The Persian Price by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online Page A

lived a life of Christian unselfishness, wholely devoted to the welfare of others, a fearless champion of the less fortunate, determined to withstand injustice and to work for the improvement of society. To Barnes the word connoted people; he lacked the cold intellectualism that sees humanity in terms of economics. To him, political science was about human beings and his concern for them gave his own political beliefs a shining sincerity. He was the most attractive person Peters had ever met. His personality gathered a devoted group of student disciples around him, but for Peters the first term at Kent under Barnes’s auspices was the step on the road to Damascus.
    All his life he had felt rootless, condemned to a life of rejecting without an alternative choice. Listening to Barnes, he discovered a new meaning to existence; a light shone at the end of the tunnel which had seemed so dark and lacking in direction. All the resources of love that were in him found a double outlet. The frail, impassioned teacher took the place left vacant by his parents, and because he was light miles away from the limited, conventional father with whom Peters had no point of contact, he never mentioned Barnes or let his parents meet him.
    Barnes’s teaching gave life a purpose for Peters; he adopted the political beliefs with the fervour of a personality starving for something to fight for. He would have followed Andrew Barnes to hell and out again, and on the 18th of June in 1968 on the campus of Kent State that was exactly what he did. It began as a protest against the Vietnam war; a number of students had been called up for military service, a rally was organized and its leader was Andrew Barnes. There had been other demonstrations; Peters had taken part and recognized the pattern. Speeches, slogans, an outbreak of stone-throwing against the police. The ugly baton charges, violence, injury, retreat and regrouping. When the National Guard were called out, he and Andrew Barnes were in the front ranks. He remembered afterwards, seeing the troops with their levelled weapons and trying to get in front of Barnes. There was a second baton charge, more violent than the first; some of the student ranks gave way, there was a horrible confusion when people seemed to be running in all directions and there were shrill screams from frightened girls. Peters heard Barnes shouting, telling them to hold on. And then the shots cracked out. Until the first students fell, everyone thought the troops were firing over the heads of the crowd. There was a lull of a few seconds when there was no sound at all but the echo of the rifle shots. Then the first screams of horror unloosed the panic and Andrew Barnes fell with a bullet in his chest.
    For years afterwards, Peters woke from the nightmare where he was kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by fleeing, shrieking people, holding the dying man in his arms. His memories were confused. He had heard the groans of pain as Andrew Barnes bled from the mouth and seen the head fall back suddenly as if he were holding a puppet and the string had broken. He was weeping when the police arrested him; it took four of them to drag him away and wrench the dead man out of his arms. He had been punched and kicked, fighting like a madman on his way to the police wagon. Inside, with his hands handcuffed behind him, he was punched in the kidneys and in the groin and beaten up again in the station. His parents had come to bail him out and there was a moment when they saw their bruised and beaten son when they reached out to him without conditions. But it was too late. Although they joined the outcry against police brutality and the murder of the students on the campus, Peters didn’t identify with them in any way. Their concern, their indignation meant nothing to him. The best human being he had ever met had been killed by the society which they and their generation represented. Barnes and the seven dead students were acclaimed as