brought him. For he refused to go with her, asked
her not to go, and then decided to haul out the boat
and halt their cruise. He told her then that he would
see her in New York.
When she left for Boston, he sailed the boat
along the coast to the small harbor where she now
lay, bleached and gray. Then he went to New York.
Arriving there he discovered that the nervous strain
of weeks of argument and disagreement with Helen
had made him again feel sick, weak, and shaky on
his feet.
~That was still harder for him to bear was that
he developed an inward belief that Helen and Henry
Scoville were perhaps right-perhaps he was cold,
heartless, and, as Helen had called him, inhuman.
He refused to admit this openly; he downed it
whenever it began to trouble his mind, by coldly,
logically, arguing to himself, sometimes audibly,
that his views then were correct and, ultimately, for
the greatest good to the greatest number.
Edward Peyton had now run out of all such ar-
guments. Nine years had brought him back to his
boat and also back to his wife, for as he turned
away from the boat and walked toward his car he
thought he could feel, honestly and wholeheartedly,
all of the emotion his wife must have felt that night
in Boston Bay and next morning in Hull, before she
left for the funeral of Sacco and Vanzetti.
\Vhen she came back to New York after the
funeral, she had a severe cough. She had marched
with Henry Scoville in the funeral procession, in
the dreary rain, and once had been knocked to the
ground by a policeman's horse, as the line squirmed
around one of the huge trucks placed across the
street by police to impede the march of mourners.
When she approached Edward upon her return,
she drew from her pocket a red arm band, inscribed
with the words, "Remember,
Justice Crucified,
August 22, 1927." She held it up to his face and
said, "I wore it in the march." Edward read it and
did not smile. He was glad, now, that at least he
had not smiled.
Peyton walked very slowly toward his car, think-
ing-his head bowed slightly, the forehead drawn
to make a deep perpendicular line between his eye-
brows. He studied a small pile of old lumber he was
passing and thought of Helen's racking cough,
which had developed into a fatal illness. Two years
after she marched in the funeral procession, she
died in Arizona, where doctors had advised him she
might be cured.
Helen died with Peyton still professing his lack
of interest in the welfare of the class whose ability
to labor is their prime possession. He did not know
that, in her last illness, Helen observed him reading
literature spread about the house, relating to the
Sacco-Vanzetti case and other phases of the labor
movement. He had tried to do this reading secretly
until her death, which finally came with suddenness,
18
at a time he thought she showed signs of improve-
ment.
From then on, he read such literature with interest
and increasing sympathy and understanding. But he
felt that he could do nothing about it. His savings
were spent, his securities gone, his old firm had not
taken him back, and he had to accept a job doing
research in a small and much less prominent law
firm.
Henry Scoville wrote to him occasionally from
his home in Boston, but Edward avoided meeting
him, until through Henry he got a job in the New
Deal administration in Washington. Edward had
been in Washington only a short time when Henry
Scoville was fired from his job, accused of being too
radical for the New Deal.
During that time in Washington, Edward and
Henry had been friendly, but Edward was, even
then, unwilling to let his friend know the changes
taking place in his ways of thinking. He argued
that the New Deal was doing all that could be ex-
pected. But this argument was for Henry's benefit.
To himself, Edward decided that the New Deal
did not go far enough, and when it was finally scrap-
ped, he told himself that those who labor must work
out their own salvation-that
those who profit by
man's labor seem decidedly unwilling to do anything
about it, except in speeches.
\Vhen Peyton returned to New York, he got a
letter from Henry asking him to help work on a
celebrated labor case coming up for trial in the
South. Edward refused. If someone other than
Henry had asked him, he would have gone into it.
Edward Peyton finally reached the .windswept
road and, glancing either way, walked across to his
car. He opened the door and slid in under the steer-
ing wheel. With his left hand resting on die door-
handle, he looked again at the boat.
He felt inclined to smile when he thought how in-
coherent his first memories on seeing the boat had
been. For the memories and thoughts which ran
through his mind after he had left the car and start-
ed walking down the incline, seemed now to tie up
perfectly, into a pattern which he could easily follow
and understand.
He slammed the door of the car shut. He knew
now that he had not driven that long distance for
a look at the boat. It occurred to him that not even
a new forty-footer could take him away from the
world in which he lived; he could not escape. He
stepped on the starter, pulled the choke button, and.
ran the motor a minute to allow it to warm up.
Boston was only a few minutes' drive from this
small seaport town. Henry Scoville was in Boston.
Edward knew he had made this trip to see Henry
Scoville. He knew that all over the country there
were workers and also farmers in need of legal help,
because efforts made to improve their conditions led
to their arrest.
MAY,
1936
