VIII

There will never be a complete history of the next four years in New Freedom. The formal records, such as they were, have been scattered, lost, destroyed. The emotional records are interesting, but, alas! untrustworthy.

No two persons agree as to, first, what happened; secondly, why it happened. Nor is there anywhere a clear view of what was meant to happen. There is no such view in the after-light; there was no such view at the time. Ideas of communism, ideas of state socialism, ideas of proletarianism, an idea of a kind of idyllic existence under the theory that men are naturally good and wise and sympathetic, artificially made wicked and selfish—all of these ideas revolved in one confusion. At the center of it was Capuchin, acting.

Others deliberated, thought how and why and to what end; what ruled him was a compulsion to act. The use of a new day was to start a new thing. His wheel had to be kept turning, faster and faster. That it should fly apart was inevitable by a physical law. So perhaps the conflict of theories had after all nothing to do with the sequel.

As that approached he passed under the delusion of being himself the portent. The New Freedom idea was Capuchin. As he grew tyrannical his followers became fanatical. The idea was propagated in other states and went very far. He began to dream of power—national power, world power. The Napoleonic mentality is much more common than we know.

As to his character, there were two irreconcilable opinions: one, that he was in fact honest and did nothing with himself in view; the other, that he was temperamentally and morally dishonest, with the ego motive uppermost. In these opinions people were not divided as you might suppose—friends on the one side and enemies on the other. No. Some of his bitterest enemies believed he was honest; some of his closest friends said he was not and were his friends still, for no reason they could ever explain.

Proofs meant nothing. When he was taken in falsehood or had broken a promise he would say, “Well, of course. But what else could I have done?” Then there was no saying what was right or what was wrong. It turned on a question of intent; and it was almost impossible to believe that the puzzled candor with which he asked that question had not its well in noble and disinterested intentions. You had either to take it so, and say, “That’s Capuchin,” as if he were somehow exempt from the common assay, or dismiss him brutally as a knave. But you could never be quite sure. Those who denounced him as a knave were all the more scurrilous about it precisely because they were not sure; the verdict required therefore to be emotionally fortified.

His actions were never thought through beforehand. They continually involved him in complicated dilemmas. The Devil is cute. There are situations, as everyone knows, in which, though you are blameless, you cannot escape the sin of duplicity and a sense of guilt. That was the kind of situation that seemed to haunt Capuchin. The perversities of circumstance were forever obliging him to practice subtlety, concealment, misrepresentation of one state of facts in order to protect another; and it was as if he did this against his will, his moral nature bleeding on the altar.

True, he himself created the circumstance. You had to remember that. Again the reservation. Never did he create the whole circumstance—only the beginning of it, releasing and setting in motion forces he could not control. Often, one would think, he did this in the humor of a disbelieving child that opens the forbidden chest to see what is in it or pulls the lever to see what will happen. All the genii he called up were of dual principle, good and bad. They presented the good side first, then turned out badly and left him in the lurch.

His father, also named George, was born in Ireland and trained for the priesthood. On the day when he was to have been ordained he embraced God’s other intention and then migrated to the United States with his lovely, wonder-eyed bride. His purpose was fixed and he pursued it directly. It was to lose himself in the west.

For livelihood he turned his hand to the nearest thing, which was newspapering. Successively he owned or edited thirteen newspapers, all but two of them in small mining towns. After his marriage he turned infidel. Afterward, not before; probably therefore as an emotional defence in the guise of an intellectual conviction. He professed a deep scorn for success, conceived a rage against industrial civilization and held classical education in contempt, or much of any education got out of books. Yet he was himself a brilliant scholar.

In religion his wife went her own way, which was a believing, devout way, not very zealous. Sprites were as real to her as the trees and shrubs. She saw them, and all of her children were afraid of the dark. They were nine. The family was desperately poor and never owned a house. This was because small newspapers pay badly; it was also because when one did pay the profits were swallowed up in mining stock speculation. Its existence was a series of happenings. Its memories were of feasts after famine, of famine again, of sudden up-rootings, of arriving at new places, once in the middle of the night at a place where there were no lights, and they stumbled miles through the dark on a mountain road, holding hands. The girls were encouraged to marry; the boys to get out on their own. When the mother died the youngest was sixteen. She had seen it through. In the coffin with her the father buried a manuscript on which he had been working for twenty years. Then he went to live alone in the mouth of a canyon, with no pencil, no paper, no book of any kind, and died there in meditation.

Young George was the third boy, the runt of the progeny, the most imaginative and resourceful of the nine. His first job was in the composing-room of a newspaper, at the age of fourteen. From typesetting to writing was a short step. Besides, he had his father’s knack for it. At twenty-four he had a newspaper of his own. It failed. Then another. That failed. Next he became editor of an established paper in Nevada. From editorship to politics is a shorter step than from typesetting to writing. He got himself elected mayor of the town. That was where he had his experience with the Wobblies.

Naturally he was an emotional radical. How he came to be such he never knew. Given his history, anyone else would know. He got it with his blood.

Like his father he held a low opinion of material success; with the same contradiction, he had tried several shortcuts to fortune. Never did he gamble in mining stocks. From that form of collision with luck the family has been injured deeply; there was a fanatical prejudice against it. But he had promoted two irrigation schemes at a time when there was a craze for converting worthless desert land into gardens of fabulous fertility. They failed. The bondholders lost their money; the settlers lost everything. They never got the water. The cost of bringing it to them turned out to be prohibitive. Capuchin lost his time. He had nothing else to lose. Nobody accused or suspected him of fraud. Too quick an imagination. Too little reflection on the facts. That was the trouble.

His heart went out to the stranded settlers. Weeping with them, he denounced the bondholders for wanting their money, the engineers for having made bad plans, the contractors for extortion—everyone but himself. Of course if it had turned out differently he might have made a great deal of money. It was after the second of these two land schemes, while he was wandering at large in search of new opportunity, that he found the worn-out newspaper he told them about in Jael’s house. There his career began.

In the New Freedom cast was one other volatile actionist, but of a different and more dangerous type. He foresaw the consequences and intended them. This was Semicorn.