Power (9 page)

I was taken utterly aback, and I simply stared at him. He had never used that word to me before, or the tone—or looked at me in such a cold and melancholy manner. I was speechless, but he went on remorselessly,

“I can say at least that I am more to blame than you. Here you are, a fine young woman, very good to look at and not unintelligent, born and grown to maturity in a coal town, and without a smidgen of common sense in your head as to what it's all about. Oh yes, you may think that this is a very small point, Dorothy, but I assure you it is not. It is directly to the core of the matter. That young man who was here this afternoon is Benjamin Renwell Holt. He is twenty-two years old, the son and grandson of coal miners. If you went to the public library here and looked at your history books, you would discover that Renwells and Holts have lived in this county since Isaac Holt led the first group of settlers here in 1771—a good half century before an Aimesley bought property here and sold it at a sound profit. That's beside the point. But much to the point is that fact that Ben Holt is a brilliant and ambitious young man—sensitive, strong, and able. Ten years ago, his father was killed in the great disaster here. He put himself through college—and took care of his mother, and came out of it an honor student. I assure you that before he came here today, he bathed and scrubbed, but you don't scrub away the mark of the mines in one day—or in ten days. So from here on, you will think twice before you remark on how clean or dirty a miner is. That is all. You may go.”

This was my own father, who adored me and granted my slightest whim and had never spoken harshly to me before in all the seventeen years of my existence. I would have burst into tears, except that I was too furious to weep and too affronted to give him the satisfaction of seeing me weep. I ran upstairs to my own room, locked the door behind me, threw myself on my bed, and wept. There I waited all evening for my father to appear and beg my pardon, but evidently the matter weighed less heavily on his mind than on mine. He let me have that evening to myself, while he played Jack of Diamonds for toothpicks with my Cousin Jimmy.

 

4

There were three precious weeks left before I would have to leave to complete my final year at finishing school, and one of those weeks was wasted with my Cousin Jimmy, rest his soul. How I grudged him every minute of my time!—for my mind was full of fantasies of how I would use those hours spent with Jimmy to meet Ben Holt, and in my mind I held a hundred conversations with him. But when Jimmy finally left on Friday afternoon, my dreams dissolved. Between my fantasy of meeting Ben Holt again and the reality of the problems it presented, there was an almost uncrossable gulf. I don't know, Alvin, whether you remember anything of the social structure of a Pennsylvania coal town in those years before the First World War. The class cleavage was absolute and unbridgeable. Father was not a millionaire by any means, but in comparison with a coal miner, he was a person of unthinkable wealth. My whole world was sharply separated from the world of the miners. Ringman was not one town, but two towns. You will recall that time when you spent a weekend with us here at Ringman and we picnicked on the top of Belfast Ridge, and I pointed out to you the pits and the miners' homes to the south and the fine and well-kept homes to the north. Belfast Ridge is only seven hundred feet high, but it separates two worlds. When you were there, the mines were already working out, and today that part of Ringman is only a ghostly reminder of the past, but then in 1914, you breasted Belfast Ridge and looked down into the devil's own estate, great black heaps of wasted earth and culm, dust and dirt, the gloomy tipples and scaffolds, the tracks and cars and the piles of coal, and beyond it, through the haze, the flat, red brick company buildings where the miners lived. It was peopled with dark men who clawed inside the earth's belly, like trolls. In town, I had seen them so often and close, but the Main Street contacts brought me no nearer to them and their sad-faced, faded women and their grave, reticent children. From across the ridge, they were alien and unapproachable.

So nothing of the hoped-for happened. Saturday, I was in town, drifting along Main Street, ostensibly to complete my shopping, but Saturday was a working day for the miners. Saturday night, it would be different, the stores along Main Street lit up and crowded, the street packed with miners and their families, but I could find no reason or excuse to be alone in the business section on Saturday night, and I remained at home, restless and miserable, until my father said to me,

“I hope, Dorothy, that you can be reasonably pleasant and hospitable tomorrow. We're having that young miner, Ben Holt, to Sunday dinner. You are part of the reason for the invitation. You live in a mining town, and I want you to be able to talk intelligently to a miner in your own house.”

So much for that. You see, Alvin, it was not fate but my father's interest in Ben Holt that brought us together in the first place. Yet I do not have to defend myself to you as prepossessing; it has always appeared to me to be somewhat comical when a woman in her sixties or seventies parades the admirers of her youth; still I am old enough to state and accept the fact that I was a very attractive young woman, comely if not beautiful, with a good figure and good health. Even at seventeen, I had all the suitors I desired, and at seventeen, in those days, a young lady was accepted as mature more readily than today. My picture had been in the paper in Scranton as the debutante of the year, and in Wilkes-Barre, I had been chosen as the queen of the May Festival—all pathetic boasting and flying of ribbons, my dear Alvin, but to the point, I think, in this little story I am trying to write for you of Ben and myself and how we met and what our courtship was. I did not turn to Ben because there was no one else, but because there was no one else like him.

You know, in those days, we were all of us reading Jack London with great eagerness; it was a time, for us in the middle class, at least, of life wrapped in flimsy romantic paper, the end of a strange age in the best of all possible worlds—a time to be shattered forever by the great war. Jack London gave us the romance we required but punctured it here and there with flashes of reality—and his romantic and implausible labor heroes were very much in the order of our dreams.

So it is no wonder that it seemed to me that Ben Holt had stepped directly from his pages. You never knew Ben as he was then. Many things changed him—nothing so much as power and the sweet, terrible taste of it—but many other things as well; but at that time, when he was twenty-two years old, there was a certain rocklike, indomitable purity about him, a youthful wisdom, a torrent of energy and words—words, words, words, like a great vessel filled to the bursting point with knowledge and certainty.

Not at once was this apparent, by no means at once, for he came into the Aimesley house as before, clumsily, his Sunday cap clenched in his massive, broken-nailed hands, wearing his cloak of resentment and suspicion. How nervous he was at first! I remember that I wore my pink organdy, which was the very best and most beautiful dress I owned for daytime wear, and how I worked for two full hours on my hair and applying rouge so subtly that it would not be noticed, since I was not supposed to possess it at all! But the effect on him was to make him even more nervous; every time he looked at me, he would turn his eyes away. I tried to put him at ease, and perhaps I succeeded just a little, but the whole conversation between us then before dinner was on the subject of the weather, and what a fine, cool September it was, and how early the mosquitoes had vanished. Yet it had its effect, and if he didn't talk to me, by dinnertime, he and my father were hard at it. To tell the truth, most of the talk in my life had been small talk, social, polite, and restricted in subject. If politics or business were to be discussed, the men waited until the women left the table. But Ben didn't wait, and on this Sunday, neither did my father.

They began with the local mayoralty race, and agreed that there was little to choose between the two candidates. My father was a graduate of Princeton, and for a while they discussed that school relative to the University of Pennsylvania. Then they launched into national politics, foreign policy, and the war.

Had it not been Ben Holt, I suppose that I would have been bored; it was the manner of the young lady of that time to be bored with such talk; but since it involved a young man I had every intention of conquering—even though my intentions were riddled with doubts, fears, and confusions—I listened intently. In spite of myself, I found myself interested.

“I have no favorites in this war,” Ben Holt was saying. “It's as naked and dirty a struggle for money and power as any war ever was.”

“The German atrocities,” Father said. “You don't believe them?”

“Do you, Mr. Aimesley?”

“I'm afraid not. Not that men aren't capable of indulging in atrocities—but they're more capable of inventing them.” My father glanced at me. With two of my friends, I had labored at a booth all through August, collecting money for Belgian Relief. “I've shocked Dorothy. The women treasure the horrors. It provides a rare opportunity for a public display of rage and pity.”

“That's not fair!” I burst out, and with a slight smile, Ben said gently, “Of course it is not, Miss Aimesley. And I don't think for a moment that Mr. Aimesley means it seriously.”

“But I do. I do,” Father chuckled.

Ben's face hardened just a little, but in the same soft voice, he said, “Then begging your pardon, Mr. Aimesley, if you think that the opportunity for a public display of rage and pity on the part of women is a rare thing, then you have only to make your way over Belfast Ridge. There you will find rage and pity enough on public display, but if you wish to make doubly certain, then wait until you hear the disaster whistles screaming from the shaft head to tell the women of Ringman that two or three hundred of their men are trapped down there in the hell of gas and darkness—”

His voice was low and soft and thoughtful, the words like music in their cadence. It was the first time I really listened to a miner speak; if they were a race apart, I had put them into the class of brutish dirt and ignorance—and now I sat openmouthed listening to one of them come to my defense against my father. Had I ever heard Father contradicted in such a manner before? I don't know, and neither did I have any idea of what his reaction would be. But he only looked at Ben thoughtfully for a long moment, and then said,

“You are right, Ben. And by God I have no business talking flippantly of any aspect of this monstrous war in Europe.”

“But you have, I think, for only when enough of us poor boobs are beaten or shot for king or kaiser will we appreciate the senselessness of this bloodletting. Still, that comes badly from a miner.”

“Why, Mr. Holt?” I asked him. “Why does it come badly from a miner? I won't say that I equate the Kings of England and Belgium with the German Kaiser, but I think you have every right to feel as you do.”

Father, watching me narrowly, whispered, “Hear, hear!” but I don't think Ben heard him. He was looking at me as if he had just now observed me for the first time. He nodded slowly and said,

“Thank you, Miss Aimesley, but, you see, we miners wear the badge of Cain, because the war that means misery for others means bread and meat on our tables. I have tried to be most careful of what I say here in your house, for you people have been very kind to me, and believe me, Miss Aimesley, I have no liking for the poor man who hates the rich out of his envy. You're not expected to know our problems.”

“That's only kindness on your part,” I replied. “If I am ignorant of what lies across Belfast Ridge, in our own back yard, I can't think that I'll ever learn anything of importance.”

“No more ignorant than most of the operators who own the mines. Many of them don't know the difference between bug dust or the gob pile—”

“Nor do I.”

“You're not expected to, and it doesn't add up in dollars and cents to you as it does to them. Bug dust is the powdered coal left on the floor when the cutting machine rips into the face, and it must be loaded into cars and tracked back to the heading before we can handle the rock coal that pays off. The gob pile consists of dirt and pieces of slate and other rock that we separate from the coal—”

I shook my head. “I can hardly follow you, Mr. Holt. All this is underground?”

“Sometimes—miles underground.”

“The thought of it makes me shiver. I don't think I could ever bring myself to go underground, not if my life depended on it.”

“Well, if your life depended on it, Miss Aimesley—well, a woman will do a lot for her kids or just to stay alive. You know, only a hundred and thirty years ago in England, the women and children worked in the mines with their men. They went down the shafts on rickety wooden ladders, and then they crawled, sometimes for a mile or two, along black tunnels never high enough for them to stand up in, and never dry either. When they laid track, the women and kids pulled the cars, crawling with the leather harness on their shoulders, while the men lay on their bellies and backs to pick at the face. A miner lasted five years, and the kids who grew up in the workings were half blind and never able to stand straight, but the women outlived the men. They had more stamina. They worked stripped to the waist, and they were bought and sold since they were indentured—”

He saw the look on my face and stopped suddenly, and stammered his apology, feeling perhaps that his reference to half-naked women had bruised my Victorian sensitivity. I explained quickly that it was the horror of it—how could one believe that such things had ever happened? And in England, a civilized and cultured nation.

“The Boers didn't think so,” my father remarked, watching me with curiosity and interest. “What Ben spoke of is true—and much worse. Dickens wrote about it, and I am sure you read what he wrote, Dorothy. It's hearing Ben talk about it that brings it home. But exactly what did you mean about war, Ben? Is that the only time a miner has steady work?”