My Eagle (Foreword and Chapters 1–3)

Foreword

by Anthony Meredith, Ardis, 419 B.O.M.

It cannot be said that the Everhard Manuscript is an important historical document. To the historian it bristles with errors — not errors of fact, but errors of interpretation. Looking back across the seven centuries that have elapsed since Avis Everhard completed her manuscript, events, and the bearings of events, that were confused and veiled to her, are clear to us. She lacked perspective. She was too close to the events she writes about. Nay, she was merged in them.

Nevertheless, as a personal document, the manuscript is of inestimable value. It was written by one who lived through the terrible years of the rise of the Oligarchy, and it gives us, as no history can, the feel of those times. We have in it the very life of the revolutionists of that day. It is history written in the heat of the moment, by a woman whose husband was one of the great leaders of the First Revolt.

The manuscript was found hidden in the hollow of an ancient oak at Wake Robin Lodge, in the Sonoma hills of California, where Avis Everhard had lived in hiding. It breaks off in the middle of a sentence. She must have been warned of the coming of the Mercenaries, and had time only to hide it before she fled or was taken. Of her fate we know nothing. We know that Ernest Everhard was executed before the Second Revolt, which she was writing toward and which, like the First, failed. Three centuries were to pass before the Iron Heel was overthrown and the Brotherhood of Man was established.

To her, Ernest Everhard was a great and unique figure. To us he was one of many, a brave man in a brave generation. But her love for him is the strength of her pages, and we would not have it otherwise.

Chapter 1. My Eagle

The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful here, and I sit and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears for the first murmur of it. And I write, while I wait, of the man I loved, and of the days when everything began.

I first saw Ernest Everhard at my father's table in Berkeley, in the spring of 1912. My father, John Cunningham, was a professor of physics at the University, a gentle and unworldly scientist, and he liked to gather at his table men of every opinion, for the pleasure of watching ideas collide. That night his guests were mostly clergymen — Bishop Morehouse, Dr. Hammerfield, Dr. Ballingford and others — and my father had invited, as an experiment, a young working man he had met: a horseshoer, a self-taught philosopher, a socialist.

I remember my first impression. His clothes did not fit him; his neck was the neck of a prizefighter, thick and strong; he moved among the delicate china like a bull. He seemed to me at first a little ridiculous, and very arrogant. He said almost nothing during the first part of the dinner, while the ministers talked of the soul and of the problems of society in the soft, round words of their profession. Then my father drew him in.

He spoke, and the table went silent. He told those learned men that they knew nothing of the working class — that they had never been inside a factory, never seen a child at a machine, never eaten a working man's supper. He told them that their metaphysics were cobwebs; that they argued about the soul and the hereafter while the bodies of men and women and children were being ground up in the mills that paid for their churches. He called them metaphysicians, which in his mouth was the gravest of insults, and he proved it to them, one by one, demolishing their arguments with a cold, hard logic and a rough, laughing scorn. Dr. Hammerfield grew purple. Dr. Ballingford tried to speak of charity and was cut down. Only Bishop Morehouse, an old man of honest heart, listened and was troubled.

"You preach for the master class," Ernest said. "You are in its pay. Your congregations are made up of the rich, and you tell them what they want to hear. Get acquainted with the working class. Then you will have something to say."

I was angry with him, and fascinated. When he spoke of the workers his voice changed; it rang. There was something about him that I had never seen in a man — a terrible certainty, and with it a gentleness hidden underneath, like iron under velvet. When the dinner was over and the ministers had gone, I found that I had watched no one else all evening. Later I came to call him in my heart my eagle, for that was what he seemed to me — a creature of the heights, beating his wings against the bars of the world.

Chapter 2. Challenges

He came again, and we argued. I defended my world, the world of my father's comfortable house and the University and the decent people I knew. He listened patiently, and then he asked me questions I could not answer.

"Do you know where your father's money comes from?" he asked. "Do you know where the dividends come from that pay for the silk you wear and the food on your table?"

My father owned shares in the Sierra Mills, a great cotton concern, and I said so.

"Then you should know a man named Jackson," said Ernest. "He worked in the Sierra Mills. He lost his arm there. There is blood on your gown, Miss Cunningham — Jackson's blood. Go and find out about Jackson's arm, and then tell me that your world is just."

I was furious. I said I would go, to prove him wrong. And I went.

Chapter 3. Jackson's Arm

I found Jackson in a wretched little shack, a broken man with one arm, making a living as a peddler. He told me the story simply. He had been working at a machine in the mill. A flint had got into the teeth of the machine, and he reached in to pick it out, to save the machine from damage — for it would have broken, and the company would have docked him. The machine caught his arm and tore it off at the elbow.

He had gone to law for compensation. He lost. The company's lawyers, able men, showed that he had been careless, and that the injury was his own fault. The foreman and the superintendent testified against him. I went to see them. They admitted to me, with shame or with defiance, that they had testified as the company wanted because they would lose their places otherwise. I went to see the company's lawyer, Colonel Ingram, an honoured man in our city, and he admitted, in his way, that he had done his duty to his client. I went to the judge. I went to the newspapers, to ask why the case had never been reported fairly, and they told me it was not news. Every one of them, when I pressed, admitted the truth in private — and every one of them was bound, by his position, his salary, his family, to keep it hidden.

When I came home I could not look at my gown without seeing blood on it. I sat in my father's house and understood for the first time that the house rested on Jackson's arm, and on a thousand arms like it. Ernest had been right. I told him so. He did not crow. He only said: "Now you are beginning to see."