Br'er Huber Consults His Dream-Book
And Says Innocent New York Is
Being Tortured Without
Knowing It
And the other flung across eight columns, in letters of vermilion, the
legend:
CANDIDATE PREACHES PRIVATE WAR
WITH FIRE AND SWORD!
In the treatment of the strike, Luke fared even worse. He was held up
as a hypocrite that championed the People from the platform and sweated
the poor in the shops. He was paraded as the real owner of R. H. Forbes
& Son. The papers generally most bitter against labor movements
published long accounts of the strike, denunciatory interviews with the
strike-leaders, and tables showing how badly the wages paid by the
Forbes firm compared with the wage-scale already in operation in the
factories controlled by the clothing-trust. There was a hurriedly drawn
cartoon that depicted Luke wearing a Liberty-cap and hurling a bomb at a
figure labeled "Conservative Business": he was addressing a mob from a
soap-box that was supported by the bowed shoulders of his oppressed
employees. The most respectable newspaper in New York hinted that his
political attack was made against his business rivals solely because
they were his business rivals, and the least respectable declared that
his quarrel with the workers stamped his election doctrines as the
gospel of Murder for Profit.
As Luke entered the door of the Broadway building in which the Municipal
Reform League had its headquarters, he came up with Venable also going
in. The old man's hand trembled as he greeted the candidate.
"We seem to have raised a real thunderstorm," said Luke, smiling. "I
hope it'll clear the atmosphere."
"Then you know?" asked Venable. "You've seen it in the papers?"
"How could I help it?" said Luke. "It's all over them."
"Oh, the speech?"
"That and this strike at the Forbes factory, yes."
"I didn't mean those things," said Venable. "I meant this."
He took from his coat-pocket a folded newspaper open at the financial
and real estate page. He pointed a shaking finger at first one and then
another obscure paragraph, both printed in small type and far separated.
Luke read the paragraphs. Each applied to the same block of an uptown
street. The former said that a new branch of an elevated railroad would
be run through this street, and the latter curtly announced that two of
the apartment houses in the block were about to be converted into
tenements for negroes.
"My apartment house," said Venable simply, "the one that all my money is
invested in, will have those 'L'-tracks running in front of its
second-floor windows. It is just between the two houses that are to to
be made into tenements."
Luke swore softly.
"Who's back of this?" he demanded.
"You know what influences control that elevated road," said Venable.
"And the tenements?"
"They've just been bought by Hallett."
"It's ruin?"
"It will be very close to it."
Luke gripped Venable's shoulder.
"You get out of this," he commanded. "Leave the League and go to them;
they'll change their plans: that's why they've made their plans the way
they have."
"No," said Venable, "I won't do it. I can't. I'm pretty old to be poor,
but I'm too old to change my opinions."
He was still talking in this manner when they entered the League's
quarters and were greeted with the news that burglars had been there the
night before.
"Nothin's been touched in any of the offices but yours, Mr. Huber," said
the breathless clerk who poured out this story to them; "but there the
safe's been blown open, and I don't know what's missin'. I sent for the
police right away."
"The police?" said Luke. "Stop your joking, Charley."
"I'm not jokin', Mr. Huber. I did send for them. They've been here.
They said they'd have a detective over from headquarters before long."
Luke hurried to his office. Bits of charred blanket and several
match-ends lay about the floor. The door of the safe swung lamely upon a
single hinge. Inside was a tumbled mass of papers. Otherwise the room
seemed undisturbed.
Quickly, Luke ran over the papers in the yawning safe. He looked up at
Venable.
"Everything's here," he said.
"Are you sure?" asked Venable.
"Quite." Luke went to his desk. Its lock had been forced. There had
been a rude attempt to restore the contents to the order in which Luke
had left them when he quitted the office the day before, but he saw at
once that everything had been examined. "And they didn't get anything
from here, either," he added.
"I wonder what they were after?" said Venable.
"So do I," said Luke acridly. "At any rate, they didn't get it." The
telephone rang as he bent beside it. He took the receiver from its
hook. "Yes?" he said. "Oh, Mr. Venable? Yes, he's here--right: he's
here in my office, I say. Want to talk to him?" He held up the
receiver. "It's that new worker, Jarvie," he explained. "He wants to
talk to you."
Rapidly as events had of late happened to Luke and the Municipal Reform
League, they were happening this morning with a speed theretofore
unequaled. Venable had not exchanged a dozen sentences over the
telephone before he told Jarvie to wait a minute and, ringing off, faced
Luke, with his cheeks gone gray.
"This--this is the worst thing yet!" he gasped.
Luke was leaning against the desk, his hands closed over its edge.
"What is?"
"This, that Jarvie says. It's--Oh!" Venable flung up his hands. "It's
too much!"
Luke's grip tightened.
"Tell me what it is."
Venable crumpled into the chair before the telephone.
"A couple of the Progressives' detectives have caught Jarvie trying to
buy one of Heney's lieutenants."
"What?" cried Luke. The veins stood out, big and blue, on his gripping
hands.
"Of course the Heney man was really working with the detectives," moaned
Venable; "but that won't help. They had a dictaphone in the hotel
room----"
"In what hotel room?"
"The one that Jarvie was to meet the Heney man in. I thought he'd be
more careful. I told him----"
Luke stood erect. He folded his arms. Venable's confession shook him,
but he exerted all his strength of will to command himself.
"What are you telling me?" he asked. "Are you telling me that the
League has been going in for rotten work of that sort? Are you telling
me that you--you of all people--have been engineering it?"
Venable's terror gave quick place to amazement.
"You don't mean to say you didn't understand that?" he countered. "How
do you suppose politics are run, anyway? Where have you been all these
years under Leighton?" Anger came to his aid; his loose jaw wagged.
"Don't try to get out of this trouble by pretending you didn't know
about it. What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have always
said--always--that the only way to beat the devil is to fight him with
fire."
"Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say
that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?"
"I say we have always fought the devil with fire."
"And this campaign. You've used your fire in it?"
"As little as possible. We never used more than we could help."
"Did the committee know it?"
Venable reached for the telephone.
"I can't waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie's
arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our
defense."
"But the committee knew?"
"Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course,
they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were
sent to school, and they are not fools."
"You bet I _will_ ask them!" said Luke.
He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the
street.
Sec.2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a
canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw
all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the
baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster
and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud
stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted
to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother's living,
imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of
his firm imperiled; the factory's employees fronting starvation and
threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a
repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in
the evils it sought to reform--these were the present results of his
endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked?
Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made
wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the
question.
To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi
to the factory.
The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran
the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of
tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the
chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to
which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle
through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every
corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits
like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have
ceased their work in anger.
Luke saw them glance up at him as his open taxicab whirled past them:
uncouth, slouching figures, with stooped shoulders and sullen faces. He
had not supposed that he could be known to a score of them, but the
portraits of him distributed for campaign purposes had made him
familiar: the first few groups merely looked at him and sneered; then
someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when the cab drew up
before the office-door of the factory, a half-brick, tossed from the
farther side of the street, shattered the glass windscreen at the
chauffeur's back.
Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal. He jumped from the taxi
and darted around it.
On the other side of the street there was only a single figure in sight:
a figure that leaned against a lamp-post. Once it had been a woman; now
it was only misery. Red toes burst from its bulging shoes from which
the stockings fell so far that, the filthy skirt held up by a claw-like
hand, at least six inches of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible. The
ragged jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed a flat chest.
Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and almost hid a red and swollen face.
Through the hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned yellow.
The right hand was extended, clenched.
"You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.
Luke turned toward the factory-door. To reach it, he had to press
through a double line of men and women, silent, ominous: the strikers'
picket-line. The woman's voice croaked from across the street:
"_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!
_Hall_eyloolyah, bum again!"
Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room papered in green, with framed
advertisements about the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an
unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby hat....
Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to Forbes's office.
Sec.3. The office was crowded. Forbes, determined, sat at his desk; he
faced a line of slouching men in shabby clothes, who held their hats in
their hands and shuffled their uneasy feet, and were headed by one man,
dressed as they were, but better fed and brawny, his large face hard,
his hat upon his head. Luke knew that this was the workers' committee
led by the organizer.
"I haven't another word to say," Forbes was declaring. A hint of relief
came to his voice when he saw Luke. "Oh, Huber," he broke off:
"Good-morning. Come over here and sit down. I am just telling these men
for the last time that we will meet them in the matter of hours, but we
can't and won't grant them the ruinous increase of wages they want." As
Luke took a chair beside him, he continued, addressing his employees and
carefully avoiding the organizer: "I have one gang of men coming here in
half an hour to take your jobs. There are more where they came from,
and we'll be running full blast this time to-morrow. If you're not back
at work by the time the first gang of men gets here, you'll never get
back."
Luke expected a growl of anger: there was no sound from them.
The organizer coughed.
"Mr. Forbes----" he began.
Forbes smacked his hands together.
"I don't know you!" he snapped.
"You know who I am," said the organizer calmly. "I told you."
"I don't recognize your right to be here."
"I haven't any right, because it's against the principles of our
organization to treat with employers, but I thought----"
Raging, Forbes stood up.
"Against _your_ principles, is it?" he cried. "Well, it's against the
principles of this firm to talk to _you_!"
"Mr. Forbes----"
"That's all I've got to say."
The organizer was unruffled. He maintained a rather terrifying dignity.
He turned to the men.
"Come on, fellows," he said.
With a loud scraping of feet, the strikers and their leader passed out
of the room.
Luke and Forbes remained quiet. Even for some time after the room was
empty, they said nothing, and while they sat thus, a boyish voice rose
from the street:
"Oh, I love my boss:
He's a good friend o' mine;
An' that's why I'm starving
Out in the bread-line!"
Somebody laughed, and several voices took up the chorus:
"_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!..."
The boyish voice continued:
"Oh, why don't you work
Like other men do?
_How in Hell can I work_
_When there's no work to do?_"
"That's their logic," said Forbes fretfully. He nodded toward the
street. "How can you argue with people of that sort?"
"It didn't strike me that you were arguing," said Luke. "What are you
going to do?"
"What I said."
"You meant it, then?"
"Every word. I've taken your advice, after all: I've employed that
strike-breaker: Breil, you know."
Luke had heard of him. Breil, he knew, owned several hundred
fighting-men and took them to all parts of the country under the
pretense that they were workers anxious to start the wheels of
industries stopped by strikers. Wherever Breil went, trouble followed.
"Then you'd better employ the Pinkertons, too," said Luke.
"They're too expensive," Forbes said. "Besides," he added, "that sort
of thing's un-American. We won't need detectives to protect the right of
the worker to work. If we need any help, we'll call in the police. I
thought you understood that. I'm afraid you will never learn the art of
handling men, Huber."
Luke was anxious for a fight. The corruption that he had discovered in
the League fired his primitive instincts. He was angry, and it was of
small consequence to him upon whom he visited his anger. Here his own
fortune, honestly come by, was threatened; his mother's support,
Forbes's and Betty's. It was an excellent opportunity.
"I'm with you," he said. "When do you expect the first contingent of
Breil's men?"
"When I said: in half an hour."
"Have you 'phoned police headquarters?"
"No. What's the use? I don't want to court a fight. The presence of
the police before there was a fight might only start one. Headquarters
sent me down two extra men this morning when I asked for them, and
that's enough for the present."
Luke bent to the telephone.
"I don't agree with you," he said.
Forbes's protest was mild. Luke called police headquarters and stated
his case. When he mentioned his name, he was told that the Police
Commissioner was not to be found.
"Then find him," said Luke.
"I think he's gone out," came the answer.
"If you don't find him after what I've told you, I'll show up your
action at the next meeting I speak at," said Luke.
The Commissioner was found.
"But what trouble have you had so far?" he demanded.
"We haven't had any so far," said Luke. "What we want is to avoid
trouble."
"I think you're easy scared," laughed the Commissioner. "Have there
been any threats?"
"No."
"Well, what's itching you, anyhow? My department's got three campaign
parades and a dozen meetings on its hands to-day besides its regular
business. I can't spare my men unless I know they're needed."
He rang off.
Sec.4. Luke wanted to stay for the arrival of Breil's men; but there
was something else that he had to do and could not postpone. He left
the factory a few minutes before the hour at which the strike-breakers
were to arrive. He passed into a street slowly filling with strikers,
but he reassured himself by the reflection that what he had to do would
be brief and that he would soon be free to return. He hurried to the
League's headquarters, where he knew that the Committee would soon be in
session.
For, under all his absorption in the affairs of the factory, and in
spite of his desire to abjure thought for action, his brain had been
busy. It was telling him something new about politics. It was
receiving the truth about parties as, from his vantage-ground, he had
seen it.
He did not stop in his own office. He went at once to the
committee-room, which opened from that of the typists'. The Committee
must have received a special summons and begun its work before the usual
time. Business, as Luke entered, was already under weigh, and the room
was filled. In the body of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon
rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together, which undertakers
hire out for funerals; most of the men had cigars in their mouths, and
the smoky air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action of
alcohol on the digestive juices. On a small platform at one end of the
room sat Venable, who was chairman, and, among the several persons
grouped about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates and Nelson.
Nearly all of the company looked at the newcomer, and Venable, after
looking, glanced quickly away. Several committeemen whispered together,
and one laughed.
Luke sat in the first vacant chair that he could find.
"It is moved and seconded," Venable was saying, "that the order of
business be suspended. All those in favor will signify their consent in
the usual manner."
A droning assent answered him.
"So ordered," said Venable, and looked uneasily in Luke's direction.
There was an embarrassed pause. Finally Yeates got to his feet.
"Mr. Chairman," he said.
Venable bowed.
Yeates's hands were in his pockets; his glance was fixed on the floor.
"I propose this resolution," he said, his voice low, his words coming
rapidly: "That it is the belief of the Executive Committee of the
Municipal Reform League of New York that Mr. Luke Huber should be asked
to withdraw from its ticket, on which he now appears as its candidate
for District-Attorney, and that he is hereby so asked to do."
There was no hubbub; everybody but Luke appeared to have known what was
coming. If there was any discomposure, it was plainly due to Luke's
unexpectedly early appearance. Everybody looked at him again.
From a front seat, one man, evidently assigned to the task, rose
abruptly.
"Second the motion," he mumbled, and sat down.
Luke was standing before Venable could ask:
"Any remarks?"
"Yes," said Luke.
"Question! Question!" called a dozen voices.
Luke's voice was raised above theirs.
"I want----" he began.
"Sit down!" yelled somebody behind him.
Luke turned, but the interrupter did not reveal himself.
"I want to say one word about this motion," Luke began. He swept the
room with a steady gaze and then let his eyes rest on the chairman.
Perhaps because their candidate had never seemed more lazy or
unconcerned, the Committee offered no immediate objection. It was
Venable that, without meeting Luke's glance, interposed.
"Considering the topic under discussion," said he, "it would be more in
accord with the usual procedure if Mr. Huber were not in the hall."
"Good for you!" cried a man in the back row of chairs.
"No! Give him a chance!" cried another.
Luke raised his hand to quiet them.
"Considering that this is supposed to be a meeting of the Executive
Committee of the League," he said, "it would be more in accord with the
usual procedure if any motions made to it were made by members of the
Committee. Mr. Yeates is not even a member of the League."
"_Sit_ down!" said the voice from the back row.
"Oh, sit _down_!" echoed a neighbor wearily.
"We can easy find somebody else if Yeates won't do!" cried another
voice.
"I am well aware of that," said Luke, "and so I don't propose to
quibble----"
"Ain't he obligin'?" called the back-row man.
"And besides," Luke continued, "if you would only listen to me for a
minute, you'll find out that I came here with my mind made up to do just
what you're now asking me to do."
He could feel their amazement at his words and so he no longer heeded
the back-row man's comment:
"You mean you came here to sit down?"
"Have I the floor?" asked Luke of Venable.
The chairman writhed.
"In that case," Luke pursued, choosing to accept Venable's movement as a
sign of assent, "I only want to say that I made up my mind this morning,
_of my own free will_, to leave the ticket and the League."
He was interrupted by a roar of disapproval. The crowd had recovered its
wits. Resignation would not suit its purpose. Dismissal alone would
suit that. A turmoil of voices arose.
As if to climb above their noise, Luke stood on tiptoe.
"Because this morning," he shouted, "I discovered----"