第13章 Words Across the Divide

The rupture came, as ruptures do, over something small. It was the last week of January, and the settlement talks had begun at last. Thorndike had been forced to the table by the forgery and by the growing scandal, and the talks were being held in a neutral room at the Aldermere, of all places, because there was no other room in the city large enough and respectable enough and neutral enough for both sides to enter without losing face. The men's delegation sat on one side of the long table, and the company's men on the other, and between them sat Mr. Wyndham with the papers, and at the head of the table sat Cornelia, and at her right, because she had asked him, sat Cormac Kavanagh. By the third day it was plain that the men would get the wage and the fund and the rule against dismissal, and that the only open question was the trust — the share of the company that Cornelia had offered them. Thorndike's lawyers fought the trust with everything they had, because a trust was the one thing a bank could not take without a fight, and on the third afternoon they found their argument. The trust, they said, would put a majority of the company's shares in the hands of unincorporated workmen whose legal identity was the assembly. An assembly, they said, was not a person. It could not hold property. Therefore the trust was void, and the only thing to do was to dissolve it and pay the men a fixed settlement in cash. Cornelia saw the trap a half-second after Wyndham did. If the trust was void, the men took cash and went home, and the shares stayed with her, and in March Thorndike called his note and took everything, and the men had nothing to bargain with and no reason to strike again until the machines came for the rest of them. She had an answer ready. She had thought about it for three nights. And the answer required Cormac to stand up in that room and say that the assembly would incorporate, that it would become a legal body, that it would take a charter from the state, and that it would accept a seat on the company's board. She had not asked him first. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and she knew immediately that she had made a mistake, and that it was too late to take it back. "Miss Hollingsworth," Cormac said, very evenly, in front of the whole table, "might I speak with you in the hall?" --- "Never again," he said, when the door had closed behind them. His voice was quiet and it was shaking. "Never again do you put a thing like that in my mouth without asking me. Do you understand what you just asked me to do? You asked me to stand up in front of Thorndike and every lawyer in this city and say that the Pressmen's Assembly will take a charter. Do you know what a charter is to the men in that room? It is a leash. It is a piece of paper that says the state may say when we may strike and when we may not. I have spent four years telling those men that they answer to nobody but themselves, and you have just asked me to tell them the opposite, in a room full of owners, without a word of warning." "I did not mean —" "You did not mean. That is the whole of it, Cornelia. You did not mean." He walked a few steps away and turned back. "I have heard that sentence from your kind all my life. *I did not mean.* It is how the money talks. The money says, I did not mean to hurt you, I did not mean to cut your wage, I did not mean to take your trade, I only meant to do what was best. And the harm is done anyway, and the men who did not mean go home to a warm house, and the men who were harmed go home to a cold one." She felt the blood come into her face. "That is not fair." "No. It is not fair. It is true. They are different things, and you have been rich long enough not to know it." "Then tell me, since you are so fond of the truth." She heard her own voice rise and did not stop it. "Tell me what I am supposed to do with a majority of shares and a bank note and two hundred men who will not incorporate. Tell me how to keep the paper, pay the men, and stop Thorndike, all at once, without ever making a decision that one of us has not agreed to in advance. I have three weeks, Cormac. Three weeks. I do not have the luxury of a meeting in a room over a saloon every time I need to move." "There it is," Cormac said. "There is the heiress." "What is that supposed to mean?" "It means that for four weeks you have been telling me that you want to unlearn the owning kind of thing, and now that the owning kind of thing is inconvenient, you want to do it fast and by yourself and tell me about it afterward." He picked up his hat, and then set it down again, and his hands were not quite steady. "I will tell you the truth, since you asked for it. I do not know how to do this with you. I know how to fight an owner. I have been fighting owners since I was twenty. I do not know how to fight beside one, and every time I begin to think I might learn, you remind me that I am not a partner. I am a man you have hired, or a man you have found useful, or a man to stand at your right and lend you credit with the Row. And I can bear any of those things. What I cannot bear is to be told it is something else." The hall of the Aldermere was cold and grand and entirely empty, and Cornelia stood in the middle of it and understood that she had done a careless thing, and that careless was not innocent. "You are right," she said. "I should have asked you. I am sorry." He looked at her for a long moment. "The sorry is not the trouble," he said. "The trouble is that when the next thing comes, you will do it again, because you are faster than me and you own the paper and you are used to deciding. And I will take it, because the men need the settlement, and then one day I will wake up and find that I have become a man with ink on his hands who lives in a rich woman's house and calls it a strike." He put on his hat. "I am going to walk home. Do not come after me." He went out through the great doors into the cold, and the doors fell shut behind him, and Cornelia stood alone in the hall of her father's club and listened to the silence, which was, she thought, the sound of a thing that had been going too fast and had finally been stopped. --- She did not come after him. He had asked her not to, and there was a first time for everything. But she did something else, which she had not decided to do until her hand was already on the door of the men's delegation room. She went back to the table, and she faced Thorndike's lawyers, and she said the thing that she had intended to say with Cormac and would now have to say alone. "I withdraw the request for incorporation," she said. "The trust will be drawn as a trust. If the law will not let an assembly hold shares, then it will allow individual workmen to hold them, and they may name their own trustees, and the trustees may be of their own choosing. The settlement will be offered in both forms, and the men will vote on it at their own assembly, in their own room, without me in it." The lawyers objected. She let them object. Wyndham, who had known her father for forty years, looked at her for a long moment and then began, very quietly, to draft the second form of the trust. She would not see Cormac for four days. She spent them working, and in the small hours of the second night, going through her father's papers one last time for the board meeting, she found a letter in his hand that she had not seen before, folded into the back of the account book where no searcher would have looked. It was addressed to no one. It began, *When they read this, let them read the whole of it,* and it went on for three pages, and by the time she had finished it she understood two things that she had not understood before: why her father had been afraid, and what he had been trying, in the last months of his life, to do about it. The board of the Clarion Printing and Publishing Company was to meet in the morning. Cornelia read her father's letter one more time, and then sat up all night making her notes, and at dawn she dressed in her plainest clothes and went out to confront the men who had lent her father money to buy the machines that were ruining his men. ---