0.1 Book report on "advesary in the house_part2" by irving stone.  (Page 5/5)

“Gloria, he whispered.

It was obvious that she did not know exactly why she had come, but had followed an impulse. They would have only five minutes together, five minutes out of a lifetime, and yet the seconds were ticking away while they sat in silence, knowing how surely, passionately, desperately and wondrously they had been in love.

When she did speak, it was not about the memory pressing hard against her hearts: the day in the story-room office behind the grocery when she had tried to say good-bye, to give him fair warning that she was about to marry Ned Harness. She instead talked about the friendly little practice her father had built up in Chicago, of her nostalgia for Terre Haute and grey house on Tenth Street. Then, abruptly her voice changed .

“Gene, you did not mind my being in the courtroom”

“No, Gloria. I was glad to see you sitting loyally behind your husband, even if it had to be against me.”

Her voice was like Daisy’s: soft and kind.

“No. I … I found out…. You were alone, that your wife was in Terre Haute. Oh, Gene, I heard them planning what they would do to you…… right in my home, the rail road presidents and their lawyers. I had to let you know that you were not alone, that someone was by your side. ,….. every moment in the court.”

“ I sensed it then, Gloria , but now I know . Each day I bought the image of your face back with me in the rat hole of a cell. Your image, the memory of your kind, affectionate look turned it into a cool green bank of the Wabash.”

She sprang up with the quick, lithe movement he remembered. There was a radiance in her eyes.

“Some part of me will always love you. Gene, no matter how many years pass or what happens to us. There is nothing disloyal about it.”

They were silent, each wondering how it was that human lives got so terribly, so meaninglessly scrambled. The guard knocked on the bars with his key.

“ I am sorry, Mrs. Harkness, but I can give you only another minute.”

She stood facing him.

“Gene, I think you were right and they were wrong. They are fighting for dollars, you are fighting for human life. They are the one who are in prison, Gene, the prison of their own insatiable greed. I have watched them, I know. The country thinks you lost and they won. But someday they will find the decision has been reversed. Oh Gene, there is no prison in the world that can have bars for you.”

Then it was time to go to be parted again. For one blinding flash her lips were on his, her fingers locked tighter behind his neck and he eagerly, longingly and passionately held her beautiful, lean, slender and supple body in tight embrace and kept reciprocating her tender kisses as long as time would permit. Had time permitted he would have covered her whole body with his hungry kisses – he would have kissed the tresses of her jet black long hair, her forehead, the tip of her up-tilted nose. He would have kissed her soft pomegranate cheeks, her both the ear-lobes softly but surely and most definitely her beautiful long neck and her smooth, glistening nape. But the guard mercilessly separated them and led away Mrs. Gloria Harkness.

After this for six months Eugene Debs had to stay in Woodstock Penitentiary for contempt of court for he had disobeyed the injunction order during rail- road strike.

During his long stay in jail he had ample time for introspection, to raise philosophical questions.

“His hunger (for knowledge) was sharp and clear, and there was plenty of solid substance in the hundreds of books that kept pouring in from his friends. Yet all that he could find were negative answers : The United states of America’s constitutions had not been written to give all men political freedom and equality, but only those who possessed property, the precious ballot, which was to create a great and free culture, was even today, after the heroic efforts of Susan Anthony and her Comrades, denied to the feminine half of the American population. The Supreme Court, which had been evolved as a check on the power of the executive, from the very moment of its inception under the hand of John Marshall had set itself up as the champion of property- owners. What was the philosophy that would resolve these ironies and bring real freedom to all human – kind ?”

This book, a biography on Eugene V. Debs, remains incomplete. He goes in for parliamentary politics too but eventually comes back to Unionism. In due course of time he turns into a socialist.