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.