From: Arden Town (1913; Unpublished MS)
Author: Scott Nearing
Published:
When Ruth Wade and Fred Allen reached the concert hall, the other members of the party were nowhere to be seen. After a fruitless survey of the crowd they stepped to the side of the pier and stood looking out to sea.
“Oh, how sorry I am!” exclaimed Ruth Wade. “They will think me so rude.”
“Do you like the ocean to-night, Miss Wade?” Fred Allen asked, without paying any attention to her tone.
“Yes, very much.”
They were silent for a time, looking out across the moonlit water. The night was perfect, though very dark; the moon, colored like beaten platinum, hung luminous out of the darkness. The stars were set like gems in their places. The night, a great expanse of black velvet, was studded with star jewels. Through the still air floated the noises from the crowd and the compelling strains of the last duet from “Aida.” The orchestra stopped playing. The noises of the crowd were stilled for a brief moment.
Fred Allen turned to Ruth Wade at length.
“The night is exquisite,” he said. “Shall we go out to the end of the pier?”
“Yes, if you think—” She stopped, looking the thoughts that she could not say in words.
He looked at her searchingly. Yes,” he said, “I think and—besides, well—”
They both forgot the others then. The night was there; they were together in it, and it seemed to hold enough for both of them. Why should they regret?
“Tell me, Allen,” said Ruth when they were seated at the end of the pier, “why you took up the decorative business. You said that you were not artistic.”
“Let me see.” He paused and looked at her, asking with his eyes why she had started such a subject. “I took up the business because my father left it to me. You can’t mix art up with business, you know; it’s fatal, the fellow who had the place before Father tried that.”
“Perhaps he tried art to the exclusion of business,” Ruth Wade suggested.
“Well,” admitted Fred Allen, “I guess perhaps he did. But that was a lesson for me.”
“Ah, I see. You may have had a vision of art in business once upon a time, but one man’s failure decided you. Oh, that’s not at all like you.”
Her voice was pitying, almost pleading. Its tones found a responsive echo in Fred Allen’s whole being,
“It does sound rather awkward when you put it just that way. I hate to have you say it—you above all other people. You mustn’t judge from what I’m really like; it isn’t fair to me—or to you either,” he added as an after thought.
Again she turned the subject. Fred Allen felt that she was searching his soul for the symbols of manhood. She said,—
“If you don’t have art in your business, at least you treat your employees well, don’t you?”
“Of course. We pay the same wages as our competitors, and provide every safeguard that the law demands.” Fred Allen remembered the repainted fire escape and stopped. He had once had a sharp conscience and it now gave him a twinge.
“Ah, then you are not yet above the law.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not yet an anarchist,” she answered simply.
“Well, rather not! An anarchist! I an anarchist? What do you mean?”
“Do you know what an anarchist is, Mr. Allen?”
“Certainly. An anarchist is a fellow who throws bricks, explodes bombs, and, in general, believes in tearing up the landscape. He is an undesirable citizen and a menace to the well-being of his fellows.”
“You are seriously mistaken,” she began, with an air that carried conviction. “You have described an ignorant man, not an anarchist. An anarchist is a man who is above the law—one who sees so clearly what is necessary for the welfare of society that he does it irrespective of legal obligation.”
“Why, Miss Wade, are you an anarchist?”
“Of course, so are you if you only knew it.”
“Well, really I—”
He stopped appalled. She was an artist, a single taxer, an anarchist. What should he hear next?
“I have ten dollars in my pocket, Mr. Allen. What prevents you from taking the money, and throwing me off the end of the pier if I made an outcry? It is not your fear of the law, but the consciousness which has been slowly developed in you that robbing is dangerous to social welfare. None of us educated people is restrained from committing crimes by law. We all realize our social responsibilities, and hence are above the law. The law, you know, was not made for the doers of good works, but of evil, as an old writer very well puts it.”
“Really, Miss Wade, I had never thought of it in that way before. I declare, I can’t see where your argument is faulty, but it must be bad somewhere.”
“Perhaps that’s because I am a woman.”
“No, confound it—”
“People have a strange misconception of the meaning of anarchism. If they really understood, they would all try to be anarchists.”
“What must I do to be an anarchist?”
“Give a square deal to your employee, your competitors, and your customers. “
“Whew! That is a program! What do you suppose would happen to me meanwhile?”
“Then you don’t give them a square deal now?”
“Certainly not. Who ever heard of giving competitors a square deal?”
“The trusts all have. That’s the principle on which they’re founded—cooperation. The only trouble is that they have forgotten the people. They have not made their square deal go around.”
“I see, you would substitute cooperation for competition.”
“Exactly. The business world has done it very extensively already.”
“There’s no doubt about that. It’s coming, even in my business, although we are a long way from it as yet.”
“Mr. Allen, there is something which I have wanted to know for a long time. Do you understand Christian ethics?”
“Well, I go to church once every seven days.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. However, here is my question. Can a man engage successfully in a competitive business and practice Christian ethics toward his workmen, his competitors, and his customers?”
“Just what would that practice of Christian ethics involve?”
Fred Allen was treading on ground which his conscience had seriously avoided. His business was carried on throughout the week; his religion was reserved for the Sabbath, or rather, for his church-going. Why this insistence on week day Christianity? Her answer came readily.
“Why, the application of Christian ethics to business would involve paying his workmen living wages, treating his competitors like gentlemen, and giving honest value to his customers. Could you do that in your business and make a success of it?”
He pondered her question thoughtfully, at last he said,—
“No, I couldn’t do it.”
“I imagined not.” She was sorry again. “It’s such a pity. There is so much misery and hate, so much overreaching, so much chicanery and rascality; and it is all unnecessary. We defend it in the name of competition, but none of those things are necessary to real competition. I wonder why we can’t learn that well-directed cooperation is always more potent than competition.”
“Miss Wade do you know how to teach people that?”
“No, how?’”
“Just go about saying to other business men what you have said to me to-night. After the lecture you have given me I really feel ashamed of doing my fellow men.”
“Lecture? Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to lecture—never on such a night. Just look out there to sea.”
Fred Allen looked. The moon had swung down close over the water. Its pathway, stretching away in dazzling brilliancy, gilded the flat summer sea. The breakers had ceased to roar; even the noises of the city were dying away. The night was still dark, and the silence lent an inspiring tone to its splendor.
“It is wonderful,” said Fred Allen softly.
“Can’t you see in that picture more reasons than I could ever give you for establishing human relations with your fellows? The whole universe teaches us—in every movement, in every soft line, in every delicate shadow—that harmony should replace discord, and that beauty should be the dominant thing in our lives. See those exquisite changes. Each swell alters, as it rises and falls, the color of the pathway. Yet how harmonious it all is! Our lives ought to run that way,—undulating, changing every second, and yet a part of a perfect whole.”
Fred Allen sat with his head in his hands. He had not spoken for minutes. Suddenly he stood up, resolutely.
“I suppose we ought to go,” said Ruth Wade slowly, “but it is so wonderful here.”
“Yes, I must go; otherwise—” His voice grew husky, and he stopped. At last,—“Miss Wade, will you be in Arden next month?”
“Yes, the whole month,” she answered quickly.
“Do you think I might get a place to stay for a week?”
“Why surely. You could stay at the Inn. Will you really come?”
“Yes,” he said, “if you will let me.”
“If I will let you. Why I—” She might have said that she had nothing to do about it, but she looked at him and stopped.
With a quick step he drew very close to her, seizing the hand that she had laid on the rail as he did so. She stood her ground, waiting, and looking earnestly into his agitated face.
“Miss Wade—Ruth—I—I am going up to town on the six o’clock train to-morrow morning. I had a—a telegram to-night and—”
She stood close beside him, drew her hand from under his, and laid it gently on his arm.
“I am very, very sorry,” she said simply. “It would have been better had I not come down with Sam.”
“Don’t say that.” He spoke it close to her face, then quickly drew away. “I may come to Arden?” he asked.
“Everyone is welcome to come to Arden.”
The pier was deserted. They stood alone there together—two quick-beating hearts above a mass of gently troubled waters. The moonbeams caressed their souls. The spell of the night enveloped them. For minutes they stood there—Fred Allen irresolute, gazing out to sea; Ruth Wade composed, beautiful, watching him, with all the depths of a woman’s compassion overspreading her mobile face.
She spoke at last, very gently,—
“Shall we go back to the hotel? I fear that it is late.”
It was long past eleven when they entered the hotel. The others, returning shortly after ten, had waited a few minutes and then had one to their rooms. The hotel lobby was half deserted. Ruth Wade turned with a sad smile, saying,—
“Good-night, and good-bye until August.”
Fred Allen bowed without a word. He dared not speak.
Eleanor Treat rose at nine the next morning after an almost sleepless night. Ruth Wade’s face, smiling and happy, had been continually in her dreams. She dressed hurriedly. The telephone buzzed. Was Miss Treat up?
There was a letter here for her—an important letter.
“Bring it up at once,” she ordered, imperiously.
She stopped dressing and waited, nervously. At last the letter came, addressed in Fred Allen’s decided hand. She tore it open and read,—
“I have taken the early train for town. I could not stand it any longer. Let’s always be good friends. F.A.”
Slowly she sank back into a corner of the bed. Her face was livid.
“I played my cards—all my cards—last night,” she murmured, “and I have lost and she has won.”
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