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 CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Gay
Interlude– The Marxist Foundations
2 Women
Interlude– The Impact of Tech
3 Race
Interlude– On Forgiveness
4 Trans
Conclusion

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
‘The special mark of the modern world is not that it is
sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.’
G. K. Chesterton

‘Oh my gosh, look at her butt

Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
(Look at her butt)
Look at, look at, look at
Look, at her butt’
N. Minaj
 INTRODUCTION

We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in

private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are
increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The
daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see
the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.
Various explanations have been given. These tend to suggest that
any and all madnesses are the consequence of a Presidential
election, or a referendum. But none of these explanations gets to
the root of what is happening. For far beneath these day-to-day
events are much greater movements and much bigger events. It is
time we began to confront the true causes of what is going wrong.
Even the origin of this condition is rarely acknowledged. This is the
simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a
quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed.
One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular
to defend or impossible to sustain. The explanations for our
existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away
from the nineteenth century onwards. Then over the last century the
secular hopes held out by all political ideologies began to follow in
religion’s wake. In the latter part of the twentieth century we
entered the postmodern era. An era which defined itself, and was
defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives.1 However, as
all schoolchildren learn, nature abhors a vacuum, and into the
postmodern vacuum new ideas began to creep, with the intention of
providing explanations and meanings of their own.
It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted
ground. People in wealthy Western democracies today could not
simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely
no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life
purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past
at least gave life meaning. The question of what exactly we are
meant to do now – other than get rich where we can and have
whatever fun is on offer – was going to have to be answered by
something.
The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in
new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and ever more niche demands.
To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who
seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have
just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been
altered. The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally
caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley
(notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just
to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but
have a business model which has accurately been described as
relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s
behaviour’.2 Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world
which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up
with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are
consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction
has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some
people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into
our societies: a new religion, if you will.
Although the foundations had been laid for several decades, it is
only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march
into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on
the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of
beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which
can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism.
And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may
never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view
which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives
but every inequity on earth. The interpretation of the world through
the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and
‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and
comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a
new ideology.
To date ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds – and
in some versions is – attractive. Even the term itself is set up to be
anti-oppositional. ‘You’re opposed to social justice? What do you
want, social injustice?’
‘Identity politics’, meanwhile, has become the place where social
justice finds its caucuses. It atomizes society into different interest
groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and
more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only,
relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring with them
some added bonus. For example (as the American writer Coleman
Hughes has put it), the assumption that there is ‘a heightened moral
knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay.3 It is the
cause of the propensity of people to start questions or statements
with ‘Speaking as a . . .’. And it is something that people both living
and dead need to be on the right side of. It is why there are calls to
pull down the statues of historical figures viewed as being on the
wrong side and it is why the past needs to be rewritten for anyone
you wish to save. It is why it has become perfectly normal for a Sinn
Fein senator to claim that the IRA hunger strikers in 1981 were
striking for gay rights.4 Identity politics is where minority groups are
encouraged to simultaneously atomize, organize and pronounce.
The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of
‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives
attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability
claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever
system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy
which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but
dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that
are unachievable. But today intersectionality has broken out from
the social science departments of the liberal arts colleges from which
it originated. It is now taken seriously by a generation of young
people and – as we shall see – has become embedded via
employment law (specifically through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in
all the major corporations and governments.
New heuristics have been required to force people to ingest the
new presumptions. The speed at which they have been
mainstreamed is staggering. As the mathematician and writer Eric
Weinstein has pointed out (and as a Google Books search shows),
phrases like ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘transphobia’ went from
not being used at all to becoming mainstream. As he wrote about
the graph that results from this, the ‘woke stuff’ that Millennials and
others are presently using ‘to tear apart millennia of oppression and
/or civilization . . . was all made up about 20 minutes ago’. As he
went on, while there is nothing wrong with trying out new ideas and
phrases, ‘you have to be pretty damn reckless to be leaning this hard
on so many untested heuristics your parents came up with in
untested fields that aren’t even 50 years old’.5 Similarly, Greg
Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have pointed out (in their 2018 book
The Coddling of the American Mind) how new the means of policing
and enforcing these new heuristics have become. Phrases like
‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ and claims that words that do not fit
the new religion cause ‘harm’ only really started to spike in usage
from 2013 onwards.6 It is as though, having worked out what it
wanted, the new metaphysics took a further half-decade to work out
how to intimidate its followers into the mainstream. But it has done
so, with huge success.
The results can be seen in every day’s news. It is behind the news
that the American Psychological Association feels the need to advise
its members on how to train harmful ‘traditional masculinity’ out of
boys and men.7 It is why a previously completely unknown
programmer at Google – James Damore – can be sacked for writing
a memo suggesting that some jobs in tech appeal more to men than
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they do to women. And it is why the number of Americans who view
racism as a ‘big problem’ doubled between 2011 and 2017.8
Having begun to view everything through the new lenses we have
been provided with, everything is then weaponized, with
consequences which are deranged as well as dementing. It is why
The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with
the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’9 And why
even a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can
be framed through the headline: ‘Roads Designed by Men are Killing
Women’.10 Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each
time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather
than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last
decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very
good at living with each other.
For most people some awareness of this new system of values has
become clear not so much by trial as by very public error. Because
one thing that everybody has begun to at least sense in recent years
is that a set of tripwires have been laid across the culture. Whether
placed by individuals, collectives or some divine satirist, there they
have been waiting for one person after another to walk into them.
Sometimes a person’s foot has unwittingly nicked the tripwire and
they have been immediately blown up. On other occasions people
have watched some brave madman walking straight into the no
man’s land, fully aware of what they were doing. After each resulting
detonation there is some disputation (including the occasional ‘coo’
of admiration) and then the world moves on, accepting that another
victim has been notched up to the odd, apparently improvisatory
value system of our time.
It took a little while for the delineation of these tripwires to
become clear, but they are clear now. Among the first was anything
to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the twentieth century
there was a fight for gay equality which was tremendously
successful, reversing terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having
been won, it became clear that it wasn’t stopping. Indeed it was
morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish
the visibility of lesbians. Then a T got added (of which much more
anon). Then a Q and then some stars and asterisks. And as the gay
alphabet grew, so something changed within the movement. It
began to behave – in victory – as its opponents once did. When the
boot was on the other foot something ugly happened. A decade ago
almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights
groups like Stonewall weren’t in favour of it. A few years down the
road and it has been made into a foundational value of modern
liberalism. To fail the gay marriage issue – only years after almost
everybody failed it (including gay rights groups) – was to put
yourself beyond the pale. People may agree with that rights claim, or
disagree, but to shift mores so fast needs to be done with
extraordinary sensitivity and some deep thought. Yet we seem
content to steam past, engaging in neither.
Instead, other issues followed a similar pattern. Women’s rights
had – like gay rights – been steadily accumulated throughout the
twentieth century. They too appeared to be arriving at some sort of
settlement. Then just as the train appeared to be reaching its
desired destination it suddenly picked up steam and went crashing
off down the tracks and into the distance. What had been barely
disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life
today. Whole careers were scattered and strewn as the train
careered along its path.
Careers like that of the 72-year-old Nobel Prize-winning Professor
Tim Hunt were destroyed after one lame joke, at a conference in
South Korea, about men and women falling in love in the lab.11
Phrases such as ‘toxic masculinity’ entered into common use. What
was the virtue of making relations between the sexes so fraught that
the male half of the species could be treated as though it was
cancerous? Or the development of the idea that men had no right to
talk about the female sex? Why, when women had broken through
more glass ceilings than at any time in history, did talk of ‘the
patriarchy’ and ‘mansplaining’ seep out of the feminist fringes and
into the heart of places like the Australian Senate?12
 In a similar fashion the civil rights movement in America, which
had started in order to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs,
looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. But
yet again, near the point of victory everything seemed to sour. Just
as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to
suggest that things had never been worse. Suddenly – after most of
us had hoped it had become a non-issue – everything seemed to
have become about race. As with all the other tripwire issues, only a
fool or a madman would think of even speculating – let alone
disputing – this turnaround of events.
Then finally we all stumbled, baffled, into the most unchartered
territory of all. This was the claim that there lived among us a
considerable number of people who were in the wrong bodies and
that as a consequence what certainties remained in our societies
(including certainties rooted in science and language) needed to be
utterly reframed. In some ways the debate around the trans
question is the most suggestive of all. Although the newest of the
rights questions also affects by far the fewest number of people, it is
nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and
rage. Women who have got on the wrong side of the issue have
been hounded by people who used to be men. Parents who voice
what was common belief until yesterday have their fitness to be
parents questioned. In the UK and elsewhere the police make calls
on people who will not concede that men can be women (and vice
versa).13
Among the things these issues all have in common is that they
have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they
have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash
barrier. Not content with being equal, they have started to settle on
unsustainable positions such as ‘better’. Some might counter that the
aim is simply to spend a certain amount of time on ‘better’ in order
to level the historical playing field. In the wake of the #MeToo
movement it became common to hear such sentiments. As one CNN
presenter said, ‘There might be an over-correction, but that’s OK.
We’re due for a correction.’14 To date nobody has suggested when
over-correction might have been achieved or who might be trusted
to announce it.
What everyone does know are the things that people will be called
if their foot even nicks against these freshly laid tripwires. ‘Bigot’,
‘homophobe’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘racist’ and ‘transphobe’ are just
for starters. The rights fights of our time have centred around these
toxic and explosive issues. But in the process these rights issues
have moved from being a product of a system to being the
foundations of a new one. To demonstrate affiliation with the system
people must prove their credentials and their commitment. How
might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being
‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By
stressing how ardent your desire is – whether you are a man or a
woman – to bring down the patriarchy.
And this creates an auditioning problem, where public avowals of
loyalty to the system must be volubly made whether there is a need
for them or not. It is an extension of a well-known problem in
liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did
once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late
Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in
retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon the brave warrior
finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights.
He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit
of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging
his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.15 If that is a
temptation for an actual St George, imagine what a person might do
who is no saint, owns no horse or lance and is being noticed by
nobody. How might they try to persuade people that, given the
historic chance, they too would without question have slain that
dragon?
In the claims and supporting rhetoric quoted throughout this book
there is a good deal of this in evidence. Our public life is now dense
with people desperate to man the barricades long after the
revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for
home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a
demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem,
which then causes an amplification of the problem.
But there is more trouble in all of this, and it is the reason why I
take each of the bases of these new metaphysics not just seriously
but one by one. With each of these issues an increasing number of
people, having the law on their side, pretend that both their issue
and indeed all these issues are shut down and agreed upon. The
case is very much otherwise. The nature of what is meant to be
agreed upon cannot in fact be agreed upon. Each of these issues is
infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies are currently
willing to admit. Which is why, put together as the foundation blocks
of a new morality and metaphysics, they form the basis for a general
madness. Indeed a more unstable basis for social harmony could
hardly be imagined.
For while racial equality, minority rights and women’s rights are
among the best products of liberalism, they make the most
destabilizing foundations. Attempting to make them the foundation is
like turning a bar stool upside down and then trying to balance on
top of it. The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability
of the system that produced them. If for no other reason than that
each of these issues is a deeply unstable component in itself. We
present each as agreed upon and settled. Yet while the endless
contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible to
all, identifying them is not just discouraged but literally policed. And
so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe.
It is the central cause of the ugliness of both online and real-life
discussion. For we are being asked to perform a set of leaps and
jumps which we cannot, and are perhaps ill-advised to make. We are
asked to believe things that are unbelievable and being told not to
object to things (such as giving children drugs to stop them going
through puberty) which most people feel a strong objection to. The
pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on some
important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is
tremendous, not least because the problems (including the internal
contradictions) are so evident. As anyone who has lived under
totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and
eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with
claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true. If
the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value
and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. If
you are asked to believe that there are no differences between
homosexuality and heterosexuality, men and women, racism and
anti-racism, then this will in time drive you to distraction. That
distraction – or crowd madness – is something we are in the middle
of and something we need to try to find our way out from.
If we fail, then the direction of travel is already clear. We face not
just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a
future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights
advances – including the good ones – grows more likely. A future in
which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on
gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some
stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups
not to play games back that have worked so well on themselves.
This book suggests a number of ways out of this. But the best way
to start is not just to understand the basis of what is going on at the
moment but to be free to discuss it. While writing this book, I
discovered that the British Army has a mine-clearing device now
named ‘The Python’, but in an earlier design it was known as ‘The
Giant Viper’. When this trailer-mounted system is fired at a minefield
it unleashes a rocket, behind which unfurls a hose-like trail hundreds
of metres long and all packed with explosives. Once the whole thing
is lying across the minefield (and like everything else you can see
videos of this online), it causes what is called ‘sympathetic
detonation’. That is, the whole thing explodes, setting off the mines
within a significant radius of the rocket and its tail. Although it
cannot clear the entire minefield, it can clear a path across the
minefield, allowing other people, trucks and even tanks to travel
safely across what was previously impassable terrain.
In my own modest way I think of this book as my Viper system.
I do not aim to clear the whole minefield and could not, even if I
wished to. But I hope that this book will help clear some terrain
across which afterwards other people may more safely pass.
 1
Gay

It is a chill February day in London in 2018 and a small

demonstration is taking place outside a cinema just off Piccadilly
Circus. Wrapped-up warm, the quiet protestors are holding up
posters that say ‘Silenced’ in capital letters. Most Londoners trying to
get to their bus stops or across to the bars of Soho barely notice
them. A passing couple clock that the group is mainly middle-aged
and elderly. One says to the other, ‘Some kind of UKIP protest I
guess.’ But it is not. The assembled dozens came here to watch a
film called Voices of the Silenced. But as their placards point out,
Voices of the Silenced has itself been silenced.
The organizers booked the cinema three months earlier, and say
they had complied with all the cinema’s rules for private screenings,
including sending them the film in advance. But a day before the
screening Pink News – an online remnant of Britain’s gay press –
found out about the screening and called for its immediate
cancellation. The call was successful. The Vue cinema swerved
around any negative publicity by swiftly announcing that it had the
right not to honour private hires if the film to be shown was ‘in direct
contradiction’ of its ‘values’. The cinema also warned the group who
had hired the venue that there might be a ‘public order’ and even
‘security’ threat if the screening was to go ahead.
So on the big night, with exactly 126 people apparently travelling
to attend the screening from as far away as the Netherlands, the
organizers are scrambling to try to find another venue at which their
assembled punters might view the film. Chief among the evening’s
organizers is Dr Michael Davidson of the Core Issues Trust. Davidson
is not a doctor of medicine. He has a doctorate in education, but like
some other public figures who use the prefix you feel that Davidson
would not be displeased if someone laboured under a
misapprehension about the precise nature of his qualifications.
Davidson had come to national attention in Britain six months
earlier when he had been invited as a guest on ITV’s Good Morning
Britain, co-hosted by Piers Morgan, to discuss homosexuality and so-
called ‘conversion therapies’. Davidson has admitted that he used to
be gay himself – or at least had ‘homosexual experiences’. But at
some point he decided that it was not for him. He has been married
to his wife for 35 years and has two children. He believes that where
he has gone other people can follow, and so through his group he
offers counselling on a voluntary basis to other people who would
like to move from being gay to becoming a heterosexual like himself
who admits that he still gets – though doesn’t act on – certain
‘urges’.
When challenged about all this on national television, Davidson
calmly and politely makes it clear that he thinks homosexuality is an
‘aberration’ and specifically that it is a learned behaviour. Asked
whether it can be unlearned, he claims that it ‘in some cases is
reversible for people who want to make that the trajectory of their
lives’. Dr Davidson managed to get this out before his main
interviewer denounced him to the others present in the studio. ‘Do
you know what we call these people, Dr Michael?’ Piers Morgan
asked. ‘We call them horrible little bigots, in the modern world. Just
bigoted people who actually talk complete claptrap and are in my
view a malevolent and dangerous part of our society. What’s the
matter with you? How can you think that nobody’s born gay and
they all get corrupted and they can all be cured? Who are you to say
such garbage?’
A relatively unflustered Davidson asked Morgan for evidence that
people are born gay, pointing out that neither the American
Psychological Association nor the Royal College of Psychiatrists
believe that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable. At which
point his interviewer ordered him to ‘stop talking for a moment’ and
‘stop banging on about whacky-backy scientists in America’. Morgan
then continued to shout at his guest, ‘Shut up you old bigot’, before
he brought the whole interview to a close with the words ‘I’ve had
enough of him. Dr Michael, shut up.’1 And so it finished. ITV had
sent a car to a guest’s home in the early morning to bring him to a
national television studio only for him to be told during his interview
to shut up.
Six months after that event and Davidson remains clearly unmoved
by that high-profile brouhaha. Talking on his mobile phone outside
the cancelled venue in Piccadilly, he is relieved to be able to tell his
audience that he has finally found a venue which would allow him to
screen his film. So the assembled men and women head to
Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre, just around the corner from the
Houses of Parliament.
The doors to that venue are tightly shut, but at one side door, if
you mention your name and your name is checked off the list, then
the entire evening opens up. Indeed, once inside it becomes a rather
jolly affair. We are all given a glass of prosecco and a bag of popcorn
to take into the screening. One elderly woman comes over and
thanks me for coming. ‘Obviously I know your own background,’ she
adds, and I realize she is not talking about where I was brought up,
‘as you talk about it often,’ she adds gnomically. But she explains
that this only means she is even more pleased to see me here. It is
true that I may be the only out person at this gay-cure film-
screening. But I suspect that I am not the only gay in the room.
The film Voices of the Silenced itself is less coherent than might
have been hoped. The main point (as explained by Davidson himself
in the film’s opening) is that ‘Ancient ideologies and modern
ideologies are coming together.’ It is never quite clear how, and the
whole thing feels like two different films awkwardly melded together
at a late stage in the editing process. The first film is about the
ancient world, with very scary apocalyptic images. The second film
consists of some very specific testimony from doctors and patients
talking about being gay and then not being gay any more. As well as
Dr Davidson there is a Dr Stephen Baskerville and an expert from
Texas named (I cannot stifle an audible laugh) David Pickup.
So each time there is something in the film on the loss of the
Temple in AD 70 and the Arch of Titus, then it cuts to the gays
again. Or the ex-gays. We are told that ‘the new state orthodoxy
celebrates homosexuality’. Then, along with a range of ‘experts’ –
mainly from the United States – we get the testimonies. What any of
these have to do with the Arch of Titus is never fully made clear.
Perhaps homosexuality is causing the collapse of this civilization? If
so the accusation is never quite made. There is an ‘ex-lesbian’ now
married with five children who says that her ‘vulnerability’ resurfaced
ten years ago but that she got help from a ministry. Several
witnesses talk of suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse and ‘self-
centredness’. One (called John) mentions that his mother was ‘a
Jewess’, which is a word you don’t often hear these days. There is a
lot of testimony from a handsome 29-year-old German called Marcel.
He describes his own tribulations. He says that as a child his mother
beat him, naked, in front of his sister and this – it is suggested –
may be one of the reasons why he has in the past found himself
attracted to men. Some of the interviewees were from families
where their parents divorced. Others were not. Several of the
interviewees seem to have been very close to their mothers. Others
not.
Dr Joseph Nicolosi – one of the stars of the film – offers up the
idea that many of his ‘patients’ actually hate their mothers, don’t
know how to deal with men and thus develop certain fantasies as a
result. He suggests that one cure for anyone troubled by homoerotic
temptations is that they might consider taking up a healthy pursuit
such as ‘going to a gym’. Suggesting, perhaps, that Dr Nicolosi has
never been to a gym.
Of course it is easy to snigger at all this, and for some people it
would be easy to be outraged too. Yet the human stories are there.
John and Lindsay say that they have both suffered from SSA (Same-
Sex Attraction) but have been able to tackle it together and are now
working together as a very successful heterosexual couple with five
children. ‘It’s not just us,’ Lindsay reassures the viewer. ‘We know
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several people [who have also had SSA] who are happily married. It
is hard work,’ she continues, with John sitting slightly awkwardly
beside her. ‘It’s not for the faint-hearted. And I think you have to just
push through. Particularly in the present era: all the media and all
the cultural pressures to do something else.’
Sadder than this couple are the several interviewees who were gay
once but now appear here with their faces blacked out. Perhaps it is
too charitable to reflect that it wasn’t so long ago that this need for
blackened-out faces and back-of-head shots would have applied the
other way around.
Towards the film’s end an Irish pastor sums up a part of the film’s
point. He explains that he doesn’t mind people holding out the view
that homosexuality is inherent and unchangeable. He just wants to
be allowed to be able to hold his view. As Dr Baskerville reiterates,
only one position on this matter appears to be able to be held in
academia and the media, and that is ‘promotion’ of homosexuality.
‘Sexuality is being politicized,’ we are told in the final moments. And
then, after another inexplicable reference to the Ancient Jews, the
film ends with the dramatic yet careful line: ‘It is time to accept
difference.’
Unsurprisingly this audience gives the film a very warm reception.
And then something mortifying happens. Several of the film’s
interviewees are in the audience and are invited up onstage to
receive more applause. Among them is a young British man from the
film called Michael. He seems slightly twitchy and nervous and filled
with suffering. His forehead is more than usually wrinkled for
someone of his age. For various reasons he has already expounded
on in the film he doesn’t want to live as a gay man and so has put
himself on an obviously internally wracking path to try to live as a
heterosexual and to become (as Dr Davidson himself has) an ex-gay
– perhaps also, in time, with the same pleasures of having a wife
and children of his own. The evening finishes with a prayer.
On the way home and in the days that followed I wondered about
my evening with the voluntary conversion therapists. And I
wondered in particular why I was not more bothered by it.
 First, it must be said that I do not fear these people – and certainly
could not kick up that level of outrage which the gay press has
decided to trade in as it loses its purpose. If there is a reason it is
because I cannot see that events are going in the direction of the
people in the Emmanuel Centre that night. Today, and for the
foreseeable future, they are on the losing side.
When they appear on television they are treated with scorn –
perhaps too much scorn. They find it hard to make watchable
documentaries, and find it even harder to screen them. They are
forced to hide away in secret venues, and seem unlikely to be taking
anywhere by storm any time soon.
Of course if I was a young gay man growing up in parts of rural
America or Britain – even today – I might think differently. Certainly
if I had grown up in parts of the American Bible Belt, or had ever
lived through (or been threatened with) the forced conversion
therapies that went on there – and still go on in parts of the world
today – I might look at Michael (Dr) Davidson and his friends in a
very different light.
But here, this evening, they are the losers. And aware of the thrill
that can occur when the boot is on the other foot, I feel a reluctance
to treat them in victory as some of their ideological confrères might
have treated me if we had met before, in different circumstances.
The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of
victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow
arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity
and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been
censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own
hands? Today the Vue cinema is on one side. A few decades ago
they might have been on the other. And Pink News and others who
celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down
the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power
over a private event. In doing so they contradict the claims made by
gay rights activists from the start of the battle for gay equality, which
is that it should be no business of anyone else what consenting
adults get up to in private. If that goes for the rights of gay groups
then surely it ought to apply to the rights of Christian
fundamentalists and other groups too.
There are two other things. The first is that in order to fear what
was happening that evening you would have to extrapolate from it.
You would have to suspect that, when Davidson says he only wants
to deal with people who come to him seeking help, this is a mere
cover-story. You would have to believe that this is in fact just a front
– the first part of a wider plan to turn something voluntary into
something compulsory and from something compulsory for some
people into something compulsory for all. And that would be to
trample all over one of the bases of political tolerance. It would be to
award yourself the right not just to come to your own conclusions
about people, but to attribute motives to others that you cannot see
but which you suspect. Which leads to a question that everybody in
genuinely diverse and pluralistic societies must at some point ask:
‘Do we take other people at face value, or do we try to read behind
their words and actions, claim to see into their hearts and there
divine the true motives which their speech and actions have not yet
revealed?’
If we were to do this in cases like these, then how would we do it?
Do we insist that the other party has the darkest possible motives
unless they fully satisfy us that their motivations are otherwise? Or
do we have to learn some degree of forbearance and taking on
trust? Even the responses to that question aren’t fixed. They
fluctuate depending on date, location, circumstance and luck.
Someone now in their seventies who was put through forced
conversion therapy (especially if put through ‘aversion’ therapy) will
have more cause to be suspicious than anyone from each of the
successively luckier generations that have followed. Warning sirens
go off earlier if they were set earlier, or in harsher times.
Perhaps these generational and geographical differences will
diminish over time and the flattening effects of social media will
make everyone equally sanguine. Or perhaps these tools have the
opposite effect, persuading a gay in 2019 Amsterdam that they are
permanently at risk of living in 1950s Alabama. Nobody knows. We
live in a world in which every fear, threat and hope imaginable is
always available to us.
Yet one prerequisite for avoiding perpetual confrontation is an
ability to listen to people’s words and hold some trust in them. True,
in borderline cases, when alerted that something strange may be
going on, it may be necessary to dig behind the words to ensure
that nothing else is happening. But if that has been done and
nothing found then the words must be trusted. None of the press
which had sought to silence Voices of the Silenced had shown that
Davidson or his colleagues were forcing unwilling participants to
submit to a regime of heterosexual conversion. None had even
enquired into what details the film included or how his ‘counselling’
was being done. And so a set of assumptions had been made about
his group and words assigned different interpretations because of
their speaker. In this calibration ‘voluntary’ meant ‘forced’,
‘counselling’ meant ‘persecution’ and everybody who went to him
was irrevocably and unalterably gay.
It is this last assumption which provokes the only big challenge
that Davidson and his colleagues present. In On Liberty, first
published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for
why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and
second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part,
and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own
erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary
opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a
truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in
time – if unchallenged – itself become lost.2
Abiding by Mill’s principles would appear to be hard for many
people today. Harder, indeed, than simply changing dogmas. In
recent years the accepted opinion on gay rights in America, Britain
and most other Western democracies has shifted unimaginably, and
for the better. But it has moved so swiftly that it has also seen the
replacement of one dogma with another. A move from a position of
moral opprobrium to a position of expressing opprobrium to anyone
whose views fall even narrowly outside the remit of the newly
adopted position. The problem with this is not just that we are at
risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but that we
may be preventing ourselves from listening to arguments that may
be partially true.
As it happens, confused as their film-making was, and disagreeable
though much of their world view might be, Davidson and his
colleagues are onto something around the nature of sexual
attraction. These are deep and toxic waters. But there is no point in
identifying such waters and not plunging into them.
When it comes to matters around sexuality a set of presumptions
have been adopted which are proving quite as dogmatic as the
notions they replaced. In June 2015 the then Conservative Education
Secretary declared that homophobic views were evidence of
potential ‘extremism’ in school pupils in Britain. Indeed as the BBC
reported, Nicky Morgan said that ‘attacking core British values or
being extremely intolerant of homosexuality were examples of
behaviour that could raise the alarm’. They were evidence that a
pupil might have been being ‘groomed’ by ‘extremists’, and a pupil
who said they thought homosexuality ‘evil’ might need to be
reported to the police.3 Of some interest is the fact that in May 2013
Morgan had voted against the law introducing gay marriage into the
UK. One year later, in 2014, she said that she now supported gay
marriage and would vote for it if it had not already become law.
Another year later, in 2015, she was declaring views such as those
she herself had held two years earlier as not merely evidence of
‘extremism’ but fundamentally un-British.
In the 1990s Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s ‘defence of
marriage act’ which sought to prevent gay marriage from becoming
possible in the United States. She watched as he backed the policy
of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for gays in the US military, meaning that
any gay soldier who told even one other person about their sexuality
could immediately be dismissed from the armed forces. As Robert
Samuels wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Hillary Clinton had the
chance to make gay rights history. She refused.’4 Yet in 2016 when
she was campaigning for the Presidency for the second time and the
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construction, called him into the bridge office for a conference, he
was given fresh assurances that he had been accepted as a post-
graduate member of the staff.
“You are a rising young man in the profession, Vallory, and if you
keep on as you’ve begun, you’ll come out at the top of the heap,”
was the complimentary phrase with which the conference began.
“You are not like most of the young fellows I’ve had to hammer into
shape; you don’t go around firing off the proposition that you know
it all.”
“I should hope not,” said David. “That sort of thing is the best
possible evidence that a man needs to go to school again.”
“Meaning that we’re all learning all the time?—that’s the idea,
exactly,” said the chief brusquely. “Take it in the use—the modern
use—of reinforced concrete, for example: we are all children going
to school in that field. What we don’t know about it would fill a
library.”
“You are right,” David admitted. “I’m learning something new about
it every day.”
“And just because we are still in the apprentice stage, I imagine we
go pretty wide on the side of safety,” Grimsby went on. “That’s
natural; we’re afraid to take our own figures after we’ve made them.
Now this ‘mix’ we’re using on this bridge; I’ll venture the cement
content could be cut down twenty per cent and still leave an ample
margin of safety. What?” Then, with an abrupt break: “Sit down and
have a cigar.”
David found a three-legged stool and nodded acquiescence to the
general postulate that the use of concrete as a substitute for
masonry was as yet but a babe in arms.
“The quality of the cement is another disputed point,” Grimsby
argued. “There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that we are
altogether too finical about that. We’ve set up a code of theoretical
standards; such and such a degree of fineness, such and such a
chemical analysis, and all that; and yet, after the job’s done, you
can’t tell where the tested stuff ends and the untested begins. Isn’t
that so?”
“I couldn’t prove that it isn’t,” said David.
“All right; neither can I. But on this very point we’re continually
having trouble with the railroad people, as you know. We may admit
cheerfully that we don’t know quite all there is to be known about
concrete; but neither do the railroad company’s engineers. Their
inspectors on this bridge are a bunch of cranks; that is the sort of
fault-finders that the ‘party of the first part’ always hires to put on
the job to watch the contractors. If we lived up to the specifications
as they’d like to make us, the Grillage Engineering Company would
come out about a mile deep in the hole.”
Again David Vallory acquiesced. From time to time he had had
troubles of his own with the watch-dog inspectors representing the
railroad company for which the bridge was being constructed.
“You younger fellows are fresh from the laboratories, and you have
the latest word in the testing experiments,” said Grimsby. “That’s
why I’ve called you in for a conference. You’ve been following the
cement tests made in our field laboratory, haven’t you?”
“Most of them; yes.”
“Well, you haven’t seen anything wrong with the stuff, so far, have
you?”
“Never.”
The bearded chief nodded. “That’s the talk,” he said; then he made
his frontal attack without further preface. “You are loyal to your salt,
aren’t you, Vallory? If what they tell me about you and Mr. Grillage is
true, you ought to be.”
“I hope I am,” returned the loyalist, a little at a loss to prefigure
what was coming next. Then he added: “My family owes Mr. Grillage
a greater debt than we can ever hope to pay, if that is what you
mean.”
“So I’ve understood. Now we can get down to the nub of the thing.
You’ve heard that the railroad company has hired a new chief
engineer, haven’t you?”
“Mr. Esher? Yes; I met him day before yesterday when he was going
over the work.”
“Esher is his name, and he’s the prize crank of the lot. He has just
thrown out that last shipment of cement on us; says it doesn’t test
up to standard in the railroad lab. It’s all poppy-cock, of course.
Some little-boy chemist on the railroad pay-roll has made a blunder
—that’s all there is to it. Now then; have you been keeping in touch
with your college?”
“Fairly well; yes.”
“Stand in with the professors in the college cement lab.?”
“Yes; I know them all.”
“Good men, are they?—men whose word you’d take in settling a
dispute?”
“In proof tests, you mean? Certainly; I’d accept them without
question.”
“Good. Here’s what we’re up against. This shipment of cement that
I’m talking about is the material Shubrick was to have used in the
under-water work on Pier Four. We can’t afford to throw it away, and
to save it we’ll have to do a little juggling; but I want you to satisfy
yourself fully beforehand. Take samples of the cement, just as it
stands, and send them to your college for analysis. We’ll keep
Shubrick supplied out of the reserve stock until you get your answer.
Better get the samples off to-day.”
Now all this was purely routine, and David, who had thus been
honored by the confidence of his chief, went about it as a part of the
day’s work. The samples were duly taken and forwarded to the
university, with a personal letter explaining the reason for the
requested analysis. An unbiased opinion was desired, and the letter-
writer ventured to hope that it might be given promptly.
In a few days the answer came, and it was entirely satisfactory. The
samples which had been submitted tested fully up to standard, and
the college authorities were at a loss to understand why any
question should have been raised as to the quality of the material.
David Vallory showed the letter to Grimsby, and was rewarded by
the hard-featured chief’s nearest approach to a smile.
“Now for the needful bit of juggling,” was Grimsby’s comment. “The
railroad people have us by the neck because we have to ship
everything in over their line. But we’ll fool ’em, Vallory. Luckily, the
cement mill isn’t on their line. We’ll send the condemned shipment
out to-night, as if we were returning it to the mill. To-morrow
morning you can slip out on the passenger train and overtake the
freight, say at Little River, on the F. S. & A., where we are building
the power dam for the paper mill.”
David Vallory was staring out of the office window with a small frown
wrinkling between his honest gray eyes. He could forecast what was
coming, and while the cause seemed to be righteous enough, the
expedient to which he was to resort bore all the earmarks of
crookedness.
“And then?” he queried.
“Then you can take a few laborers off the dam—I’ll give you an
order to Bullock authorizing it—shift the cement into other cars, and
fire it back here. When it comes in, it’ll figure as a new shipment,
and you’ll have to doctor the railroad way-bills a bit to make them
fit.”
It was the first time in his working experience that David had been
asked to carry out a piece of deliberate trickery, though there had
been other occasions when he had helped to throw dust into the
eyes of the too-critical railroad inspectors. Quite naturally, his point
of view in these smaller deceptions had been that of the men who
figured with him as Eben Grillage’s paid henchmen; but this cement
“juggling,” as Grimsby had baldly named it, had all the
characteristics of a crime.
“It’s a rotten shame that we have to get down to such methods!” he
protested. “Let me go to Mr. Esher with the result of these university
tests and Professor Luthe’s letter. Taking them together they ought
to convince him that we’re not trying to put a spoiled batch of
cement across on him.”
Grimsby’s smile was too well guarded to betray his real meaning.
“Esher would turn you down cold. It’s his business to stand by his
own laboratory, of course, and he’ll do it. I didn’t ask you to get this
college analysis with any hope of convincing Esher with it; I merely
wanted you to be satisfied in your own mind. You see what we’re up
against. If we have to throw away that shipment of Portland, it will
mean a good chunk of loss for the Grillage Engineering Company.
You said you owed the big boss something; now’s the time to prove
that you weren’t talking through your hat.”
Thus appealed to, David stifled his qualms; and the next day he
carried out his instructions faithfully and to the letter. The
condemned material was overhauled at Little River and was shunted
into the Engineering Company’s own construction yard at the dam.
Here it was shifted to other cars by Bullock’s laborers, and the
juggling process was brought into play. To the F. S. & A. agent at
Little River, David merely stated a fact. He was shipping three car-
loads of cement from the company’s yard at the dam to the bridge
at Coulee du Sac. Would the agent way-bill them accordingly?
“Ship cement in one day and out the next, do you?” grinned the
railroad man. “Didn’t I see the yard crew shoving these three cars
over to the dam yesterday?”
“These are not the same cars,” said David, and he produced the yard
boss’s memorandum to prove it.
The half-truth, which was wholly an untruth so far as the inner fact
was concerned, succeeded. The cars were billed, and in due course
they reached Coulee du Sac as a new shipment. Just what was to be
gained by the juggling, when the railroad inspectors would be
certain to sample the cement and test it, with probably the same
results as those they had reached before, was not very clear to
David Vallory. But one night, a little farther along, he was given a
shock of enlightenment.
The shock was administered by his bunk-shack mate, the engineer in
charge of the under-water work in the caissons; Shubrick by name,
and by training a man who had grown accustomed to many shifts
and tricks in that branch of engineering which is fullest of fatalities.
To Shubrick David Vallory was freeing his mind on the general
subject of over-critical inspection.
“These railroad watchers are getting on my nerves more and more,
all the time!” he complained. “They act as if they think we are a
bunch of crooks, needing only half a chance to scamp this job so
that it will fall into the river with the first train that passes over it. Do
they worry you on the under-water work as much as they do us on
the concreting?”
Shubrick grinned ferociously.
“I’d shut off the air and drown a few of them if they did. Just the
same, David, they’re onto their job all right. You needn’t make any
mistake about that.”
“You say that as if you thought we needed watching. Do you think
so?”
This time Shubrick’s grin took a sardonic twist.
“When you are a few years older, you’ll know a heap more, David.
Why, good Lord, man! are you nourishing the idea that this
contracting company is doing business on a philanthropic basis?”
David Vallory shook his head. “You’ll have to diagram it for me, I
guess. We may not be any too honest; I’ve seen some things done
that I’ve wished we didn’t have to do. But that isn’t an admission
that we’re a gang of thieves, to be watched and harried from one
day’s end to another.”
“It’s a fight,” said the older man cynically. “The other fellows tie us
up with a lot of specifications that they know perfectly well would
ruin us if we should live up to them; and, on our side, we live up to
just as few of them as the law will allow. The honor system may
work in college, but it doesn’t get by to any marked extent in
business. As far as that goes, you, yourself, are not as innocent as
you look, David. You worked that little cement juggle the other day
to the queen’s taste.”
“You heard about that?” said David, and it was a mark of the short
distance he had traveled on the road to equivocation that he flushed
when he said it.
“Everybody knows about it—everybody but the railroad people. You
played it mighty fine. What’s puzzling me is the railroad way-bill part
of it. How on top of earth did you contrive to get those way-bills
doctored on the F. S. & A. at Little River? Did you buy the agent?”
The flush deepened under David Vallory’s eyes. The misleading
explanation he had made to induce the railroad agent to bill the
condemned cement as a mill shipment to be transferred from the
work on the dam to that on the Coulee du Sac bridge was the least
defensible part of the transaction, or so it seemed to him.
“The less said about that part of it will be the soonest mended,” he
returned gruffly.
“Well, it was a neat little trick all the way round,” the under-water
boss commented. “If Congdon hadn’t fallen down in the first place,
we wouldn’t have had to work it.”
This was new ground to David Vallory and he said as much. “What
did Congdon have to do with it?” he asked.
Shubrick relighted his pipe, and after a puff or two: “Do you mean to
tell me that you don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
Again the under-water engineer sucked slowly at his pipe. “There is
one of two things, David,” he remarked, after the pause: “you are
either a good bit deeper than I’ve been giving you credit for being—
or else you’re too innocent to be running loose without a guardian.
Didn’t Grimsby tell you how it all got balled up in the beginning?”
“He told me that some railroad chemist had blundered in making the
tests.”
Shubrick’s laugh was soundless. “It was our man Congdon who did
the blundering. After he had made the tests in our own lab., he was
ass enough not to see to it that the railroad chemist didn’t get a
whack at the stuff.”
“Are you trying to tell me that the cement wasn’t up to standard?”
demanded Grimsby’s accessory.
“If you need to be told. It’s a ‘second,’ all right enough; it sets
unevenly, and is otherwise off color; but nobody will ever know the
difference after it’s in place in the bottom of the river.”
For a moment the air of the small bunk shack became stifling and
David Vallory got up and went to stand in the doorway. When he
turned back to Shubrick it was to say: “Then the whole thing was a
frame-up, was it?—to enable us to work off a cheaper grade of
Portland in a place where it couldn’t show up?”
“Of course it was. We have to play even when we can.”
“But I had that shipment analyzed myself. I sent samples of it to the
university.”
“Then you took your samples from the wrong sacks, that’s all. I’m
using the stuff in the caisson, and I guess I know what I’m talking
about. It’s punk.”
“If that is so, why haven’t the railroad people found it out in a
second test?”
“That’s easy. This time Congdon was right on the job and saw to it
that they got the proper kind of samples. You needn’t look so
horrified; the bridge isn’t going to tumble down.”
But more important things than bridges were tumbling down in
David Vallory’s heart and mind at that moment. When a young man
has grown up in an ethical atmosphere the first broad step toward
the unethical is apt to be subversive of a good many preconceived
ideas and standards. After a time he said:
“Shubrick, the frame-up wasn’t altogether on the railroad people.
Part of it was on me.”
“That’s easy, too,” said the older man. “Grimsby was merely trying to
provide you with a good, stout alibi; to leave you a nice, respectable
hole to crawl out of in case there should be any future to the thing.
But if you’re really stirred up about it, you are foolish. Things like
that are done every day. We are fighting for our own hand. The
Golden Rule is pretty to look at, but it doesn’t hold water in
business.”
“You’re taking the ground that we are dealing with a condition and
not with principles of right and wrong?”
“Precisely. A man has got to be loyal to something, Vallory: I’m loyal
to my bread and butter; so, too, in the long run, are you, and
ninety-nine other men out of a hundred. Possibly it digs a little
deeper with you. Haven’t I heard you say that you’d willingly go a
mile or so out of your way where Mr. Grillage’s interests are
concerned?—that it was up to you to take long shifts or hard ones,
or anything else that came up?”
“You have.”
“There it is, then. No man living has ever been able to draw the line
absolute between ethical right and wrong and lay it down as a
mathematical axiom. I’ll put it up to you. If you are a fanatical crank
your duty is plain. You know the inside of this cement deal, and you
can show it up if you feel like it and make it cost the Grillage
Engineering Company a pot of money. But you are not going to do
any such asinine and ungrateful thing—you know you’re not. What
you’ll do will be to tell yourself that the particular grade of Portland
used is strictly a matter of opinion between our staff and the
railroad’s, and let it go at that.”
It is altogether improbable that Warner Shubrick regarded himself as
in any sense an advocatus diaboli; and it might be even farther
afield to suppose that Grimsby had given him a hint to safeguard the
cement fraud by trying to justify it for his shack-mate. None the less,
the seed was sown and a new point of view was opened for David
Vallory. Given time to wear itself out, the natural indignation arising
upon the discovery that he had been used as a tool in Grimsby’s
small plot became gradually transmuted into something quite
different. Shubrick, in declaring that a man must be loyal to
something, labeled a solvent which has dissolved much fine gold in
the human laboratory. The transition from loyalty to an ideal to
loyalty to a cause is not so violent as it may seem. Hence, it need
not be written down as a miracle that, in proportion as the ideals
withdrew, there grew up in David Vallory a blind determination to be
loyal, first, to his salt.
It was in a letter to his father, written at the end of this same month
of March, that the newer viewpoint got itself set forth in words.
“I didn’t know what a cramped little circle I’d been trotting around in
all my life until I came up here,” he wrote. “You have to go up
against the real thing in the world fight before you can get your
ideas straightened out, and give things their proper relative values.
The university did nothing for me in that respect, and the
Government job in Florida was a mere anæsthetic. But here I’m
doing a man’s work, and carrying a man’s responsibility. I know you
won’t take it as a brag if I say to you, Dad, that I’ve grown more in
the nine months that I’ve been at Coulee du Sac than I did in the
nine years before that. For the first time in my experience I’m
beginning to be able to peep out over the edge of things, and to
grab hold while the grabbing is good. Incidentally, I’m learning what
it means to be loyal to a man who has been loyal to me and mine,
and I know it will please you when I say that I’ve been able, now
and then, to work off a little of the big debt of gratitude we owe to
Mr. Grillage.
“Ordinarily, I should suppose, Mr. Grillage doesn’t trouble himself to
keep tab on the many apprentice engineers that he has scattered
around on his numerous contracts, but I’ve had more than a hint
that he looks my way, now and then. Only yesterday Grimsby was
telling me in his sort of bitter way that he guessed the big boss was
grooming me for something better than I have now. While I’m well
enough satisfied with my present billet, I’m not married to it so that
Mr. Grillage couldn’t divorce me. Anyway, here’s hoping.”
It was only a short fortnight after the writing of this home letter that
David was summoned to Chicago by a telegram from the king of the
contractors, and he went with a light heart, half forecasting another
promotion. Also, he was soberly jubilant over the thought that, by
some happy conjunction of the lucky planets, he might again be
permitted to divide time, at least for one evening, with Virginia
Grillage’s retinue of court-payers.
 VII
A Reward of Merit
IT was after city office hours when David Vallory reached Chicago,
arriving in obedience to the telegram from headquarters, and he was
preparing to go to a hotel for the night when a brisk young fellow in
livery singled him out to ask his name and to tell him that Mr.
Grillage’s car had been sent for him. In the waiting automobile, to
his unbounded surprise and delight, he found Miss Virginia. The
lapse of something over a year had only made her more ravishingly
beautiful in David’s eyes, and his welcome was all that he could ask
—and more.
“You ought to feel highly honored,” she said, making room for him in
the limousine. “I ran away from a houseful of people to come in
town for you.” And then, lest he should be too unreasonably happy:
“It is so good to be reminded of dear, old, study Middleboro again!”
“I wish to goodness I might remind you of something besides
Middleboro,” David complained, laughing; “of myself, for example, or
Palm Beach, or—well, in fact, almost anything. Do you realize that it
is over a year since we last met?”
“I do, indeed. Also, I realize that you have never, by any chance,
written a line or happened to come to Chicago at any time when I’ve
been at home. Or perhaps you’ve been here and didn’t think it worth
while to let me know.”
“Nothing like it,” said David, matching her mood. “I haven’t been in
the city since your father sent me to Coulee du Sac, unless you
count the car-changing times when I went home at Christmas. You
don’t realize that I have become a workingman since I left the
Government service. I have, and I’ve had a laudable ambition to
stick to the job and earn my wages honestly.” Then, as the car
began threading its way through the traffic to the northward:
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home, of course; to The Maples.”
“To the houseful of people? I shall disgrace you.”
“No clothes?” she suggested, with a smile that made him tingle to
his finger-tips.
“Absolutely nothing to wear!”
“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are
lucky not to have you in overalls and mining-boots—or don’t you
wear mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you
won’t have any chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will
monopolize you.”
“What is he going to do to me; fire me?”
The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s
daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be
waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a
perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe you are
going to be ‘fired.’”
“That is a nice, comforting thing to be told—just before dinner!” he
laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me
about yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?”
“Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?”
“Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going
to marry him.”
“When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the
wedding—for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old
Middleboro. Won’t that console you?”
“I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me
that way, and the Cumberleigh occasion will be both, from my point
of view.”
There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles,
to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy. At
the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a
lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and
architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions
digs between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David
Vallory.
“Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the
magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness.
“Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to
include the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering
what it means to you, individually.”
“I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder.
“Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and
again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run
away from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay
figures in the stage-setting. Can you understand that?”
Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was not
the first time that she had let him see that the quick-witted, clear-
sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only overlaid, and
not spoiled, by the lavishnesses.
“I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of
itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.”
The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great
house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation.
It was the young woman who seized and made use of it.
“I hope you will always remember that, David—and let it be clean
money,” she said soberly; and then, with a quick return to the playful
mood: “Here we are, just in time for dinner. I shall introduce you to
the houseful as my cradle-brother—may I?—and after dinner you
may go your way with father and get yourself properly ‘fired.’”
Drawing pretty heavily upon the simplicities, David won through the
social preliminaries without calling any marked attention to himself.
Miss Virginia’s “houseful” made an even dozen at the rather
resplendent dinner-table, and the naïvely inquisitive young wife of an
elderly stock-broker, who was David’s elbow companion, and who
kept him busy answering childish questions about his profession,
saved him from particularizing too curiously as to the others, though
he was observant enough to note that none of the many competitors
he had had at Palm Beach was among them. At the table dispersal
he found himself at once in the clutches of the master of the house.
“Come on into my den and we’ll break away from all this
hullaballoo,” growled the king of the man-drivers; and when the
coveted privacy was secured: “Pull up a chair and smoke. You’ll find
cigars in that sponge-box, or pipes and tobacco on the mantel. How
did you leave the bridge?”
“We are working on the closing span, and two months more ought
to see the rails down and the trains running over them,” David
reported, settling himself in a deep chair with one of the long-
stemmed pipes. “Now that the cold weather is over, there is nothing
to hold us back.”
“Lose much concrete in the freezing?”
“No; very little. We used your idea of tarpaulin coverings and a
perforated steam-pipe and saved practically every yard we put in
place. There was some little kicking on the part of the inspectors,
but we got by with nearly all of it.”
“Huh!” grunted the big man. “A bunch of inspectors wouldn’t be
happy if they couldn’t find something to kick about! That’ll do for the
bridge. We’ll call it a back-number for you and pass it up. I’ve been
letting you alone at Coulee du Sac; wanted to see what you were
going to make of yourself—what you were made of.”
“I hope I haven’t disappointed you too badly,” David ventured.
“You haven’t; if you had, you wouldn’t be here to-night. Now then;
are you ready to tackle something a good deal bigger than an
assistant’s job on a concrete bridge?”
“I’ll tackle anything you give me; though I’m not asking you to push
me any faster or farther than the good of the service will warrant.”
“Don’t you lose any sleep over that,” was the gruff retort. “You’ll
never get any plums from me merely because you happen to be
Adam Vallory’s son. For that matter, the shoe’s on the other foot. I’m
thinking about giving you a hard job—a damned hard job. What do
you know about the Nevada Short Line new-alignment project out in
the Timanyoni country?”
David shook his head in token that he knew little.
“Practically nothing more than the technical articles in the
engineering journals have told me.”
“Well, it’s a right sizable job, and we have the contract. We had a
fellow named Lushing out there as chief, but I had to let him go.”
“Incompetent?” said David.
“No; competent as the very devil. But he welshed; let himself be
bought up by the railroad company.”
“How was that?”
“Just plain crooked; gave us the double-cross; chummed in with the
railroad staff; took favors, and all that. Any time he wanted a special
to run down to Brewster for a night off, he got it—and we paid for
it.”
Having his recent experience in mind, David Vallory understood
perfectly. With a man of the Lushing type in charge as chief
constructing engineer there would naturally be no cutting of corners
on the hard-and-fast specifications; no saving of money for the
Grillage treasury.
“It seems to me that plain business loyalty is one of the things you
buy, or ought to buy, with the salaries you pay,” was his disposal of
the Lushing case.
“Lushing is a fise-dog, and he has proved it by going over to the
railroad engineering staff as chief inspector,” rasped the man-driver.
“What do you think about that?—going over to the other side and
carrying with him all the information that his job with us had given
him?”
David was by this time sufficiently partisan to lose sight of the fact
that a discharged man might be excused for taking the first place
that might offer.
“It was unprofessional, to say the least,” was his comment.
“There was more to it than that, but we needn’t go into the
contemptible whys and wherefores,” Grillage went on, with a
portentous frown. “I let him out, and for a month or more we’ve
been rocking along without a chief—and with a man against us who
knows all the tricks of the trade. I’ve called you in to ask if you think
you are big enough to swing the job and hold up our end of the
pole. Grimsby says you are.”
David Vallory gasped. It was a tremendous promotion for a young
man less than four years out of college, and he was wise enough to
discount his lack of experience.
“I am only an apprentice, as you might say, Mr. Grillage, and many a
man with my equipment, or more, is still carrying a transit,” he said,
after a momentary pause for the breath-catching. “But I’m going to
leave it with you. If you think I am equal to it, I can only say that I’ll
do my level best not to disappoint you.”
The big man’s laugh was like the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
“You’re modest, David, and that isn’t the worst thing that can
happen to a young fellow in his beginnings. But I’ve been keeping
cases on you, and I go a good deal on what Grimsby says. He gives
you a good send-off; says you know the engineering game, and can
keep your head and handle men. The Timanyoni job won’t ask for
much more, unless it’s a little of this loyalty you talk about. If you
need an older head, you’ll have Plegg, who’s been first assistant on
the job since it began. Plegg has the age and the experience, and
you can lean on him for everything but initiative—which is the one
thing he hasn’t got. Now we’ll get down to the lay-out,” and he took
a huge roll of blue-prints from its case and began a brittle outlining
of the realignment project in the Hophra Mountains.
David Vallory, still a trifle dazed by the suddenness and magnitude of
the promotion, bent over the drawings and became a sponge to
soak up the details. In the construction of the Nevada Short Line
over the Hophras in the day of the great gold discoveries, haste had
been the watch-word of the builders. With the golden lure ahead to
put a premium upon speed, the engineers had eliminated cuts, fills
and tunnels, so far as possible, and had made the line climb by a
series of reversed curves and heavy grades to the surmounting of
the obstacle mountain range at Hophra Pass.
Now, since the Short Line had become an integral part of the far-
reaching P. S-W. system, a campaign of distance-shortening and
grade-reducing had been inaugurated. There were bridges to be
built, hills to be cut through, tunnels to be driven. Powder Can, a
mining town nestling in the shadow of the mountains, was the
center of the activities, but the work extended for some miles in
either direction from the town, with the heaviest of the hill-cutting
and tunnel-driving climaxing in the big bore which was to form the
needle’s eye for the threading of the mountain range.
Again modestly discounting his lack of experience, David Vallory was
doubtful of his ability to plan and carry out such a vast undertaking
from its inception. But the trail was already broken for him, and he
had only to walk in the technical footsteps of his predecessors. And
with a good assistant who had been familiar with the work from the
first, this should be comparatively easy.
“I’m your man, Mr. Grillage,” he said, after the maps and plans had
been duly considered. “I’ll lean on Plegg, as you suggest, and give
you the best there is in me. I’ll say frankly that I don’t believe I’m
big enough yet to swing a thing like this as a new proposition. But
with the lay-out all made and the work in progress, I ought to be
able to pick it up and carry it to the finish.”
“That’s up to you,” said the big man shortly. “You may take this set
of blue-prints with you and check yourself into the job on your way
to Colorado. Grimsby says you’re good for the engineering end of it,
and I’m taking his word for that. But there is another angle that you
mustn’t lose sight of. It is a big job, and there were half a dozen
bidders. We had to cut mighty close to get in, and any bad breaks
on our part are going to shove the profits over to the other side of
the books and write ’em down in red ink.”
“There mustn’t be any bad breaks; that’s all there is to that part of
it,” said David, with youthful dogmatism.
“That’s the talk. And more than that, we must shave all the foolish
frills out of the specifications. You know how that goes, or, if you
don’t, Matt Grimsby hasn’t done his duty by you. On a job like this
the railroad engineers would have us gold-plate every spike we
drive, if they could. You’ve been in the contracting business long
enough now to know what I mean.”
David made the sign of assent without prejudice to any of the
standards of uprightness and fair play, the undermining of which he
was still far from suspecting in his own case.
“I shall be working for the Grillage Engineering Company, first, last
and all the time,” he asserted. “The company’s business is my
business, and I haven’t any other.”
At this, the contractor-king’s gruffness fell away from him as if it
were a displaced mask.
“There spoke your father, David, and a better man never lived. I was
only trying you out a while back when I said that you needn’t look
for the plums just because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son.
After you get a little farther up the ladder and find that you have to
depend on the man or men lower down, you’ll be willing to pay high
for a little personal loyalty of the sort that looks an inch or two
beyond the next pay-day. I’m putting you right where I’d put a son
of my own, if I had one, out yonder in the Timanyoni country, boy—
and for the same reason. I want to have somebody on the job that I
can bank on and swear by.”
It was the one touch needed to put the fragrant flower of personal
relationship upon the juggler-grown tree of promotion. David Vallory
was still young enough to take the oath of allegiance without
reservations to any master strong enough and generous enough to
command his loyalty, and Eben Grillage could have found no surer
way to light the fires of blind, unreckoning fealty.
“A little less than a year ago, Mr. Grillage, you loaded me with the
heaviest obligation a man can carry. You are adding to it now by
giving me a boost big enough to make a much older man light-
headed. I’d be a mighty poor sort of a son to Dad if I didn’t——”
“Never mind the obligations,” the master broke in, with a return to
the brittle abruptness. “There is an old saying that the quickest way
to make an enemy of a man is to do him a favor. If it isn’t working
out that way in your case, why, so much the better. Now you may go
back to the dinner people, if you want to. I’ve got to dictate a bunch
of letters.” And the king of the contractors jabbed his square-ended
thumb on a push-button to summon his secretary.
 VIII
Out of the Past
DISMISSED from the presence of the hard-bitted maker of destinies,
David Vallory—not being a devotee of bridge—spent little enough of
what was left of the evening in the manner in which he most wished
to spend it. But at the end of things, when hope deferred was about
to fold its wings and go to bed, Miss Virginia gave her place at the
second whist table to the elderly broker’s juvenile wife, and David
had the reward which comes to those who only stand and wait.
“Well, have you been dishonorably discharged?” she asked, after
they had passed out of earshot of the card players.
“I imagine you know a lot more than I can tell you about it,” he
bubbled happily. “I’m to take an early train to-morrow morning and
vanish, disappear, fade into the western horizon.”
“Are you sorry—or glad?”
“Both. I’ve had a promotion so whaling big that it makes my head
swim. But the place of it is a mighty long jump from Chicago.”
“You didn’t make any use of the nearness of Chicago while you had
it at Coulee du Sac,” she cavilled. Then: “Are you starting west
without going to see your father and sister?”
“I was with them Christmas, as I told you. And I have a plan which
has been simmering while I was waiting for you to get tired of the
whist-game. If the living accommodations in the Timanyoni country
are at all possible, I shall send for Dad and Lucille a little later in the
season.”
“The accommodations are very good. There is a small summer-
resort hotel with cottages on the ridge opposite Powder Can.”
“You have been there?” David asked.
“Once; for a few weeks last summer, or rather early in the autumn,
when the work was just starting. But won’t that be a rather violent
change for your father and sister?—from sleepy old Middleboro to
the heart of the Rockies?”
“Possibly. But there are reasons for believing that it will be beneficial
all around. Dad isn’t entirely well. His heart was never in the banking
business to any great extent, but just the same, the breaking up of
all the old routine is hard for him. A complete change will do him no
end of good.”
“You said ‘reasons’, and that is only one.”
“There is another. How much do you remember about my sister,
Lucille?”
“Only that she is blind, and perfectly angelic, and the most delicately
beautiful child that ever breathed.”
“She is all those things yet—only more so. Do you remember Bert
Oswald?”
“Oh, yes; quite well. He is a lawyer now, isn’t he?”
“Even so. Worse than that, he is in love with Lucille, and—er—I’m
very much afraid she is with him—entirely without realizing it, you
know. It’s a pitiful misfortune for both of them. Of course, Lucille can
never marry.”
“Why do you say ‘of course’?”
“With her affliction? She doesn’t dream of such a thing! Herbert has
been very decent about it. I put him on his guard last summer
before I left Middleboro, and he hasn’t spoken—yet. But a day may
come when he will speak, and then, as I have told him, there will be
trouble and a lot of needless wretchedness. That’s why I want to get
Dad and sister away from Middleboro. If they are not where Bert can
drop in every few minutes, it will be different.”
For a time the daughter of profitable contracts did not comment on
the plan, but when she did there was a touch of her father’s shrewd
directness in her manner.
“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she
told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so
calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There
have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the
beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”
“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a brother—
as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when old
Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again. And
your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had
ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me,
Virginia.”
Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!”
she mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?—or maybe it’s Florida. Or
have you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college
widow?”
“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very
certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream
for me as yet, but some day——”
“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,”
was the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”
“No; that isn’t the word at all.”
“Beautiful, then?”
“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”
Again she laughed derisively.
“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of
you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”
“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer
ground: “You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work
with your father—is there any chance that you may come to the
Timanyoni this summer?”
“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year—for some things.”
“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”
“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you
know anything about Powder Can?”
“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He
says it’s a mining-camp.”
“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It
is the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and
you know what that would mean.”
“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling
dens, and all that.”
“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from
the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there
with—with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me—or us;
there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d
call us.”
“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said
David.
“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant
to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take
us—only we wouldn’t go in—was a dance-hall. There was a girl at
the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the
sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to
see her in such a place.”
“You should never have seen her,” said David hotly. “I’ve been trying
to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as
that!”
“He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking
of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in
the little minute that we were standing there, a big quarryman broke
out of the circle and—and put his arm around her neck. It was
horrible. She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her.
He struck her ... with his fist.”
David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all
this? It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that
you had to see it.”
“That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the
Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The
dancing stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of
them, rushed in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s
blow had knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did
what we could for her. The next day I went to see her.”
“That was like you, Virginia, only——”
“Only what?”
“I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best
about that; but——”
“I had to go, David. There was a—a sort of obligation, you know.
She was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I
remembered seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her
name is Judith Fallon.”
If a bomb had been suddenly exploded under David Vallory he could
scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They
were sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players,
and the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure—
for which he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have
noticed his gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she
went on soberly.
“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad
as they seemed—though they were bad enough. The girl had lately
lost her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room
shack for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see
him, of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had
taken to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have
gotten pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the
piano in a dance-hall.”
David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast,
unlettered man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty.
“I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble—family
trouble, I think—before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I
heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.”
“It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the
new work on the railroad is responsible—an army of workmen with
money to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither
better nor worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t
fair to such people to permit the conditions.”
“I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how
much I shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what
you have been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at
our doors ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.”
“Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there,
David?”
“Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.”
“I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,”
she returned, half musingly.
“What does it imply?”
The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of
motors in the driveway.
“That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself,
if you can—and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling
me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving
early in the morning? Then I will say good-night and good-by. The
hall man will show you your room. Give my love to your father and
sister when you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out
yonder to the ragged edge of nowhere!”
 IX
Silas Plegg
POWDER GAP, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping
down from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for
the swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away,
lies like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the
upturned fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of
mountain peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the
callouses in the palm.
At the foot of one of the callouses lies the mining hamlet of Powder
Can; once, in the day of the early mineral discoveries, a plangent,
strident nucleus of excitement, but—in the phrase of its oldest
inhabitant—a “has-been” at the time of David Vallory’s advent, with
a few deep shafts and winding drifts out of which day-laborers,
unenthusiastic successors of the early discoverers and plungers,
winched or wheeled a few monthly car-loads of low-grade ore.
In some measure the Nevada Short Line’s track-changing activities
had brought a return of the plangencies. Scattered construction
camps with their armies of workmen dotted the basin above and
below the mining town, and once more saloons and dance-halls and
gambling places sprang up and did a thriving business on real pay-
roll money. Eben Grillage’s attitude toward these absorbents of the
money he paid out for labor had ever been that of the closed eye. To
all appeals for the betterment of conditions in the humanitarian field
he had a stereotyped reply: “The Grillage Engineering Company is
strictly an industrial proposition. It does not undertake to say how its
employees shall spend their time or their money when they are off
duty.”
On the summit of a ridge diagonally opposite Powder Can the
prospective millionaires of the mining-camp had, in the day of
magnificent expectations, laid out a suburb for the future city, and in
token of their faith in the future had built a log-house hotel with
appropriate cottages. For some years after the collapse of the
mining boom the hotel had remained closed; but with the nearer
approach of the railroad it was reopened, with a few families from
Brewster as the groundwork of the guest structure, and some small
sprinkling of tourists to come and go during the season.
For a month or more after his arrival in the Hophra basin, David
Vallory saw little of Powder Can the town, and still less of the log-
built inn on the top of the adjacent ridge. New to every phase of the
track-changing project, he had scant time even for eating and
sleeping. At a dozen different points on the new location the work
was driving at top speed; here and there bridges in process of
construction over the swift mountain stream; numerous hill cuttings
where great steam-shovels clashed their gears and chains from shift
to shift throughout the twenty-four-hour days; prodigious fills
growing foot by foot with the dumped spoil from the cuttings; and,
last but by no means least, the projected tunnel under Powder Pass
which was inching its way from both sides of the mountain in
gigantic worm-gnawings through the granite.
During this strenuous preliminary period in which he was striving to
gather the multiplicity of working threads into his hands, David lived
in the bunk trains and mess tents, getting in touch with the various
units of the laboring armies, and absorbing the details as a thirsty
dog laps water. To his great satisfaction he found his staff largely
composed of young men eager to make a record; eager, also, to
pledge fealty to a chief who was himself young enough to be still in
the process of winning his spurs. Plegg, the first assistant, was the
single exception to the youth of the staff. He was a man of middle
age, and at their first meeting David was struck with a vague sense
of familiarity; an elusive impression that he had somewhere in the
memory files a picture of the senior assistant’s weathered face, with
its clipped beard, shrewd eyes and thin-lipped mouth about which a
half-cynical smile played so often and so easily as to become almost
an added feature.
“Have we ever met before, Mr. Plegg?” he had asked, at that first
meeting; and the mildly sardonic smile had immediately fallen into
broader lines.
“Once, Mr. Vallory; on a fine June morning nearly a year ago. It was
in a Pullman sleeper, back in God’s country; and, if I recall it
correctly, I told you you would go far if you were not too good. You
are fulfilling my little prophecy very handsomely; and incidentally we
are both proving the truth of that old bromide about the extreme
narrowness of the world we live in. I’m glad to have you for my
chief.”
It was Silas Plegg who did the most toward helping the new chief in
the absorbing of the details, and David Vallory early acquired a great
and growing respect for the technical gifts of his first assistant. The
organization of the engineering staff, and of the rank and file, was
fairly geniusful, the hand of a master being evident in every
disposition of the huge working army. David weighed and measured,
studied and observed; and at the end of the preliminary month was
ready to give credit where credit was due.
“Plegg, you are too good an engineer to be anybody’s assistant,” he
said, one evening after they had finished a round of the night-shift
activities and had returned to the cramped quarters of the small
bunk car which they shared together. “Why didn’t Mr. Grillage give
you this job after Lushing quit?”
Plegg’s smile was grim.
“If I were really as cynical as you think I am, I might hint that
possibly Mr. Grillage had a young man in his eye whom he wished to
give a shove up the ladder. But I’ll stand it upon another leg. Mr.
Eben Grillage is an excellent judge of men; and he knows me of old.”
David shook his head.