Power

I began the letter to you, dear Alvin, yesterday, and then I put it aside, and a day intervened before I could come back to it. I had all of Ben’s personal letters and notes crated and shipped from Washington to Ringman, but it took a long time with two of those bright and eager young men on the research staff of the union going through the material and separating what, as they felt, properly belonged in the union’s archives or in the Library of Congress. The results of their labor arrived yesterday, five large crates of material. I attempted to deal with it, but it defeats me, and I am of a mind to bestow all of it on the public library here. That would be a sensible place for it, a proper place. And I like the thought of interested people going to our library for information about Ben’s life—not the same one-room cottage free library he went to as a boy, but still the same library in continuation.

So there is a problem solved, and isn’t it true that at our age, most problems are relatively easy of solution? It’s the problems of youth that are vast and terrible and overwhelming. You know, it was such a problem that brought Ben to our house here in Ringman for the first time—yes, the first time I saw him. Or at least I think so. Ringman, then—it was September of 1914, just forty-four years ago—was not a very large town, less than twenty thousand people, as I remember, so I may well have seen Ben Holt before he came to our house. Being an only and motherless child, I was at boarding school and finishing school for my education but my summers were spent here, and I certainly could have seen him many times. But not seen him to know him and look and remember; that happened when he came to our house.

Mrs. Privit was our housekeeper then, already aging and slow on her feet, and I ran past her to open the door. I was expecting my cousin, Jimmy Aimesley—he died in France in 1918, poor fellow—who was coming for a few days, and I wanted to greet him myself. But when I flung open the door, there, instead of my Cousin Jimmy, was Ben Holt.

“Is that Mr. Holt? And if it is, your father is expecting him, Dorothy, so ask him to come in!” Mrs. Privit called out to me, but I was speechless and neither asked him to come in nor to remain there on our doorstep, only staring at him. You see, it was a different time than this one, a different age, and I don’t suppose there was a properly raised young woman like myself who didn’t wait from day to day for the man she dreamed of to walk into her life. How she knew, I can’t say; but I knew. I knew it would be a young giant, like this one, with eyes of sparkling blue and brown hair in a great rumpled mass that he tried to comb, but so unsuccessfully, and a mass of arm and shoulder to fill the whole doorway, and his cap in his big hands, held nervously and turned round and round nervously; and afterwards he said that all he saw was my open mouth and my own wide eyes staring at him and making him feel what he already suspected, that he was a sort of a freak, badly dressed, badly groomed, at the front entrance of a rich, great house where he had no business being.

“Well, Dorothy, is it Mr. Holt or isn’t it?” Mrs. Privit called.

“I’m Mr. Holt,” he said, confirming my hope that his voice would be rich and deep. “I have an appointment with Mr. Aimesley.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” I managed to say, and then, at once and together, I realized that he was a miner, his hands ingrained with coal dirt, his fingernails cracked and broken, his neck skin lined with the black net of his trade, his suit too small for him, and himself no fairy-tale prince but one of the men of the Ringman Pits; and I thought my heart would break with the dream shattered as quickly as it came into being. I let him into the house, closed the door behind him, and then ran upstairs to my bedroom, ashamed of myself for opening my heart to him—whether he knew or not—and giving my precious accolade to someone like himself. Mrs. Privit said afterwards that I had behaved strangely and badly, and discourteously too, and she was absolutely right. Although she knew as little as Ben Holt what had happened to me when I first opened the door.

In those old houses, privacy was always modified by an air vent, and my father’s study was directly under my bedroom. I was mortified and dismissed Ben Holt from my life as expeditiously as I had taken him into it; but curiosity was ever my weak point, and I had to know what this great, oversized coal miner had to do with my father. I opened the vent and listened.

Ben had come out of the University of Pennsylvania the previous spring. You know the story of what that meant to him, what he went through and what his mother went through for Ben to have that degree. Today, going to a college, even for a coal miner’s son, is matter of fact, not a miracle; but my father knew a miracle then and accepted miracles with the grave and thoughtful wonder of a man who regards his species each new day as if it were a newly created miracle. So the spread of silence when I opened that vent must have been occupied by my father looking at Ben, studying him with interest and respect, and smiling that slow, warm smile of his, until he said,

“Sit down, Ben, won’t you. You don’t mind if I call you Ben?”

“No, sir, Mr. Aimesley.”

“I do it as a matter of seniority, not as a point in class relations. I make that plain, because our conversation here will not be fruitful if I give any impression of patronizing you. Do you have any notion that I am patronizing you?”

“Not yet, sir.” The reply came after a moment of hesitation, and there was the note of a smile in his voice. I wanted to see him smile and felt cheated.

“Tell me when it occurs,” my father said flatly. “Do you smoke?”

“On occasion, sir.”

“Then you don’t mind if I do?”

“No, sir.”

“All right, Ben.” Silence as my father lit his cigar and took the two or three puffs that established his pleasure. “First, I want to thank you for coming here. A miner’s Sunday is precious.”

“I was glad to come, Mr. Aimesley.”

“Good. Have you any idea why I sent for you?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. We’ll come to that. First of all, I know something about you. Ten years ago, I represented your father and the other miners who died in the Ringman Massacre, as it’s called. The settlement was small enough, shamefully small, but at least it was something.”

“I know that. I’ve been grateful.”

“For what? No, don’t say things because they sound right, Ben. You were not grateful—you were as bitter as the others, and with reason. I’m not a labor lawyer. I should have done better; I should have known more, stood on firmer ground. Well, that’s done. The point is, I’ve watched you. It’s news when a miner’s son fights his way into the university, and more news when he does it without a father’s help. I don’t have to tell you what you did. You know what you did, better than I can ever know. Your mother passed away recently, didn’t she?”

“Two months ago.”

“And that left you alone, didn’t it?”

“I have no brothers or sisters, if that’s what you mean. I have relatives here in Ringman—”

“That’s what I meant,” my father said. “You have aunts and uncles, but you prefer to board with Mrs. Tarragon.”

“What did you do, sir? Have me investigated?”

“Simpler than that,” my father laughed. “I asked a few questions. Tell me something, Ben—why did you go back to the mines?”

“I’m a miner.”

“That’s a statement of condition, not a reason.”

“I have my reasons, Mr. Aimesley.”

“But you prefer to keep them to yourself. You resent the rich lawyer who puts his nose into your affairs, and you think that none of it is any of his damn business.”

There was a stretch of silence. Deliberately, my father had provoked Ben Holt, and now Ben was weighing the provocation, studying my father, and trying to gauge direction and meaning. I didn’t have to see this to know it; I knew my father, and in some strange way, I seemed to know Ben Holt—just a little.

“No, sir,” Ben said. “I guess your business is whatever you choose to make your business. But we live in Ringman. You are Joseph Aimesley, and this is the Aimesley house, and I’m a digger out at the pits.”

“And never the twain shall meet?”

“Something of that sort, Mr. Aimesley.”

“The hell with that!” my father snorted. “Don’t talk to me about class or pride, Ben. I’ve lived my life in Ringman as well as you, and for a little longer, and I’ve bucked this damn miner pride until my head is sore. Don’t tell me about pride. If they gave classes in it, there’s no one but a coal miner fit to teach it. I’m not hiding anything. If I seem periphrastic, it’s only because I am attempting to avoid offense to that pride of yours. Now to get down to facts. While you were still at the University of Pennsylvania, you received an offer to read law with the firm of Lee, Cadwallader and Seely in Pittsburgh. Am I right? No. I don’t spy on you. It just happens that Arthur Lee is my brother-in-law. I wrote to the university for your record and sent it to him and suggested that he make the offer to you.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because if you are avaricious for gold and you hear about a nugget buried somewhere, you will go and dig it up. Let us say that I am avaricious for human intelligence. Does that make sense to you?”

“Well, sir—yes. In a way.”

“But you turned down Arthur Lee. Why?”

The silence stretched again, and my father let it stretch. He would be lighting his cigar again, I decided, and regarding Ben Holt moodily, as he so often regarded me. When Ben answered him, his voice was so soft that I had to strain to hear.

“I had two brothers, sir.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that, Ben.”

“Daniel, fourteen years older than I. Franklin, fifteen years older.”

“What happened to them, Ben?”

“The Harkness cave-in. Eighteen ninety-nine. It’s forgotten by now. They worked together, as a team.”

“I see.”

“Well, that was a good offer from Pittsburgh. I’m very grateful to you for thinking of me, Mr. Aimesley.”

“I wish it wouldn’t end there, Ben. A lawyer is well armed. You can do a lot as a lawyer, Ben.”

“Yes, sir. I know that. But first I have to figure out what I want to do.”

So my letter to you, dear Alvin, goes on and on. I put it aside yesterday, and later that evening I rummaged through the drawers of my old bedroom chest. Father never changed my room, never got rid of anything, and there in a drawer I found the diary I had kept for three years, from the age of fourteen to the age of seventeen. So you see that I was a very usual young lady who kept a diary during just those years when a girl is expected to. It continues up to a point, and my point was the day I met Ben Holt. Late at night on that day, I made the following entry:

Today I met a divine, awful young man. His name is much more exalted than he is, since he is only a coal miner. His name is Benjamin Renwell Holt, and he has caused me nothing but trouble, so I hope I will never see him again and that Father forgets the whole thing. Cousin Jimmy also arrived.

That was the last entry I ever made in the diary. Can it be that when you first touch the manner and meaning of your existence, a teen-age diary is put aside? Anyway, during dinner, my Cousin Jimmy Aimesley said something about Ben Holt. He had arrived as Ben was leaving, and Father introduced them. I remember that Jimmy was terribly impressed with Ben’s size, bearing, and a certain quality of magnetism so striking in Ben, and he mentioned this. Jimmy was small and underweight, and had always admired and envied big men.

“I don’t think he’s anything to admire,” I said.

My father raised his brows. “Then you know him, Dorothy?”

“No, I only opened the door for him.”

“But you know he’s no one to admire,” my father went on. I think I was forewarned; I knew that tone of my father’s; but I had to go on and hit out somehow against Ben, I couldn’t stop, and I said,

“He’s just a miner, but even a miner’s hands and neck could be clean when he comes calling on Sunday.”

Father’s face clouded, but he would never allow an argument during dinner. “That’s enough, Dorothy,” he said quietly. “We’ll discuss this later.”

After dinner, Father gave Jimmy a copy of Mr. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, an old favorite of his which, he felt, would amuse Jimmy and improve his outlook on the world, and motioned me to follow him into his study. Poor Jimmy was no great prize, but to be marched off like this on his first night with us was almost more than I could bear, and in the study, I stared at Father morosely.

Bluntly, with no moral precepts to introduce the matter, Father said, “We’ll stick to the facts, Dorothy. They are more enlightening than speculations on egalitarianism. You feel a personal affront in the fact that Mr. Holt did not remove the signs of his trade before he came calling here.”

“It is Sunday. He could have washed.”

“I’ve raised you poorly,” Father sighed, “but we’ll let that go by the board for the moment. How the hell do you know that he didn’t wash?”

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.

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?”

“Year-round work? Yes, sir, just about the only time.”

“But I thought last year was a good year.”

“In a way of speaking, because war was in the air. In a normal year, it’s work when the market wants coal and layoff when it doesn’t. As a kid, even when my father was alive, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t hungry, and when my father died and I went into the mines—why, my stomach became a bottomless pit. I heard an operator once say that miners eat too much.”

“How callous!”

“Yes and no, Miss Aimesley. He had watched miners eat. What he didn’t understand is that the kind of work a miner does burns up food like a fire. Miners do eat more than anyone else I ever heard of—but if they don’t eat, they can’t work. Have you ever seen a fat miner?”

I shook my head and said, “But, Mr. Holt, I’ve heard so much of the horrors and suffering of a miner’s life. I don’t remember the great disaster of 1904, but just this past summer, I heard the disaster whistles screeching twice, and every other summer too. Perhaps I’m not as sensitive as I should be, but I do live in a mining town, and I know something about how hard it is for the miners. I remember one winter, before Mother died, when she said to me, ‘I won’t have to take the curtains down for cleaning, Dorothy.’ But her face was so sad that I asked her why, and then she said, ‘When the curtains stay white, the miners are starving.’ I mean—some of it I can understand. Only, one thing I never understood—”

“Yes, Miss Aimesley?”

“Why miners remain miners. They’re not slaves. Those people you told us about in England, well, they were indentured servants, weren’t they? But today in the United States, no one is forced to stay with one job. When there’s no work, why don’t the miners go somewhere else where the work isn’t so cruel, perhaps? Why do they stay in the mines until they are hurt or killed or worn out?”

“We need coal and someone has to mine it,” Father said.

“But that’s not the answer. Not to my question.”

“I guess it isn’t,” Ben said. “And I think that if I heard your question once, I heard it a hundred times. Last week, your father told me that miners were too proud—”

“Not too proud. Just damn proud to a point of irritation!” Father interrupted.

“But you’re right, sir. They are proud and headstrong and independent, and they’re that way because they’re miners. It’s hard to explain a miner to anyone who hasn’t lived with them, and the hardest thing to get across is that most miners love their work and they take pride in it and—well, it’s just what they want to do. As dangerous and dirty and back-breaking as it, it’s what a miner wants and what he loves. I work in the mines because I want to and because I’d rather work in the mines than do anything else.”

“But how can you say that?” I burst out. “You’re a college man, Mr. Holt. Surely you want something more from life than to be a miner?”

“Do I? Should I, Miss Aimesley? I’m not being impertinent—I’m perfectly serious. I love the mines and I love the men who work in the mines, and I hate them too. I love them and hate them, and there have been nights I couldn’t sleep, trying to understand what it all means to me. I remember the first time I went down a shaft. I was only fourteen then, and when the elevator car sank into that pit of black—blacker than any black in the whole world—I wanted to scream with terror. And down in the pits and tunnels, the terror became worse and worse. All I wanted was to get out of there before the whole weight of the world fell on me and choked the life out of me, and all I could say to myself was that I’d die of hunger before I’d ever be a miner. And other miners have told me that it’s always that way the first time. But the second time, the fear is less. And a time comes when it goes—and the tunnel is your home and your life, and you live with danger and death and it nourishes you and it makes you proud. Because no one else in the whole world is as skilled as you and as brave as you. Every time you put up a timber, your life depends on your skill and judgment, and every time you set off a blast, it’s the same thing. You hate it and curse it, but you want it—and a time comes when you’re its prisoner just as surely as if you were indentured.”

He finished, and Father and I sat there in silence. Remember that I was not yet eighteen, and I had never seen a young man like Ben Holt before or sat across the table from him. The young men I knew talked about tennis or the shows they had seen on their visits to New York or how much money they hoped to make and how successful they hoped to be. They did not talk, vibrantly and poetically, of Stygian pits of darkness, where men drove dynamite into a black rock face and lived and worked in clouds of coal dust and deadly gas. Nor must you feel that this was a pose or a charade on the part of Ben. Ben knew as well as anyone else what a deadly, hopeless hell the life of a miner was; but, as he told me afterwards, confronting me, he had to paint a picture that was brave and romantic. And to a very large extent, he believed it. You see, in the beginning, then, I did not fall in love with the Ben Holt you knew—no, not even with the headstrong, desperate man you met in West Virginia, leading an army of armed miners, and certainly not with the white-haired, somber giant who taught a whole world the meaning of power. I look back through time as an old woman, my dear Alvin, and there was not one man but many men. In some ways, we don’t change at all; but in other ways, we do change so much.

Shall I finish my story of that evening? I am not putting down the actual words that were said—you must realize that—it was so very long ago; but not so different, either, for while there are things that have become vague and fuzzy, those first days with Ben are clear and unclouded. We talked some more at the table, or rather he talked while Father and I listened. Once the barrier of place and class was broken, the words poured out of him in an endless torrent, and nothing he said was dull or familiar. From his point of view, he found there in our home a sweetness and warmth that he had never encountered before. He had no illusions about the virtues of the rich, but neither did he promote the legend of the virtuous poor. He had lived with poverty all his life, and he had sufficient knowledge of the degradation and suspicion and ignorance and hatred it breeds. In later years, I have seen Ben stalking like a raging lion in the homes of millionaire coal operators, filled with and voicing anger and contempt; but there was another Ben, and we were not millionaire coal operators, only a small-town lawyer who lived alone with his daughter.

After dinner, we went into the parlor, and Father asked me to play something for them, while he and Ben smoked cigars. Father’s one extravagance was cigars, and he always kept a large humidor of panatelas, fragrant and mild, that he had sent to him from Cuba. Ben, on the other hand, smoked a brand of cigars which I remember seeing only in the coal towns of Pennsylvania, and which has today suffered a well-deserved demise. They were referred to as “the digger’s” or “miner’s consolation,” and in those days sold two for five cents, and no one who ever smelled their fragrance will forget it. Ben had a pocketful of them and longed for a cigar, but did not dare light one in our house. I remember his face as he lit the panatela Father pressed on him, and in after years, whenever he speculated on the psychology of a union leader who sold out, I would twit him about that cigar. Anyway, there he sat, with a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other, trying his best not to look self-conscious, scrunching his long arms and legs, so that he would show less shirt cuff and less skin between pants and socks, and listening to my rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata,” an important part of the repertoire of every serious young lady pianist of the time.

He had been wonderfully possessed and at ease all evening, but now he began to withdraw into himself and become surly. It was not that he didn’t enjoy the music; I have almost never known a miner who didn’t have a feeling for good music—perhaps because there is so much of the Welsh blood and influence in them; but rather because he suddenly saw himself in his position and resented it, the fact that he did not dare to smoke his own cigars and had to sit there in silence and listen to my less than noble performance. He felt that he was being patronized. When I had finished playing, he made some polite remarks, and a little while after that, he took his leave.

Then, as always, I was sensitive to his every mood and action. Father was not. After he had seen Ben to the door, he turned to me, rubbing his hands with delight and grinning, and asked me,

“Well, what do you think of your unwashed digger now?”—for all the world as if Ben was something he had created specially for that evening.

“I think that’s a dreadful way to characterize him!”

“Honey,” he cried, exploding with laughter, “that was your characterization, not mine.”

“At least I want to forget it.”

“Then he got through to you.”

“I found him quite interesting,” I said demurely. “I just wonder what happened when I was playing. He became very surly and unhappy, I think.”

“Did he? Well, a young man’s to be forgiven his moods. The point is, he’s quite a man with quite a mind. You’ll agree to that, won’t you?”

“He’s certainly the most opinionated young man I ever met.”

“You mean that he has opinions and voices them. That’s not exactly the same thing as being opinionated.”

“He’s very sure of himself.”

“And with reason,” Father said. “He’s had no one to depend on but himself.”

Should I have told Father that I was in love? It was something I hardly dared to admit to myself—that for the first time in my life, I wanted a person so desperately that I could not think of anything but Ben Holt. I don’t believe that these things are accidents. If I had left it alone, perhaps I would never have seen him again, although Ben insisted that he was already in love with me. But that was after the fact, and people love differently, and to be in love—if indeed he was—meant something else to Ben than it meant to me.

So here is a whole day, another day, gone with my writing, dear Alvin, and now for the first time, this journey so far back into the past is beginning to trouble me just a little. But I will finish it as truthfully as I know how, which is little less than truthful. I mean that the Dorothy Aimesley and the Ben Holt I write about are like two people I have read about or been told about. Have you ever remarked on the fact that in a dream you will see yourself in the third person, so to speak? This remembering is somewhat like a dream.

Two days, and I have written nothing, but I have gone back into a past I never thought I would revisit. What sort of people are we, Alvin, that we look upon growing old with such skepticism and fear—yet avoid the past as the plague and revisit it with even greater fear? But I have been prowling over the old house, going through drawers and rummaging in the attic, and I have even wept a little over this and that. In my old bedroom, just where I had placed it more than forty years ago, I found a long, long letter from Ben, and I am sending it to you but in its proper place. You may peruse its intimacies without embarrassment and use it just as your own judgment dictates.

I thought that I had the letter I wrote to Ben after the Sunday evening I spoke of above; I had some notion that he kept it and gave it back to me some time later. Well, perhaps he did—or perhaps he threw it away. Ben did not suffer from sentimentalism—and I mean that more as praise than criticism. In any case, I could not find it, but I remember the general tenor of it. The evening after, Monday evening, I wrote to him:

Dear Mr. Holt:

I enjoyed our evening with you, and would like to see you again, if you can find time. Since I am leaving for school soon, I have only this coming Sunday free. If your day is also free, I think it might be nice to pack a picnic basket and spend the day out of doors. Providing the weather is suitable. If you can let me know before the weekend, I will be happy to fix the picnic basket.

Or in much the same sense, if perhaps even more restrained. Still, then, in 1914, it was a piece of impropriety, and shattering in that I addressed myself to a coal miner, a person of no family, figuratively and literally. It explains my state of mind better than anything else might, and when I had mailed it to Mrs. Tarragon’s boardinghouse, I felt that I had indulged in an action little short of criminal. Don’t smile at the desperateness of my situation, for that would only be evidence of the poverty of your own later years. A girl of seventeen, truly in love for the first time, experiences something as rash and wonderful as anything that will ever happen to her again—and more so, believe me. So if I could not eat and could not sleep and breathed air as sweet as honey and walked in a world of music wherever I went, this was not unmixed with guilt and remorse. My advances were improper and reckless, and whatever Ben Holt had thought of me before, surely he would think only less of me now.

I had planned not to tell my father of my action until I received some reply from Ben, but on Wednesday, at dinner, he said to me,

“Dorothy, even if you have fallen in love with that young miner, you’ll prove nothing by a death of starvation.”

I stared at him in amazement and mumbled denials, but he had lived with me too long not to recognize the first substantial break in an appetite that had been healthy, to put it mildly. So I blurted out what I had done, indulged a few tears, and surprisingly was able to eat a proper dinner. Father was responsible for that. He shrugged and pointed out that at worst, Ben Holt could only say no.

“Then you’re not angry at me?”

“When you decide to marry Ben Holt or John Doe or anyone else, we’ll get down to basic things. Meanwhile, you’ve only invited a boy to a picnic. If your mother were alive, she might sensibly insist on a chaperon—”

“But you won’t—please, Daddy?”

“He hasn’t accepted yet, has he?”

“But I’m going off to school. What harm—”

“I am not worried about your safety or your honor, Dorothy. We’ll talk about it when you hear from him.”

I received my reply from Ben the following morning. “Dear Miss Aimesley,” he wrote, “Thank you for your kind invitation. I will be at your home at eleven o’clock in the forenoon on Sunday.” And he signed it “Benjamin R. Holt.” How I scrutinized it and analyzed it! In time, Ben told me that he had rewritten it three times, but I never knew whether to believe that; although it may have been. I never fully understood why Ben wanted so desperately to make a proper impression upon us. Certainly, he wanted nothing from my father. Was he in love with me? Not then, I don’t think; yet all of his actions were formal and thoughtful, unlike himself. Or am I being unfair to him? It is so easy to worship Ben, as so many did, that perhaps I am bending over backwards to form a fair picture. I do know that we, myself, my father, and our whole way of life were of a special significance to Ben. I do believe that during the whole course of Ben’s life, Father was the only man of close relationship with whom he never quarreled and never broke. In later years, when Ben would rant about the iniquity and hypocrisy of the rich, all the rich, I would remind him of Father. “That’s another category,” he would bark at me. “Joe Aimesley’s a civilized man!”

Anyway, I showed Father the note. “Do you want to go?” he asked me.

“Of course I do. I wouldn’t have written him otherwise, and I’m so ashamed of it.”

“Of letting him know that you like him?”

“Yes.”

“If he couldn’t see it for himself, he has no sense.”

“And you won’t make me have Aunt Alice or someone like that for a chaperon?”

Father just looked at me and shook his head in despair, and so it had worked, and I had my day with Ben Holt. And it was that day that made all the difference in the world, and I don’t regret it. I don’t suppose I could have loved anyone who wasn’t like Ben, and I’m glad it was Ben.

Those were the days of long dresses. I wore a pink cotton with a red silk sash, but before that I was up at six o’clock to see to the picnic lunch. At seven-thirty, when Mrs. Privit entered her kitchen, I had turned her work table into an utter confusion of boiled eggs, sliced olives, mashed anchovies, ham paste, liver paste, and pickles. She drove me out of there and said she would finish it herself. Not only did she disapprove of my plans for the day, but she saw it as an alternative to church.

We were only intermittent churchgoers, for my father was an unprejudiced agnostic, but when I was home, his sister, my Aunt Alice Aimesley, who was one of the leaders of the woman’s suffrage movement in eastern Pennsylvania, would turn up each Sunday morning to see that I attended church. Her attitude mystified my father, for most of the year Aunt Alice was lecturing here and there and all over the country on the suffrage movement with never even a nod to religion. It was only in Ringman that she took an interest in the godless upbringing of her poor motherless niece. This Sunday I had finished dressing, at about half past ten, and came downstairs to hear her arguing with my father.

I paused on the stairs to listen to her contention that my wickedness was threefold: not only was I missing church service to picnic, but my companion in iniquity was a miner, and I was proceeding unchaperoned. To which my father replied,

“That comes poorly from anyone, but badly from you, Alice.”

“Just what do you mean?”

“Do you wear one face for the suffrage movement and another for Ringman?”

“Of all the insufferable accusations—”

“I am not accusing you of anything, Alice. I am simply pointing out that this is Dorothy’s last Sunday at home before she returns to school, and I intend for her to spend it as she desires. I will not have you questioning her morality or her intentions. If you are going to fight for the freedom and liberation of your sex, you might as well apply your credo here in Ringman as anywhere else.”

I had never heard Father talk to his sister like that before, and the result was that she stormed out of the house without waiting to speak to me. When I came downstairs, Father had gone into his study. He never mentioned the incident, and promptly at eleven, Ben appeared, scrubbed and cleaned and wearing the same black suit. He brought me a bouquet of roses, beautiful, long-stemmed red roses that even then were quite expensive. It was a lovely gift, and after I had put them into a vase, I called Father out of his study to admire them. Then Mrs. Privit, her mouth drawn into a thin and disapproving line, appeared with the picnic basket, which Ben took and hooked on his arm, just as though a Sunday picnic were a weekly matter with him. Father told us to enjoy ourselves, and we walked out of the house and down the road with never a word between us until Ben thought to ask me where I would like to go.

“We might climb Belfast Ridge and picnic on one of the flat rocks there.”

He agreed, and then remembered to tell me how pretty I looked.

“Thank you,” I smiled.

“I mean, I thought of it when I first saw you, but I didn’t have all my wits about me.”

“Oh?”

He didn’t speak for a while after that, and we strolled down the road, each of us immersed in meditation. Away from our house, toward the wagon track that went up Belfast Ridge in those days, were only farmhouses. Today, a part of that area has been developed for small homes and the rest of it is a golf course. There is a shopping center where the new highway cuts into Belfast Ridge, and it is all very busy and garish; but at the time I write of, there were only the rolling fields and the clumps and windbreaks of maple and oak and birch, the colors changing already in the early autumn and glints of yellow and gold all over the landscape. One of the ironies of coal and the men who mine it is that so often the veins lie in the most beautiful country imaginable—a good description for the hills that surround Ringman. And that was such a cool and clear morning that my whole memory of the day is crisp and glistening.

It was the first time we had ever been alone with each other, and I was still smarting with shame at my boldness for having written to him. Ben must have sensed this, because he mentioned that he was grateful to me for having taken the initiative and written to him. He thanked me.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I can’t pretend that I am pleased with myself.”

“Why not?”

“Because young ladies don’t make advances toward young men they barely know.”

“Well, surely it’s not an advance to write me a note and say that you would like to see me again.”

“It certainly is!” I snapped.

He looked at me with amazement and pointed out that if I hadn’t written the note, we probably would not have seen each other again for a long time—if ever.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Well, please tell me, Miss Aimesley,” he said, stopping short and facing me, “do you or don’t you want to spend the day with me?”

“Of course I do,” I blurted out, almost in tears at this point.

“Then what’s this all about?”

“You should have written to me.”

We walked on again and for a while in silence. Ben was shaking his head. “Oh no,” he finally said. “I guess you never open your eyes and take a good look at the world, do you, Miss Aimesley?”

“Of course I do.”

“You keep saying that.”

“What?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, what do you want me to say, Mr. Holt? I’m afraid I’m a very ordinary person. I’m afraid pearls of wisdom can’t drop from my lips every time I open my mouth.”

“You’re not a very ordinary person at all, and I’m not much good at polite small talk, Miss Aimesley. How could I write you a letter? Or call on you? Or anything like that? I’m a miner. My name is Ben Holt, and I live in Mrs. Tarragon’s boardinghouse, and if I had a brain in my head, I would have torn your letter to pieces and forgotten all about it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m a damned fool enough to think that you’re the most desirable and loveliest woman I ever saw in all my life, and because you and your father made me feel like a human being.”

That quieted me. We walked on for ten or fifteen minutes without a word being said, and then I saw three young men coming down the road on bicycles. They were miners in Levis and blue shirts, and they rode girls on their handlebars, skinny, giggling, screeching girls, and they all set up a shout of welcome when they saw Ben, “Benny!” “Benny, buddy!” “Oh, what a nifty, what a peach that is, Benny!” They braked to a stop, two of the girls tumbling off, and gathered around us. Flustered and mumbling for the first time since I knew him, Ben introduced me. The boys were shaggy-haired, pale, their skin tattooed with coal dust. Their speech was the strange nasal dialect of the miners in that part of Pennsylvania. They looked at me closely; they recognized my name; they nodded, muttered a few words, and then rode off. The girls said nothing at all. They departed in a mixture of restraint, irritation, and deference; and all I could think of was that here on Sunday, when the poorest workman put on his best, three young miners were out in Levis. It was a small, unworthy thought, but they became the image of Ben and Ben became them, and my heart sank, and I think I would have given everything I owned in the world to be back safely at home, never knowing that a Ben Holt existed in this world.

As for Ben, he seemed to know what was going on in my mind. His wide face was thoughtful and grave, and as we walked on, he appeared to be a thousand miles away; so much so that I was shocked when he said to me, very gently,

“Would you like me to take you home, Miss Aimesley?”

“Oh? Oh no—no. Why should you think that I want to go home?”

“Well—well, it’s kind of hard for someone like you to be out with a roughneck for the first time and enjoy it and feel secure.”

“You’re not a roughneck,” I replied indignantly. “If you were, I certainly would not be out walking with you on a Sunday!”

“Or any other day?” he smiled.

“Or any other day, Mr. Holt. And as for someone like me—I hardly think you have a right to talk in terms of someone like me, Mr. Holt, since you know nothing about me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And as for feeling secure, I feel perfectly secure. Or are you suggesting that I ought to feel afraid of you, Mr. Holt?”

“You know that I’m suggesting nothing of the kind, Miss Aimesley. And the last thing in the world I desired was to make you angry.”

“But I am not angry, Mr. Holt—not at all.”

And now, suddenly, we were both of us smiling and relaxed for the first time, and feeling young and splendid in the fine noonday sun, and climbing bravely up the wagon track to Belfast Ridge. Once or twice, where the road was very rough, Ben gave me his hand. I remember the size of it. It closed over my hand and devoured it, and the hard, calloused surface of his palm gripped my fingers like iron. We didn’t say much going up the hill; it’s a hard climb, and we saved our breath, and then presently, we stood on the top, the world unfolding beneath us, woods and fields and hills on one side to the west of us, and on the other side, eastward, the collieries, the scarred earth, the piles of culm, the spur tracks and trestles and clefts of erosion, and the dull, dirty brick company houses of the miners, lying in the haze across the valley, terrace upon terrace, swinging around and folding down finally into the streets of Ringman.

Ben found a broad, flat rock, and I said that it would do splendidly as a table. I refused to let Ben help me unpack the basket, but insisted that he sit down and rest himself. He hardly took his eyes off me now, and he was relaxed enough to ask me whether I would mind his smoking a cigar.

“Not at all,” I said. “I like cigar smoke.”

“Well, the miner’s consolation is not exactly a cigar, but up here the wind will blow away the smoke, Miss Aimesley—Miss Aimesley?”

“Yes?”

“May I call you Dorothy?”

I nodded, going on with the lunch and not daring to look up at him right then. I knew that his eyes were on me. He went on,

“You see, Dorothy—those kids—well, a miner’s kids—it’s hard to talk about mining. It’s just so hard.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Well, how can I explain it? Where do you start? It’s like we’re a people apart—a race apart. I once read a book by a man called Kingsley, a book called The Water Babies, supposedly a kid’s book in England. I was just a kid when I picked it up and read it—a book about a chimney sweep who was dirty because he didn’t care about being clean. I remember how enraged I was when I read it, not because it was a snobbish, silly book, but because this damn fool who wrote it didn’t understand that you can’t clean chimneys without getting dirty—and that soot is not just dirt.” Ben held out one of his big hands. “I scrubbed for fifteen minutes this morning, and the tattoo of the mines is still there.”

Now I faced him, and our eyes met. He grinned suddenly, spread his arms, and leaned back where he sat there on the ground. I offered him a sandwich. It was tiny. He swallowed it in two bites, and I gave him another one and a hard-boiled egg. He was hungry, and I was pleased to see that he liked the food. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Holt,” I said to him. He said, “Ben Holt.” “Ben Holt, then. Tell me about yourself, Ben.” But he wanted to know where to begin, how to begin. He looked at me in my pink dress, and I sensed what he was thinking. “There was a man called Ollie Bricker, whom I tried to kill once by dropping a lump of coal off a tipple onto his head. But I missed him. I was just a kid. Is that the kind of thing you want to know about me? Does it tell you anything about me?”

“I’m glad you missed him and that you don’t have anyone’s life on your conscience.”

“When you say something like that,” he asked curiously, “you mean it, don’t you? Everything you say?”

“Yes. Why did you want to kill him?”

“He was a cracker boss.”

“Oh? What’s a cracker boss?”

“He runs the screen room,” he grinned derisively. “Now you want to know what a screen room is.”

“Yes.” I gave him more sandwiches and another egg and some pickles.

“I suppose you know what kind of coal we mine here?”

“Anthracite. I know some things about coal.”

“All right. You don’t treat anthracite as you do bituminous. The bituminous falls to pieces as it burns, but the anthracite has to be broken into pieces of approximately the same size. It’s what we call a fancy product, and some people think it’s the best coal in the world. It is, for some purposes—but it’s hard to fire. When it was first discovered here in Pennsylvania, back in colonial times, they couldn’t market it in Philadelphia because people didn’t know how to fire it. They called it ‘black diamonds’ in contempt, but that’s just what it was, and when you do fire it, it burns with a hot, beautiful flame and gives off almost no smoke. After the anthracite is mined, it’s broken down into small pieces by a machine we call a breaker. But at this point, the coal is mixed with slate and other undesirable rock, and this rock has to be picked out of it. That’s a job done by kids—even today—they’re called breaker boys. The broken coal passes through a long chute, and the breaker boys sit on benches over the chute, and all day long they crouch over picking the slate out of the coal. They can’t stop because the coal doesn’t stop, and by midday, the chute is so full of coal dust that you can’t see, and your eyes are burning and your throat and lungs are full of the stuff, and the roar of the chute has taken your hearing away, and in the summer you sweat and roast and dream of a drink of water and in the winter you shiver and freeze, and the dirty swine who sees to it that you never stop and never take a rest is the cracker boss; so I just made up my mind to kill him, and that was it.”

All this poured out of him casually, almost indifferently, between bites of sandwich and sips of hot coffee.

“How old were you, Ben?” I whispered.

“Thirteen, I guess—”

“How terrible!”

“It wasn’t terrible, Dorothy. It was normal and ordinary.”

“For you.”

“Of course for me. I didn’t resent working in the chute; it took away my summers—it took away the best part of being a kid, but I didn’t resent it because I didn’t know any other way, and you have to know another way to resent.”

“And now you know another way, and you’re full of resentment,” I said.

“Yes and no. When I look at you, Dorothy, I see a girl like no other girl I ever knew. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t know you well enough. But I tell myself that. And then I resent the way it’s been for you, easy and clean and gentle all your life, and for your father, and that big house of yours—”

“Is it only hard your way? What do you suppose Father felt and I felt when my mother died?”

“What I felt when my mother died,” he replied bluntly. “And maybe something of what my mother felt when two sons and a husband died in the pits.”

“I’m sorry, Ben.”

“Sure. You’re tender and compassionate, but you’re in another world. How do I cross over? If I want to. I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know if you want me to.” He held up one of our tiny picnic sandwiches. “I’ve never eaten anything like this before. I’m twenty-two years old, and I’ve never eaten food like this before. Or been to a picnic before. I couldn’t sleep last night for knowing I was going to see you today and be with you, but Jesus Christ, how I resent you!”

“I don’t own a coal mine,” I said slowly. “I didn’t make any of your world, Ben Holt, and neither did my father. The first time I saw you, I resented the way your hands looked. That makes as much sense as for you to resent me because I’ve never been hungry and because my father has a nice house.”

“I know that.”

“I’m glad you do—sometimes. And as for myself, I’m not very unusual. There are thousands and thousands of girls like me. You went to college. You must have met girls like me.”

“You think so?”

“I’m asking you, Ben.”

“I held two jobs one year in college. I waited table in the dining room during the day and I worked off campus late at night. In an all-night counter place. The kids with money used to wind up their dates there. I remember a girl came in one night with a feller—she was pretty enough to take your breath away. I guess I stared at her, and she said to stop staring at her and annoying her. You can imagine what I felt like. She ordered eggs and left the bottom of her plate covered with the yellow. Then she tipped me. She borrowed ten pennies and pressed each one of them into the yellow muck on the bottom of her plate.”

“You remember that,” I nodded. “I guess you’ll remember that until the day you die. You don’t want to ever forget it, do you, Ben Holt?”

“No! Because I dug those pennies out and washed them! Because I needed that ten cents!”

“I suppose there might be cruel miners—bad miners. Even plain wicked miners. Even a miner’s daughter who was just nasty through and through. Or couldn’t that be?”

I think the most wonderful thing about Ben was his smile. His face would become like a storm, dark and brooding and full of impending wrath, and then he would smile the way he smiled that day; and when he did, my whole heart went out to him.

“It could be,” he nodded.

And that was when our day began, really, a wonderful day with a Ben Holt so few people ever knew.

A whole week now, dear Alvin, since I broke off what is already a considerable manuscript. The truth is that during this time, I had to resist an impulse to destroy what I have written—and then talk you out of what you propose to do with all our memories of Ben’s life. I read it through. What possible meaning or importance can such meanderings have? I have been quite depressed, which is unusual for me, and this searching back into our past makes life seem even shorter than it actually is—and if anything, more meaningless.

Well, I went down to Washington last week. The union had a large banquet—of course you know this—to celebrate the completion of their new building, and I had hoped to see you there. I was disappointed when you didn’t come. You will recall the meeting we had with Frank Lloyd Wright—is it possible that twenty years have gone by since then?—when Ben first asked him to design the building. The excitement I felt watching them meet for the first time—what was it someone said? “Two giants of our time”—or something like that. They struck it off, didn’t they, but really, neither of them knew or understood each other. I am so suspicious of the flashy “great men” meetings that are sprinkled through history. What excited Ben chiefly was the fact that he and the union were commissioning the greatest living architect to do a building for them. It was another step, another rung in the ladder; but I don’t believe he ever cared about the building itself. Mr. Wright talked about the material and symbolic significance of a building to house the union that mined coal. Ben was a thousand miles away; he had a strike on his hands and he was being attacked from within the union again—

But all that is beside the point. They wanted me at the dedication of the building because, as they put it, “It marked the fulfillment of Ben’s fondest dream.” What nonsense! I know the good and bad of Ben, but the last thing in the world he gave two damns about was that building or any building.

Well, I came and I went, and at least it lifted me out of my doldrums. The public-relations man at the union—the new one, Smithson, a bright, alert young thing with ivy written all over him; they tell me he majored in trade unionism at college—had made arrangements for me to lunch at the White House with the good mistress there; but at the last minute, it was called off, due to pressures of this and that. I suppose that one of the minor rewards for being a hostess in such a position is an exemption from explanations. If matters intervene they intervene, and that’s all there is to it. Just as well.

I drove back from Washington to Ringman alone. I never used to enjoy driving, but lately I seem to have developed a taste for it. I drive slowly—I am sure every other driver on the road berates me and that I confirm all the clichés about women drivers—and driving gives me a chance to think, not thinking in any constructive sense, but to allow my thoughts to wander here and there and everywhere.

I lived through, once again, that golden September Sunday with Ben—much as I wrote of it and much different too; so I begin to mistrust all accounts of things that have happened, and I shall never again read anyone’s account of a real life with any real pleasure. I have a sort of theory that in a person’s life, any moment is an eternity and utterly peculiar unto itself. I am no more able to recapture the moods and fancies and exultations of a girl of seventeen than you are, my dear Alvin, and I do respect you as a writer. In my mind, I watched Dorothy Aimesley and Ben Holt with considerable detachment and some obtuseness. I watched him kiss her for the first time. I watched them sit there on the rock on top of the ridge for their own eternity, in the wonderful silence of discovery. I watched them walking, hand in hand, his big bulk in black looking over her small pink self.

I tried to remember why I fell in love with Ben Holt. Is the answer as unnecessary as the question? In the manuscript you sent me about your own first involvement with Ben in West Virginia, you mention the first time you saw your Laura. You saw her not as she was, but as you wanted her to be. Do we actually operate that way, like children who see toys in store windows and desire them? Perhaps we do, and with no more sense or purpose; and at least it provides for me a memory of a day that was rich and golden.

But nothing was consummated or finished on that day. Ben brought me home at five in the afternoon and left me at the door to my house, and he left without even a small kiss for farewell.

That was his own shyness at our house, and it lessened my state of beatitude not an iota. Up the stairs to my room, my feet never touching the steps; and at my mirror, I conducted a thorough examination of what had so fascinated and captured Benjamin Renwell Holt. At dinner, my father looked at me long and curiously before he said,

“Dorothy, are you in love?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

He referred to it only once more. “Until now, Dorothy, you’ve known boys and dated boys. This is a man.”

“I know that, Daddy.”

“Then the only advice I have is to use common sense.”

I told myself that it was good advice, and I determined to follow it. In any case, I would be leaving for school on Friday, and after that, my romance would mark time. As for seeing Ben again before Friday, I hardly thought that it would happen. But it did. Tuesday night, he telephoned and asked whether he could call on me the following evening. I invited him to dinner. He protested but I insisted, and finally he agreed. I didn’t know that he would have to take the day off at the mines, pleading illness, to be at our house on time and clean and presentable.

When I told Father that I had invited Ben to dinner the following evening, his only reaction was to say that Ben was always welcome. Then I asked Father why Ben had turned down the job with the Pittsburgh law firm.

“Did Ben tell you that? Why didn’t you ask him?”

“Ben didn’t speak about it. I listened at the register the first time he was here.”

“Did you? If you lack other virtues, Dorothy, I’m gratified that you’re honest.”

“I’ve always been too curious. Why did he turn down the job, Daddy?”

“I’m not sure I know,” Father replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps he didn’t want to be a lawyer. There are people who don’t, you know.”

“Did you have something else in mind when you asked him here?” I pursued it.

“Oh—possibly. My own law practice is nothing to write home about, but I could take a young man on.”

I nodded. “It could never happen now.”

“Why?”

“I think he likes me a great deal. He’s too proud to work for the father of a girl he likes.”

“I see.”

But at dinner the next evening, Ben was as formal and reserved as he had ever been—more so, for he said next to nothing compared to the last time he was here. He and Father talked a little about the case of one Steve Padowski, a miner who was accused of theft and assault, and whom Father was defending. It happened that Ben knew the man, and was able to tell Father something about him. Then the war and local politics. After dinner, Father pleaded work and retired into his study. Ben and I sat in the parlor. I showed him an album of family pictures that evening, and I remember that I was a little disappointed at his lack of interest. He tried to appear interested, but made a poor show of it. Then we talked about one thing and another and then about my going away.

“You’ll forget about me soon enough, Dorothy,” Ben said flatly.

“I hardly see why in just two months. I’ll be back for the Thanksgiving Day weekend.”

“It’s not a question of time.”

“Then what is it a question of?”

“The two different worlds we exist in. You know that, Dorothy.”

“You keep talking about two different worlds. I haven’t mentioned it once, but you can’t forget, can you?”

“Because you’ve never seen my world, Dorothy. You’ve never walked into it the way I walked into yours.”

“I’m sure that if I spent an evening in a coal miner’s house, I’d never want to see you again,” I smiled.

“Perhaps so.”

“Then you ought to try me, Ben Holt.”

“It’s not as simple as that, Dorothy. I’m a miner. That’s the basic thing. You don’t just walk into a miner’s house. You walk into a miner’s world and remain there, day after day, year after year. Could you ever see yourself doing that?”

“You are also a college man, and a person of will and intelligence. Do you intend to be a miner all your life, Ben?”

“Possibly.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I was never more serious. Doesn’t it make any sense to you that a person should want to be a miner?”

“No,” I said plainly. “No, not at all. It’s a cruel and heartbreaking life, and it makes no sense to me that anyone should choose it when he has an alternative.”

“I imagine there are a lot of things about me that make no sense to you,” he said bitterly.

“Well, for heaven’s sake—of course there are, and there must be any number of things about me that make no sense at all to you. But that doesn’t make things impossible, does it? And that’s no reason to have a quarrel, is it?”

“I’m not quarreling!” he snapped.

“You’re angry.”

“I’m not angry at you. I’m just angry. I’m angry at a world that makes you ashamed to think of yourself as a miner’s wife.”

“Ben—Ben, believe me, I’m too young to think of myself as anyone’s wife.”

“In your middle class, sure you are. In my class, it’s different.”

“Ben—” I shook my head. “It takes time to know people.”

“There’s only one thing I can do for you, Dorothy,” he said dramatically, “and that’s to walk out of here and never see you again.”

“You’d be doing that for yourself, not for me. And I don’t see that you’re obligated to do anything for me—or that I am to do things for you. We’re good friends, and I would like it to remain that way.”

“So that you could turn the whole thing into a suitable middle-class fairy tale!” he snorted.

“What whole thing?”

“Whatever we feel for each other.”

“Ben,” I said gently, “I like you a great deal. You said you never knew anyone like me before. Well, I never knew anyone like you before. So we have to give it time—don’t you understand?”

He nodded, and I must give him credit for trying to be polite and amiable about it; but Ben was never much good about being polite and amiable. About a half hour later, he said good night to me, and a year went by before I heard from Ben Holt again.

Why did I finally marry Ben? That’s a poor question for sixty-one to ask seventeen, or twenty, for I was almost twenty before Ben and I were married. I think I loved him; I admired him; I made a hero out of him; and he was intelligent and positive and filled with a wild violence of energy. I felt proud and fulfilled when I was near him, and all those are reasons, aren’t they? But after I said good-by to him, there was no letter, no word from him all winter long. When I came home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I telephoned the boardinghouse where he had been living, without giving them my name. They said that Ben had left during the first week in October and that they had no forwarding address. I asked Father whether he couldn’t find out what had happened to him, and meanwhile all sorts of dread possibilities crossed my mind. I was not without imagination, as you may have gathered. Father tried, and came up with the information that Ben had left Ringman, apparently for good. A few of his friends supplied the information that he had intended to go out west, naming places as far apart as Texas and California, but no one knew for sure and no one Father spoke to had heard of Ben.

“Why would he go away like that?” I asked Father. “Why would he cut himself off like that?”

“That’s hard to say. Maybe he’s having a turn at running away from something. Or looking for something. I don’t know.”

“Why wouldn’t he write to me?”

“Perhaps that’s part of the point. To forget you. But I can’t say, honey. We’ll wait and see, but believe me, we’ll hear from Ben Holt again one of these days.”

I was less optimistic than Father, and as the winter wore away and turned into spring, and spring into summer, I came to the conclusion that Ben Holt had passed out of my life for good. A healthy young woman of eighteen does not pine away over a lost love. I had eligible boys clustering around, dances and parties to attend, and my responsibility as president of the Junior League for Belgian Relief. Time passed. I visited with my Aunt Martha in Massachusetts during the latter part of August, and when I returned to Ringman a letter from Ben was waiting for me.

That was the letter I spoke of before, a long letter, which I am enclosing with this apparently endless letter of my own. It will interest you, I believe, and you may use any part of it or all of it, just as you wish. I don’t feel that I am violating any confidence by allowing you to read it—or the whole world, for that matter. So far as I know, it is the only writing of Ben’s that is uninhibited, emotional, and unguarded, the last being particularly important. In all truth, I don’t know whether Ben would want it published or not, but I can never know that, can I?

You must make the decision yourself, Alvin. Here is the letter, a little yellow with time and somewhat faded—but as alive, to me at least, as the first time I read it.

Denver General Hospital

Denver, Colorado

October 3, 1915

Miss Dorothy Aimesley

Ringman, Pa.

Dear Dorothy:

Or should I call you Miss Aimesley? It is so long now since I received your permission to call you by your first name that I wonder whether it is still in effect?—that is, if you remember me? In case you have forgotten, I am the oversize miner with the dirty hands who once ate three quarters of a picnic lunch on the top of Belfast Ridge. In case you feel that my own memory is at fault, I can remind you that it was the first time I ever ate a sandwich composed of a mixture of stuffed olives, anchovies and cream cheese. It was very good, too, much better than the hospital food here.

The fact that I am in this hospital is nothing to worry you, if you are disposed to worry about me. That is a presumption on my part, but then I guess that even daring to write this letter after a year of silence is just as presumptuous. I could say that I am writing to you because I have no one else to write to, but you would know that to be untrue. I have three aunts, two uncles and better than twelve cousins back in Ringman, so I could write to any one of them. I am trying to be light and make small of things, but it doesn’t become me too well, does it? I keep telling myself that you may be married by now and that I have no right at all to express any sentiments to you, but I cannot keep from saying that there was never a day since I left Ringman that you weren’t in my thoughts. There also was no day when I didn’t consider writing to you, but that always slammed up against my purpose of getting out of your life completely and leaving you alone. If you prefer it that way, just tear up this letter and leave it unread. If you read on, I will take it for granted that you are interested in what I have to say and in the things that happened to me.

About the hospital, I am here with an infected leg that was badly cut up. They operated, and now it is healing successfully, and they tell me that I won’t even limp. I will be here another week if all goes well—longer if it doesn’t. But everything seems to be going well.

A few days after I saw you the last time, Dorothy, I made my final payment to the university. I had been on scholarship and on jobs there, but I had to take a loan to round it out. I sent them a money order for two hundred dollars, and that completed payment on the loan. I had thirty-seven dollars left, and a miner I know, Tom Llewellyn, was caught under a beam and brought home with a broken back. I put the thirty-seven dollars in the kitty for him. He’ll never walk again, and we all tried to salve ourselves off with a little money. That night, I walked out to the yards and climbed into an empty boxcar. I had no money, no destination and no love for anything that lived. Not even for you, Dorothy, at that moment; I wanted only to put distance between us and forget that I ever knew you or Ringman or Tommy. I rode that string of empties out to St. Louis.

I spent a month in St. Louis working as a freight checker in the barge terminal on the river … It was easy work, just checking manifests and keeping a simple set of books, and the first day I learned all there was to know about it. I lived in a furnished room, ate in cheap restaurants, and spent most of my time after the job reading in my room. Sundays, I took long walks and poked around old bookstores. My boss at the terminal was a Swede, Jack Thorsen, and he took a liking to me, and had me over to dinner once, and wanted me to stay there and learn the business. He paid me fourteen dollars a week, fair enough pay when you consider how light the work was and how I came to it with no experience at all. But it wasn’t for me.

I never looked at a girl there either. I feel foolish saying that, but I want you to know.

I had no reason to remain in St. Louis and no reason to leave. My existence was rootless and meaningless—and if there is anything in the world more meaningless than to live in a furnished room and go to work each morning and come back each evening, then I don’t know about it. It wasn’t the loneliness. I’m used to being alone, to doing for myself and fending for myself. But I used to tell myself that I had a direction. Even if I was never sure just what that direction was, I had a direction to cling to. Now I had none. I left St. Louis because it was no better and no worse than remaining there.

In turn, I tried Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita. In Kansas City, I found a job in a cotton warehouse. It was heavy work and I hated it, which is strange, because I always enjoyed heavy work. After a week, I moved on. In Topeka, the only work was as a laborer on a big city sewer project, and if there’s one thing that’s an anathema to a miner, it’s to work as a laborer. There’s another puzzle to add to your book of miners. In Wichita, no work at all, and I was running out of money. But there in Wichita, at the Royal Hotel, a miserable hostelry where I put up for one night, I ran into a kid called Larry Hurst. He was nineteen and broke and he reminded me of my brothers, and for some reason or other, I took a liking to him and bought him supper. He had been working as a cowhand at a big ranch west of Dodge City—for eighteen dollars a month. That’s the gospel truth, eighteen dollars a month. I had thought that mining was a rotten deal in dollars and cents, but after I listened to his story of work and hours and treatment on a big ranch, I had new respect for the whole mining industry.

Anyway, he had sworn an oath to himself never to take ranch work again, and he was in Wichita trying to make some kind of a stake to get up north to Montana, where, as the story went, there was work at good wages in the copper mines. His father had mined copper in Montana twenty years before, when hell was a gentle word for the conditions in the mines there; but he had heard that things were different now and that working conditions and wages were good.

The next morning, after I had paid my hotel bill and the price of breakfast, I had about two and a half dollars left. Larry was broke. It wasn’t much of a stake for two men, but we decided to take off and see how far we could get, one place being about as good as the next.

There’s no way directly out of Wichita to the north, but the Atcheson runs west, and at a little place called La Junta, there’s a spur line to Pueblo and the main line through Wyoming to Montana. But when you ride the railroads without tickets, you can’t plan it as well as you might like to. We found an empty car on a slow freight, supposedly for Dodge City, fell asleep and found ourselves in Kansas City. It took three days more to make Pueblo, and we were close to starving then. We hired out for a week on a sheep ranch, three dollars each as wages and as much boiled mutton as we could eat. I can make myself sick now just by thinking about boiled mutton, but it was preferable to starvation. When we left there, the rancher dropped us off at a coal mining town called Serpo, and I talked Larry into trying the mines for a stake.

It was to be for no more than a week or two. With the war in Europe, no mine could produce enough of anything, and wherever there were mines, they were taking on men. Larry had never mined coal before, but we hired on as a team, and I took him as my day man or helper. He was a goodhearted kid and learned quickly—not that it isn’t more back than learning that a man wants; but what there was to learn, he learned, and he had the back too. He was strong and willing and cheerful, a good man to work with.

The mine itself was a rotten mine, a deep shaft and two and a half miles underground to the cutting face. It was bituminous, not anthracite, and the operators were greedy. Colorado never was a first class coal region, and until this year, the going was rough for the owners. Now the world has a lust for coal that nothing seems to satisfy.

So instead of going on to Montana, we remained at Serpo and worked in the mine. I don’t know what we had in mind. We talked about a lot of things—in particular about saving our money for a good stake and then going prospecting on our own for silver and gold. Every miner, no matter what he digs, has at one time or another made a little daydream out of prospecting. We read books on metallurgy and mineralogy, and we only got drunk once, and Sundays we’d go out to mule farms and talk prices and mule lore, and other Sundays, we’d sit around at the Muskat Saloon, where the old men gathered to talk about the days when there was a gold strike over every hill. Weeks passed. Twice, we decided to quit, and each time, they raised the tonnage price.

It wasn’t a good life and it wasn’t a bad life, Dorothy. I wanted you, to be with you—well, more than I can say, and I had some crazy dream of returning to you rich and mighty.

But, you see, the mine was worked out, and now they were robbing the pillars. That calls for some explanation, and without a treatise on coal mining, you can think of it this way. The seam of coal runs more or less horizontally with the surface of the earth, although it can pitch sharply in one direction or another. In what we call pillar mining—the way most coal is mined in the United States—a shaft is sunk to the depth of the coal seam. Then a main entry, or corridor, is driven into the seam and along it. On either side of this main entry, rooms, as we call them, are dug, that is, the coal is mined out of sections and these sections are separated by walls of coal. These walls support the roof and keep the mine from falling down around our heads—that is, the coal pillars and the timbering that we put up as we work into the mine. After a mine is pretty well worked out, they sometimes go through a process called “robbing the pillars,” that is, taking out the sections of coal seam that were left to support the roof and collapsing the mine from the finish of the entry back to the shaft. This can be very dangerous—or no more dangerous than first mining, depending on the conditions in the mine and the skill with which the pillars are removed.

In this case, we had too many new hands for real skill, a mine that was badly ventilated, and a bad case of operators’ greed. The thing happened one day when we dynamited the face of a section. Afterwards, I learned that one of the blowers in the ventilating system had broken down. The other blowers continued to operate, but at best, it was a poor system, and now a dust mixture began to build up in the rooms. At the same time, there must have been a heavy firedamp, or methane, where we were working.

Briefly, Larry and I and four other men who were working in the room took cover in the entry while a charge was exploded. The room we had left blew and then the entry blew, and then the blast skipped from room to room, where the dust-air mixture had built up. I have very little heart to try to tell you exactly what happened, and I remember it poorly at best. Think of yourself suspended in darkness, explosions on every side of you, smashed and thrown by the concussion, your lighting gone, mules and men screaming with pain and horror, dust thick enough to feel, your sense of direction gone, and a certainty that the whole world is collapsing on you. Or somewhat like that. Or any other nightmare you care to put in its place.

In such a situation, the plain fact of your existence is unbelievable. Human sound, beyond the fact of terror and pain, is meaningless. It took me a while to understand that Larry was calling for me, and it took more time to find him, crawling around in that obscene blackness—not darkness the way you know it on the earth’s surface, but a darkness beyond all darkness. I found him. There was a beam across his staved-in chest and half a ton of coal on the beam and on his body, and he died there under my fingers without me ever seeing his face again. I had matches, but to strike one there might have started the dust explosions all over again and more violent and lethal this time.

I got out. You look back, and it’s impossible to understand why one person gets out and another doesn’t. But I got out with no more damage than some bad cuts on my leg, which in time became infected and landed me here in the hospital at Denver. Larry died there, and with him one hundred and sixty-seven miners. I brought one man out to the shaft with me, but that didn’t save his life. He died before they could bring him up. I got up the shaft and I went down again, not because I was brave, Dorothy, but because I was filled with guilt. I wanted to bring Larry’s body out, but there were more explosions. Why, we’ll never know. We worked there the rest of that day, and all night long I was at the shaft, while they brought up the bodies, while the wives and the mothers kept the deathwatch there. It’s hard to remember too much of that night, but I remember hearing someone say,

“Anyway, at least half the dead are Mexicans, so what the hell!”

I felt an impulse to kill the man who said that, but there had been enough killing and enough pain and suffering—and all of it added up to nothing, no sense or rhyme or reason except the fact that a blower went out and the dust-air combination piled up in the rooms.

I feel that you are asking yourself whether he hasn’t had enough—whether Ben Holt isn’t content now to turn his back on mining forever. I don’t know what the answer to that is, Dorothy, so help me, I don’t. I am filled with all kinds of unreasonable fury and anger, and sick to death of a society that builds itself on a foundation of the dead bodies of miners, and the other day, as a sort of macabre game, I added up the statistics of miners killed on the job since the Civil War, as much as I could remember them, and I got a figure of over a hundred thousand, but maybe my statistics are wrong, and I left out those who are maimed and broken, and I got the feeling that it was like a war. A war that doesn’t end. And when I fall asleep, the explosions start, the booming from room after room as the chain reaction ignites the dust—

So there is my story, and since you have read this far, I presume that you are interested. Here in the hospital I have thought of nothing else but you, and if nothing else makes sense, then I can fix my mind on you, and in some way, that makes sense and logic out of my existence.

But I make no claims. I have no right to, and I never had. If you are in love with anyone else, or engaged to be married, or married, I will not intrude on your life again. But if none of these are the case and you should see fit to write to me here, I would be both grateful and happy. If I was uncertain about my feelings for you once, I have absolutely no uncertainty now. I hope that this finds you in the best of health, and I look forward to seeing you soon and to hearing from you.

Very sincerely,

BEN HOLT.

I think that after you have finished reading the letter, Alvin, you will say that there is much of Ben in it, and also nothing at all of Ben. The terrible tragedy at Serpo, which, with our national passion for alliteration, we have put into history as the Serpo Slaughter, left a mark on Ben that was never eradicated; he was unable to forget the simple fact that the miner lives with death. You’ve heard him lose his temper at wage negotiations and roar out, “What’s the price of death! Name it!” I heard that for the first time—but I’m going ahead of myself, and by now this document, which you so artlessly asked for as a letter concerning Ben’s courtship, has become a needle in my side, and I’ll know no peace until I have finished it and sent it off to you.

I showed the letter to Father. Did I tell you that one of Ben’s suspicions was true, or almost true? I wasn’t formally engaged, but I had an understanding with George Cummings, an eligible and very nice boy from Scranton, and I wore his fraternity pin. His people owned the Cummings Mills, and I suppose they were very rich—real rich, I mean, and not the genteel state we were in, which in those days was defined as “comfortable.” But I can truthfully say that George’s financial prospects played no part in the matter. He was a nice and good-natured boy, and my Aunt Alice approved of him because, as she put it, he was “my kind.”

Well, after Father read the letter, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, “An interesting letter, Dorothy. Don’t you think?”

“Interesting?”

“To me, I mean. He says he’s in love with you. I wonder what that means in Ben Holt’s terms?”

“I don’t know. But it’s going to be hard to give George’s pin back to him and tell him I can’t be his wife.”

“Oh? You feel you must tell him that?”

I nodded.

“Suppose Ben doesn’t come back?”

“He’ll come back,” I said.

He did. He returned in December, and he brought me, as a Christmas present, a gold bracelet. You’ve seen it, a striking piece, two serpents intertwined, a strange design and a strange choice. He had spent all that remained of his compensation money on it. Father debated the wisdom of my accepting it, but I pleaded that Ben would be hurt if I refused; and after remarking on the wide range of variation my solicitude included, Father agreed with me.

I passed my nineteenth birthday, and Ben was working in the mines. Father never brought up the subject of law again, not with Ben and not with me. My friends were getting engaged and married, but Ben did not ask me to marry him. We saw each other on Sundays, and often enough, Ben had dinner with us. My aunt suggested that I go to Massachusetts for a long visit, and when I put my foot down about that, she began to work for a long cruise, one of those five-week affairs through the islands and the Panama Canal to California; but the U-boats were already skirting our coast, and Father wouldn’t hear of any sort of boat ride.

Father usually knew pretty well what went on among the miners, and one day he remarked that Ben was making something of a name for himself.

“In what way?” I asked him.

“A number of ways. He called a stoppage at one of the collieries and the men followed him out. He held that the ventilation was no good and the mine was a deathtrap.”

“He never mentioned that to me.”

“No? Well, perhaps he thought you’d worry.”

“You said a number of ways.”

“I meant he’s been getting around among the miners. They like him and respect him.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” I demanded.

“There’s every reason why they should. The operator who owns the pit where Ben works is a damn fool by the name of Nate Stisson. I’ve had some dealings with him. He’s a bullhead who takes every man’s measure by his own image, and he sent his cracker boss over to buy Ben off with five hundred dollars and a foreman’s job. He probably figured that it was an irresistible offer and that he could use a man like Ben as a straw boss, and with the price of coal what it is today, half the operators have gone out of their heads completely.”

“To buy Ben off?”

“That’s right. It was an idiot scheme, and only an idiot would send a cracker boss to do business with Ben. Ben beat the man. He broke his jaw and four ribs and put him in the hospital.”

“Oh no. No, I don’t believe that,” I cried. “Not Ben. He wouldn’t do that.”

“He did it,” Father said. “Stisson had Ben arrested, and old Stanley Kusik, the president of the union local here, talked me into taking the case.”

“You had to be talked into defending Ben?”

“In this case, I’m afraid I did, honey. Oh, I could see Ben’s side of it. He was being bribed. His whole basic sense of integrity was being impugned, and worst of all, he was being asked to forget the conditions in the mine—conditions that threatened the lives of the men who worked there. So he had every right to be angry and indignant. But he had no right to beat a man so savagely that he had to be hospitalized.”

“But you asked Ben why and how it happened, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. And Ben said he lost his head—that he was still too close to what he had been through out in Colorado.”

“You believe him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Father said after a long moment, “I believe him.”

But there was no defense, as such, nor did Ben have to appear in court. Father went to see Jack Brady, the largest of all the operators in Ringman, and convinced him that if Stisson pressed his charges, the whole area would face the very real possibility of a strike. That was a year when operators had nightmares at the thought of a strike. Brady and some of the other operators talked to Stisson, and the charges were dropped. I happened to be in Father’s office in town when Stanley Kusik, the president of the local union, came in to thank Father and to hand to him, personally, the union’s check in payment for the case.

I learned later that Kusik was only fifty-five, but he had the appearance of a man ten or fifteen years older. He was a small, bent man, white hair, white mustache, tiny blue eyes and a seamed, leathery face. He had spent his whole life in the mines, and his election to the union post two years before was in the way of a tribute to his knowledge of the conditions in Ringman, as well as to the affection the miners felt for him. He greeted me warmly when I was introduced to him, a shy but charming smile of approval underlining his words as he said to Father,

“She is a very beautiful woman, your daughter, Mr. Aimesley.”

“At times,” Father nodded. He held the check for one hundred dollars that Kusik had given him. Most of Father’s work was with estates and bequests, and he had served two terms in the past as county surrogate. Cases like this one were taken because he could not bring himself to reject them, and now he said to Kusik, “I am going to accept this check, Stanley, because I like you. I don’t have much respect for a man who gives away his skill for nothing. However, my daughter here is one of the pillars of the local league for Belgian Relief. I am sure the union will not object to my endorsing this check over to her.”

“The union won’t object, Mr. Aimesley. In fact, our finance committee will feel good about it both ways.”

After Kusik had left, Father turned to me and said, “I’ve been thinking about this whole business, Dorothy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been unjust to Ben.”

“Whether you were or not, you managed to have the charges dropped. That’s what counts, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not only thinking about what Ben means to you, but about him in a sort of basic way. Ben Holt is not just any man. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

“I’m not sure,” I said slowly.

“Well, he’s important—and it’s all of him that makes for that importance, his violence, his anger, his brain—perhaps his ruthlessness as well.”

“Ben’s not ruthless—”

“You don’t think so? Well, we won’t argue the point. Let’s have him over to prove I’m saying all this in good faith.”

At dinner, neither Father nor Ben referred to the incident of the bribe. Instead, they talked about the West in general, Colorado in particular, about Mexicans and Indians and the treatment of both. I had come to expect and accept from my father a fund of knowledge about out-of-the-way subjects, but Ben continued to amaze me. It was not his knowledge of things, but the depth of his knowledge; if he went into a. thing, he went into it thoroughly. They started with the treatment of Mexicans and Indians in general. Then Ben chose the Osages and the Cherokees in specific, detailed their history, and made his point flatly,

“They put their trust in others. That doomed them.”

“They had to,” Father insisted. “They were Indian tribes facing a powerful federal government. What else could they do?”

“Put their trust in themselves. In their own power and unity. That’s the only thing anyone respects.”

“Ben, they faced an army.”

“What is an army? It’s a part of the whole power idea—and the question was not one of army or government—the question was, where does power lie and how can it be used?”

“And where did this power lie, Ben?”

“In the land they occupied, in where they were and what they were, in what they stood for, a people of their own land. But most of all, their power lay in their unity. In knowing how to use it, and that’s something they never knew and they never learned!”

The argument went on, but I heard only snatches of it. I was watching Ben. When an idea took hold of him, his face lit up; his reserve vanished, and there was something thrilling in his excitement and fervor—and when that excitement finished, it was as if he retreated deep, deep into himself. As if he removed himself utterly, and this was the case when we went into the parlor after dinner. I played the piano. Ben sat in a chair in the corner and listened without hearing. Father left. I finished playing and looked at Ben. He rose and walked over to the piano.

“I guess you heard about it,” he said.

“The fight?”

He nodded.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it, Ben.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s over. You did whatever you had to do. You always said that we lived in different worlds, and that I didn’t understand your world.”

“Even if that’s true, I want you to understand my world. You have to.”

“Why do I have to, Ben?”

“Because I love you.”

So there it was, finally, plainly and straightforwardly, and I stood up and asked him what it meant or what he thought it meant when he said that to me.

“I want to marry you, Dorothy. I want you to be my wife, if you love me.”

“Don’t you know whether I love you, Ben?”

“I’m afraid to know or not know.”

Then, for the first time, he wholly took me in his arms and kissed me, and it was over and I had agreed to be Ben Holt’s wife. There was the culmination of our courtship and the agreement, no stranger, I suppose, than anyone else’s. We sat and talked and made plans and raised our defiance to life and fate and the future; and it seems to me that it was very ordinary and unusual only in the fact that I was a middle-class girl and Ben was a miner. In that way, it was not usual; that made no sense or reason to me; and even in the middle of all the excitement of being asked this question that is so meaningful and absolute to a young woman, I was asking myself what would be now, and would he expect me to move across Belfast Ridge and rent one of those tiny soot-grimed sections in the long tenements where the miners lived, and was this to be my life, raising a family in the squalor and poverty of a miner’s home, rising at four o’clock in the morning, in the pre-dawn gloom to cook his breakfast and then watch him go off to the diggings, myself broken and middle-aged at thirty and an old woman at forty, and to live each day through waiting for the awful howl of the disaster siren—was this it, and was this what he was promising me and what I, in turn, was accepting?

My elation, you see, was not unmixed with a sense of being caught and trapped in something I never knew or bargained for, and my questions couldn’t be asked or answered. Ben, on the other hand, was swept along by his own plans and victories, and he spelled it out for me.

“Do you know when we’ll be married, Dorothy?”

I shook my head.

“I should let you decide that, shouldn’t I? I was going to say two months, but whatever you wish.”

“Why two months?”

“Because in six weeks, the union elections come up. I’m going to run for president of the local union here.”

Oh, he was like a little boy at that moment, and he couldn’t have been more excited or alive if he had announced his candidacy for President of the United States. For my part, I didn’t know, I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what it meant or where it would take him. Nor did I know whether the presidency of a local union was a full-time job or a part-time job, whether he would continue to be a miner or not; and in all truth, my own simple and direct wish was for him to be anything but a miner. When I asked him, he said,

“Oh, it’s a full-time job, all right, Dorothy, and the pay is no better than a miner’s pay, but that’s not the point. You were always outspoken about how much you wanted me to stop working in the mines—”

“I only mentioned it twice, Ben.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it’s been on my mind more than on yours. Don’t misunderstand me; it’s all mixed up, and I’m trying to make you see it the way I do. To be a miner’s wife is not the most attractive life in the world, but there it is, and if you love a man, you go where he goes, don’t you?”

He flung this at me, but I couldn’t answer him.

“You see, I’m not doing this for you. I’d do anything for you, Dorothy, but I always have to go where my own blood leads me. I can’t tear myself away from the mines. No matter what happened, I’d always go back. I’m a miner. But I think I have enough sense to know what it is to be a miner. There’s no one in this world gives two damns about the miner except himself. For five thousand years, he’s been crawling under the earth and leaving his trail of blood wherever he goes. Now it’s changed; now the whole world needs him! That world out there—by God, it can’t exist a week without the mines. And now’s the time for the miner to have his due—but only if he understands his own power. Few enough of them do. They can think as far as the next side of bacon and the next bag of flour, and no further. I can. I understand power—and I understand the power of the miners, and someday I’m going to be at the top of a union of every miner in the United States—at the top, Dorothy!”

He knew where he was going. Perhaps he had always known, perhaps from the first day I met him and before then. But he was the first one like that I had ever known. He talked about power, and his sense of his own power infused him and communicated itself to others. Think of the boys I had known and gone with, college boys who were polite, gentlemanly, well mannered. They would go into their fathers’ firms, they would read law, and a few of them would study medicine and some would find proper jobs for their place in life. But none of them knew or cared very much what their ultimate destiny would be. Should I have been perturbed or frightened by Ben’s declaration? But the plain truth is that I was thrilled and delighted.

I told Father about Ben’s decision to run for the president of the local union, and I thought he would be as thrilled as I was. Instead, he seemed disturbed, and I found myself asking him whether he wanted Ben to go on being a miner for the rest of his life.

“No. But you see, Dorothy,” he said, “I never shared your fear that Ben would go on being a miner. Being a miner was in the way of marking time for Ben. I just didn’t know what his direction would be when he began to move. But that he would move—well, I had no doubts about that.”

“Then don’t you think he’ll be elected?”

“He’ll be elected, all right. Ben is in the way of being a local hero among the miners here. They know what it takes for a miner to fight his way through college. They know his worth, and they knew his people; and the fact that he went back into the pits after the university doesn’t hurt either. He’s one of them, and still they feel that he’s a little more than any of them. It’s just that I wish he didn’t have to run against old Kusik.”

“But it’s not like taking someone’s job,” I protested. “Believe me, Ben doesn’t care two pins about the job. The pay is no better than a miner’s pay, about thirty dollars a week, I think, and Ben’s not doing it for the job or the pay. He’s doing it because this way he can serve his own people. He can make life a little better for them. He can see to it that they have something better to look forward to than a life of privation and danger.”

“All by himself, Dorothy?”

“Not by himself. Of course not. That’s what the union means. Father, I want you to understand Ben and to understand his motives—because he asked me to marry him.”

Father stared at me in silence for a while. Then he nodded and said softly, “What was your answer, Dorothy?”

“I love him, Daddy. What could my answer be?”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Since the first time.”

“If you’re sure, then that’s all that matters to me. But you know what you’re getting into, honey.”

“I think so.”

“It won’t be easy. Whatever one might think of Ben Holt, there’s one thing about him that’s evident—he is what our society calls ‘a man of destiny.’ That’s a stiff piece of elocution, but in plain English it adds up to a man who will place himself and his own needs above everything else. It goes deeper than selfishness. Nothing is going to stand in his way, and nothing is going to interfere with what he wants.”

“How can you say that? What has Ben ever wanted?” I was indignant and hurt. “He could have had a career and money too! He put both aside to remain a miner and to remain with his own people!”

“Baby,” Father said gently, “I’m not tearing Ben down. I’m simply stating a fact of his character. Ben is a wonderful man—an unusual and brilliant and purposeful man. I told you that the first time I brought him here to our house. In a way, I share the responsibility of your decision to marry him, for I made it possible for you to see him and to know him. But I want you to know what you’re doing.”

“I do know. You feel that Ben is ruthless because he’s running against Stanley Kusik? Well, what has Kusik ever done for the miners?”

“A great deal, but that’s not to the point. Kusik is experienced and honest and he does the best he can. Maybe his day is over. Maybe the miners need a young, bold man. I don’t know. I know little enough about mining or the local here, too little to pass any judgments. And I’m sure there are sides of Ben you know far better than I do. I only want you to know all of him before you make up your mind.”

“I have made up my mind, Daddy.”

“Then God bless you. There it is. I’ll be the first to kiss you and congratulate you.”

And in all the years that followed, I can hardly remember a time when Father didn’t defend Ben—except once, as you know, Alvin. He put his own thoughts aside, and accepted what was inevitable.

What else to tell? I think a part of this was the annual meeting where the election took place; we were married after that. Father and I went to that meeting. Ben invited us and sent us passes. Father was eager to go, and I—well, I had never been to a miners’ meeting, and it was high time that I began.

The miners had a hall in Ringman, but it was limited in size, and for large, important meetings they used the Shrine Temple at Lanton, twelve miles away. The night when we drove over there was bitterly cold, and though Father and I arrived early, almost every seat was already taken. The auditorium at the Shrine Temple had seats for twenty-five hundred people, but before the proceedings began, well over three thousand men were jammed into the place. I noticed a handful of women who were helping with the paper work, at most a dozen; I was the only one actually seated among the men, and thereby the target of numerous eyes and whispers. I wondered how many of the miners knew that Ben and I were to be married, and who I was and what I was doing there. At least enough of them knew Father to keep us from feeling entirely out of place, and as we entered, half a dozen men went out of their way to shake hands with Father and say a few words to him. Like many sheltered young women of that time, I had a far from complete knowledge of my father’s work or world, and it gave me a warm, good feeling to know that through him Ben’s world and mine touched.

It was a Saturday night, and the miners were scrubbed and dressed in their good black suits, each of them armed with a pocketful of those indescribable cigars. The air was rapidly becoming unbreathable, when one of the men on the platform stood up and shouted, through the roar of conversation and greetings,

“Brothers, since we’re here without masks or lamps and there’s no hope of any compensation if this here hall blows up, the committee asks me to announce that there’ll be no more smoking tonight. So when your stogies burn down, just don’t light up again.”

That may have helped a little, but miners are not easily told what to do and when to do it. Another thing that amazed me was the reading of the administration reports against the roar of conversation on the floor of the hall. I asked Father about this, and he explained that no one really listened to the reports, and that the miners had long ago learned that it was better to read them against the noises than to spend a fruitless half hour trying to impose silence.

“When they want to hear something, you’ll be amazed at how quiet they’ll be, Dorothy. There’s nothing else in the world just like a miners’ meeting, just as there’s nothing else just like miners. Their union is the main rationale of their existence. They don’t respect leadership and administration—they suffer it and mistrust it, and they won’t give an inch to show it respect or obedience, unless they’re moving toward a strike or a demonstration. It’s not only that they’re the most independent people on earth; they’re men who spend their lives working with death at one hand and darkness at the other. It does something to them. It makes them different.”

While the reports were given and the business of the night attended to, I watched the miners and tried to see this difference my father spoke about. There was a certain physical similarity among them. Their faces were lined and hard, and ingrained with coal dust. Ready-to-wear suits were not cut for people like them; the miners bulked too wide, and they were too heavily muscled across the arms and shoulders. Many of the younger men were strikingly handsome, blond, large. The older men were invariably bent. As the temperature of the hall went up, they took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves and relaxed. A good many of them chewed tobacco and took snuff. I can’t say that I was at my ease. I had never been in a hallful of men like these before; the smoke and the noise and the smells affected me badly, and I had to argue with myself to remain cahn and self-possessed and in my seat. On the other hand, the men around me went out of their way to make me feel comfortable. They stopped smoking, and they said nothing that could be calculated to offend me. I had thought, as so many people like myself do, that because I had an intermittent relationship with repair men and delivery people, an occasional carpenter, the men around the stables, and the mechanics who serviced our car, that I knew what there was to know about working people. All my life, I had seen miners on the street, and always in the distance were the tipples and the man-made mountains of culm; but strangely enough I had spent the best part of almost twenty years of living in Ringman, and yet I had never been among miners before, not this way where there could be no separateness and I was an integral part of three thousand talking, shouting, snorting, smoking men.

Gradually, my fear and discomfort disappeared, and I was able to relax. When at last Ben walked up to the platform to speak, I was intent on him and what he had to say, and not even disturbed by the miners who rose to their feet and shouted,

“What do you say, Benny boy!” “How are your knuckles, laddie!” “Reach out, Benny—I want to hear what you got to say!” And more of the same. Oh, he was liked, all right, and he liked it, standing up there, a great bear of a man, with his shaggy head of hair and his disconcertingly pale blue eyes. He was of this group of men, but not like them, and they saw in him what they would want to be themselves, something young and strong and very powerful and very fearless.

There was no transcript of what Ben said that evening, and I don’t pretend to remember his words or even all of the ideas he advanced; but I do remember the theme he put forward and that very clearly. It was the first time I heard Ben speak in public, and even then he had the basis for the manner and delivery that became so famous in later years. Between sentences, he paused and studied the men in front of him. He never hurried and he never spoke thoughtlessly. He despised the clichés of labor oratory, and he always tried to say what he meant in plain, simple English. But that didn’t make it less studied. I have seen him stand in front of a mirror for an hour, practicing a manner of delivery; but when he used it, he managed to give the feeling of impromptu words and feelings.

Now, as he spoke, the hall quieted. He had them listening almost immediately. He was making small of things like the walkout he had led. “It’s holding the line,” he said. “It’s standing still. It’s coddling the damn little we have—and make sure, what we have is very little indeed. We don’t have any of the safety measures we asked for—measures we’ve been asking for for half a century. There isn’t a mine in this county with adequate ventilation. There isn’t a mine with adequate safety measures, and because there’s a coal hunger, we’re working harder and longer than we ever worked before. And when do accidents happen? When a man’s tired, when his reactions are a little slower, his response a little duller, his muscles too weary to respond to the demands of a situation. No, I’m not satisfied by the fact that we’re working. Nor should you be. Because you and me, we know why we’re working. We’re working because there’s a hunger for coal—and the name of that hunger is war. W-A-R—war! We don’t love war. Our whole lives are war, and we know what it means to live with death. So don’t anybody ever tell me that the miner loves war or wants war! Ask my mother, may she rest in peace, what it means for a woman to lose two strong sons and a husband—ask her that, and she’ll tell you what war means to a woman! But don’t ever tell the miner’s woman that miners want war! Because it would be a lie!”

A storm of applause here.

“Still, the war is there, and an appetite for coal such as the world never knew before, and profits such as the operators never dreamed of before. But we work for the same wages. Yes, I know—we make more money. We mine more coal. We break ourselves that much faster. And in the end, we pay the price, not the operators. That’s what I call standing still. But if we don’t move now and make our demands now and win them now, we never will!”

That was Ben’s theme, and he drove it home as long as was necessary, and when he sat down, even I could see that he was as good as elected. Stanley Kusik couldn’t say anything that would change the outcome. I don’t even know whether the old man wanted to. He admitted Ben’s arguments, and he admitted that it was possible that the union needed a younger and more energetic man. He stood on his record, honesty and concern for the miners, but it wasn’t enough. Ben had thought the thing through, and because he listened and knew what the miners were thinking and saying, he was able to not only echo their thoughts but to go a step further. When Kusik’s vice-president got up to speak for the administration, he was shouted down and howled down. The miners had made up their minds. Ben was elected president of the local—almost by acclamation.

Three months later, Ben and I were married. It was not as happy a wedding as it might have been. Some of my relatives washed their hands of the whole affair. The rest mixed poorly and gingerly with Ben’s relatives and friends. For myself, I knew that I was marrying a wonderful, strong man, whom I loved and admired—and at the time it seemed to be enough.