“Then I’ll let Carey have it some day,” Pierce said promptly. “I’ve been wanting to settle a house on him when he marries. Martin’s to have this one, of course.”
“You going to let him come here after he’s married?” John inquired. Martin’s engagement to Mary Louise Wyeth had been announced at the great Christmas party.
“The place is big enough for us all,” Pierce replied. He had been pleased with the small demure girl whom Martin had brought to Malvern for inspection. Martin had grown up handsome and strong and comfortably average as a young man. He had been graduated from the University decently but without honors. He danced beautifully and rode well. Lucinda was enormously proud of him. Carey was a shrewd thin young chap, already a skilled debater. It was useful to have a lawyer in the family — a good second son, prudent and contented with his place.