Power by Howard Fast Page B

but the Main Street contacts brought me no nearer to them and their sad-faced, faded women and their grave, reticent children. From across the ridge, they were alien and unapproachable.
    So nothing of the hoped-for happened. Saturday, I was in town, drifting along Main Street, ostensibly to complete my shopping, but Saturday was a working day for the miners. Saturday night, it would be different, the stores along Main Street lit up and crowded, the street packed with miners and their families, but I could find no reason or excuse to be alone in the business section on Saturday night, and I remained at home, restless and miserable, until my father said to me,
    â€œI hope, Dorothy, that you can be reasonably pleasant and hospitable tomorrow. We’re having that young miner, Ben Holt, to Sunday dinner. You are part of the reason for the invitation. You live in a mining town, and I want you to be able to talk intelligently to a miner in your own house.”
    So much for that. You see, Alvin, it was not fate but my father’s interest in Ben Holt that brought us together in the first place. Yet I do not have to defend myself to you as prepossessing; it has always appeared to me to be somewhat comical when a woman in her sixties or seventies parades the admirers of her youth; still I am old enough to state and accept the fact that I was a very attractive young woman, comely if not beautiful, with a good figure and good health. Even at seventeen, I had all the suitors I desired, and at seventeen, in those days, a young lady was accepted as mature more readily than today. My picture had been in the paper in Scranton as the debutante of the year, and in Wilkes-Barre, I had been chosen as the queen of the May Festival—all pathetic boasting and flying of ribbons, my dear Alvin, but to the point, I think, in this little story I am trying to write for you of Ben and myself and how we met and what our courtship was. I did not turn to Ben because there was no one else, but because there was no one else like him.
    You know, in those days, we were all of us reading Jack London with great eagerness; it was a time, for us in the middle class, at least, of life wrapped in flimsy romantic paper, the end of a strange age in the best of all possible worlds—a time to be shattered forever by the great war. Jack London gave us the romance we required but punctured it here and there with flashes of reality—and his romantic and implausible labor heroes were very much in the order of our dreams.
    So it is no wonder that it seemed to me that Ben Holt had stepped directly from his pages. You never knew Ben as he was then. Many things changed him—nothing so much as power and the sweet, terrible taste of it—but many other things as well; but at that time, when he was twenty-two years old, there was a certain rocklike, indomitable purity about him, a youthful wisdom, a torrent of energy and words—words, words, words, like a great vessel filled to the bursting point with knowledge and certainty.
    Not at once was this apparent, by no means at once, for he came into the Aimesley house as before, clumsily, his Sunday cap clenched in his massive, broken-nailed hands, wearing his cloak of resentment and suspicion. How nervous he was at first! I remember that I wore my pink organdy, which was the very best and most beautiful dress I owned for daytime wear, and how I worked for two full hours on my hair and applying rouge so subtly that it would not be noticed, since I was not supposed to possess it at all! But the effect on him was to make him even more nervous; every time he looked at me, he would turn his eyes away. I tried to put him at ease, and perhaps I succeeded just a little, but the whole conversation between us then before dinner was on the subject of the weather, and what a fine, cool September it was, and how early the mosquitoes had vanished. Yet it had its effect, and if he didn’t talk to me, by dinnertime, he