The Iron Heel | Page 6

he toiled hard for liberty and suffered sore. How hard he toiled and how
greatly he suffered, I well know; for I have been with him during these twenty anxious
years and I know his patience, his untiring effort, his infinite devotion to the Cause for
which, only two months gone, he laid down his life.
I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard entered my life--how I
first met him, how he grew until I became a part of him, and the tremendous changes he
wrought in my life. In this way may you look at him through my eyes and learn him as I
learned him--in all save the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.
It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, as a guest of my father's* at dinner,
he came to our house in Berkeley. I cannot say that my very first impression of him was
favorable. He was one of many at dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered
and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance. It was "preacher's
night," as my father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out of place in the midst
of the churchmen.
* John Cunningham, Avis Everhard's father, was a professor at the State University at
Berkeley, California. His chosen field was physics, and in addition he did much original
research and was greatly distinguished as a scientist. His chief contribution to science
was his studies of the electron and his monumental work on the "Identification of Matter
and Energy," wherein he established, beyond cavil and for all time, that the ultimate unit
of matter and the ultimate unit of force were identical. This idea had been earlier
advanced, but not demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge and other students in the new field
of radio-activity.
In the first place, his clothes did not fit him. He wore a ready- made suit of dark cloth that
was ill adjusted to his body. In fact, no ready-made suit of clothes ever could fit his body.
And on this night, as always, the cloth bulged with his muscles, while the coat between
the shoulders, what of the heavy shoulder- development, was a maze of wrinkles. His
neck was the neck of a prize-fighter,* thick and strong. So this was the social philosopher
and ex-horseshoer my father had discovered, was my thought. And he certainly looked it
with those bulging muscles and that bull-throat. Immediately I classified him--a sort of
prodigy, I thought, a Blind Tom** of the working class.
* In that day it was the custom of men to compete for purses of money. They fought with
their hands. When one was beaten into insensibility or killed, the survivor took the
money.
** This obscure reference applies to a blind negro musician who took the world by storm
in the latter half of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era.
And then, when he shook hands with me! His handshake was firm and strong, but he
looked at me boldly with his black eyes--too boldly, I thought. You see, I was a creature

of environment, and at that time had strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a
man of my own class would have been almost unforgivable. I know that I could not avoid
dropping my eyes, and I was quite relieved when I passed him on and turned to greet
Bishop Morehouse--a favorite of mine, a sweet and serious man of middle age, Christ-
like in appearance and goodness, and a scholar as well.
But this boldness that I took to be presumption was a vital clew to the nature of Ernest
Everhard. He was simple, direct, afraid of nothing, and he refused to waste time on
conventional mannerisms. "You pleased me," he explained long afterward; "and why
should I not fill my eyes with that which pleases me?" I have said that he was afraid of
nothing. He was a natural aristocrat--and this in spite of the fact that he was in the camp
of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche* has
described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.
* Friederich Nietzsche, the mad philosopher of the nineteenth century of the Christian
Era, who caught wild glimpses of truth, but who, before he was done, reasoned himself
around the great circle of human thought and off into madness.
In the interest of meeting the other guests, and what of my unfavorable impression, I
forgot all about the working-class philosopher, though once or twice at table I noticed
him-- especially the twinkle in his eye as he listened to the talk first of one minister and
then of another. He has