"Out of order!" he bawled.
Luke waved him down.
"That this League," he yelled, "was as corrupt as----"
They were all on their feet. Some were standing on their chairs. The
men next to Luke tugged at his coat. Other men rushed at him crying
threats. They shook their fists and cursed him.
Luke was as mad as any of them now. His hands struck out at the
twisting figures about him. The tendons of his throat swelled like
knots as he screamed:
"----as corrupt as its enemies! Corrupt! Corrupt! Corrupt! And I
leave you to your own rottenness!"
He fought his way through them to the door. He flung one man across a
chair that crashed under its sudden burden. Another man who stood in
his way, he struck with an upper-cut under the chin and sent him
bouncing against the wall. Hooting, swearing, yelling, they crowded
behind him, and he fought his way clear and almost ran through the outer
room full of astonished stenographers.
A girl ran after him.
"Someone was wantin' you on the telephone, Mr. Huber," she panted. "I
think he said his name was Forbes and I know he said it was very
important."
Luke paused, looked at her as if she were speaking an alien tongue and,
unanswering, pressed on to the elevators.
Sec.5. What now?
He thought about the newspapers, because his whole soul was still set
upon self-justification. He went to the Union Square Hotel; found the
public stenographer, dictated to her, and signed, copies of a statement
briefly saying that he had left the ticket of the League because he had
found the organization corrupt; posted these to the press, and then,
already wondering why he had bothered to follow a course of publicity
that was really directed solely by habit, turned again into the street.
The idea of party had been torn out of him, and he felt as if an arm or
a leg had been torn out of him. He could not imagine a man being whole
without being part of a party and thereby having a party as part of him.
Even yet the lingering hope of the impossible made its claim.
But his reason fought that claim with the sword of remembered
experiences. It recalled his faith in the party into which, almost
literally, he had been born, and how that faith was shattered; his
subsequent belief in the theory of reform within the party, or the
party's ability to reform itself, and how that belief was broken; his
intimate knowledge of corruption at the head of the other two parties;
his discovery, that morning, of the same baseness in independent reform
movements. Certain as he was of the rightness of his attitude toward
those strikers at the Forbes mill, he was yet able to see that even the
working-class, cheated by one political organization after the other,
could not win its ultimate desires through any political organization,
though they formed one of their own. Where was the entity? What was a
party but the people that composed it? Could a party be a
thing-in-itself? Could it have any existence save in and through its
members? That mattered nothing. Whether the members imposed evil upon
the organization that they created, or whether the thing that they
created imposed evil on its creators, the evil was inherent in Party.
The irrefutable fact was that the disease lay not in the form of a party
and political system, but in the system itself: parties were wrong ab
initio, politics were evil in their conception and being. Not this or
that party was responsible, nor were these or those politics; parties
were not diseased, politics were not diseased. Party in the abstract,
Politics in themselves were the disease.
Nevertheless, he would hold those letters for a little while....
Sec.6. That turn of his passing thought toward the position of Labor
reminded him of the message that the stenographer had given him. He
went to a telephone and called up the factory.
Over the wire, Forbes's voice came in a broken cry. Breil's men had
arrived on time, and the strikers were waiting for them. There was a
pitched battle in the street. The few policemen on duty disappeared.
The strike-breakers fled into the factory, where two of them now lay
dangerously wounded and a dozen others were badly cut and bruised.
"Why didn't you telephone sooner?" Forbes demanded. "It's awful! I
sent for doctors and nurses. I've been trying everywhere to get you.
There's one man--I couldn't find you anywhere--I don't know----"
Luke gritted his teeth.
"Haven't you 'phoned for more police?" he asked.
"Of course I have; but the Commissioner said it wasn't anything but a
street-fight."
"Then I'll try the Mayor."
"I have done that, Huber."
"What did he say?"
"He said--you would hardly believe it--he said that these matters were
the Commissioner's business."
Sec.7. Luke went himself to the Commissioner and the Mayor, and was
given the answers that Forbes had been given. The Commissioner said
that he had the reports of his patrolmen, and that these spoke of the
matter as trivial when it happened and described it as now ended. In
the Mayor's office he was told:
"I have to depend on the word of my Commissioner."
Luke spent the remainder of the afternoon trying by long-distance
telephone to reach the executive office at Albany. When he got an
answer, it was from the Governor's secretary, and was to the effect that
he now expected: no troops could be called out for service in any county
of the State until the local civil authorities asked for them.
Sec.8. That night, when there was a lull in the turmoil around the
factory, Luke and Forbes sat late in the library of Forbes's house,
trying to devise some plan to save the situation. It was two o'clock in
the morning when Luke walked into the darkened hall; but there Betty's
warm arms were around his neck, and Betty's voice was whispering in his
ear:
"It will come out all right. I know it will come out all right, because
_we're_ right."
He kissed her.
"I hope I do better at this than I did in politics," he said. "I
haven't had time to tell you, but I lost there, dear."
"No, you didn't." He felt her hair brush his cheek as she shook her
head in contradiction. "No, you didn't. You had your choice between
doing what was right and what was wrong. The only way to win was the
way they thought was losing. But you did what was right--and so it was
they that lost, and it was my brave man that won!"
*CHAPTER XV*
Something had gone wrong again with the head of that office in the Wall
Street skyscraper where George Washington watched the stock-ticker and
where the windows looked down on filmy streets full of figures bobbing
like entangled flies: the plump man in brown, the man with the pointed
teeth and the beady eyes, was once more absent. The slight cold that
the doctors mentioned, the catarrhal affection, had returned; the mucous
membranes of the throat were re-inflamed; the malady that no newspaper
gave a name to renewed its war.
As always, the office work proceeded with silent regularity. Simpson,
the almoner, saw callers. Atwood, the chief broker, telephoned for
orders uptown. Conover, the confidential clerk, traveled several times
a day between his master's house and his master's place of business in
one of his master's motor-cars. At the brown man's home, the famous
physicians issued their non-committal bulletins; L. Bergen Rivington and
George J. Hallett came in and went out, the former worried and
elliptical, the latter loud in denial. And directly across the street
the relays of reporters resumed their watching, asked hourly the same
questions and received always the same replies. Rumor once more hinted
dark things about a ruined digestion and an overworked brain.
Nevertheless, there was a difference between this occasion and its
predecessors, and the delicate nerves of the financial world quivered
with their subtle and sure appreciation of it. The interval of good
health had been briefer than ever before. Simpson looked grave. Atwood
received few orders. Conover more often than not failed to see whom he
sought. The famous physicians called other famous physicians into
consultation. Rivington and Hallett were sometimes denied audience.
The reporters sent their chiefs a word that made every newspaper-office
in the country hunt up a certain long-prepared obituary, set it in type
and keep it standing on the bank with a slug-line that read, "Hold for
Orders." Rumor shook its thousand heads, and this time rumor was right:
the thumbs of the gods were turned down.
No more rising early and working late for the man with the beady eyes
and hairy hands. No more gluttony. No more scheming. All hours are
alike in the sickroom; his only food was tepid broth, and about a brain
too tired to scheme for itself, the only scheming was how to drag
forward from minute to minute its life that was death-in-life.
In the street straw had one day been strewn to quiet the noise of
traffic, and the next day commands from City Hall closed that street to
traffic. Outside was silence, and silence was inside, behind the
brownstone walls and shuttered windows, over the rich rugs, among the
pictures by the great dead artists.
In a darkened room, in a big Louis XV. bed, bought from the poor
descendant of a Provencal marquis for whose mistress it was made, the
patient lay. His legs were beneath the covers, but an upholstered
bed-rest propped him so that his trunk was almost upright, wrapped in a
house-jacket of French flannel, russet brown. Freshly shaven and
carefully brushed, he was as neat as if he were about to go to business;
but his cheeks hung like folds of dough over his heavy jaw-bone; his
short-sighted eyes were fixed on the tapestried canopy above him, which
showed the rape of Europa; his lips, turned pale, were pulled back
tightly over his yellow fangs. On the edge of the coverlet, high-drawn,
his hairy hands gave the only sign of life in all his body: the rounded
tips of their stumpy fingers moved constantly as if they were spinning
... spinning...
He would not go to business any more.
It was the day on which Luke's month of promised suppression was to
expire. In the sick-room of the man in russet-brown two doctors stood
at one side of the bed now, with a nurse between them. L. Bergen
Rivington and George J. Hallett were admitted to the room, and Rivington
stood at the foot of the bed with his trembling hand before his face,
while Hallett, beside him, squared his jaw and looked at the dying man,
who did not look at him. Some servants that had worked in the house for
twenty years hovered in the shadows and sobbed, because they loved their
master and had long cause to love him. A clergyman, in his vestments,
knelt at the side of the bed opposite the doctors and read from a little
book.
"O Almighty God," read the clergyman, his voice sounding loud in the
quiet of the room--"with whom do live the spirits of just men made
perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; we humbly
commend the soul of thy servant, our dear brother, into thy hands..."
One doctor quietly reached out and placed a seeking finger on the dying
man's wrist.
"... that it may be precious in thy sight..."
The doctor looked over his shoulder at his colleague. The colleague's
eyes asked a question. The examining doctor nodded.
"... it may be presented pure and without spot before thee."
Then the man on the bed died. He died silently, speedily, grimly. The
stumpy fingers stopped their weaving motion; they shot into the palms of
the hands, and the hands clenched until only their hairy backs were
visible. The lips tightened for a moment until the pointed fangs seemed
to have bitten through them; the beady eyes protruded still farther from
their sockets; the crooked arms curved stiffly toward the belly; the
crooked knees shot toward the chest; the whole figure seemed to curl up;
the mouth fell open.
The clergyman looked, hesitated and continued:
"... teach us who survive, in this and other like daily spectacles of
mortality, to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is; and so
to number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts to that holy
and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live here, which may in the end bring us
to life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, thine only Son
our Lord. Amen."
Far down in the offices on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street
skyscraper, everything was going on as usual. Only one room of the
suite was empty, and even in it, under the solemn Washington, the
stock-ticker was weaving out its yards and yards of tape by the windows
that looked to the web of streets on which the people buzzed always like
entangled flies.
*CHAPTER XVI*
Sec.1. Public opinion had been unanimous concerning Luke's break with
the Municipal Reform League. Only in the terms of their condemnation did
the newspapers differ: they were all agreed that Luke was anathema. His
letters to the press served him to small purpose; the Executive
Committee issued a statement declaring that his withdrawal had been
requested "because of inflammatory utterances and practical policies
contrary to the spirit and purpose of the organization." The official
statement was accepted and his individual version treated as a futile
attempt to blacken a reputable, if mistaken, movement. It was
everywhere believed that he had been forced to resign because of his
Cooper Union speech, and it was in some quarters hinted that his former
comrades held him responsible for the attempt to bribe the Heney
lieutenant--a scandal made the most of during the subsequent period of
the campaign and thereafter dropped before it reached the courts. In
spite of the fact that the Committee had met in secret session, some of
its members gave their own story of its turbulent denouement to the
reporters, and this was published in a form that made Luke appear as a
cornered bully.
"Mr. Huber [said the most dignified editorial on the subject] was once
doubtless a well-intentioned young man, but his first taste of popular
applause seems to have intoxicated him, made him see visions of one real
evil in every impossible quarter and caused a fit of that acute mania
wherein one's best friends are mistaken for one's worst enemies. This
is the only charitable explanation of the tragic end to a promising
career, but on that end the Municipal Reform League is certainly to be
congratulated."
Other editorials laughed at Luke's habit of hitting at vast conspiracies
of which he never produced proof, and some charged him with flagrant
dishonesty. He reverted for a time to his belief in publicity and
bombarded the papers with letters of explanation; but the papers at
first garbled and then forgot to print what he wrote. He sent for
reporters to give them interviews, but, although the men still liked
him, and politely took down his every word, they could never get their
"copy" beyond the editorial desks. Within a few days, the former
candidate was a newspaper joke.
He had, of course, written to his mother and sister about his engagement
to Betty, since publicly announced, and they had replied with kindly
letters, glad because of his planned marriage to the daughter of a man
of good family supposed to be well-to-do, and hopeful for his continued
happiness. Now, with the news of his political overthrow published
broadcast, Jane wrote to ask him why he had been so foolish and to quote
her husband the Congressman, to the effect that what Luke needed was an
apprenticeship at practical politics; his mother's comment was one of
love triumphant over the defects of the loved object and forgiveness for
behavior inexplicable in his father's son.
The strike dragged on wearily. After the first outbreak of violence,
the leaders were able, for a time, to prevail upon the strikers to use
more peaceable methods; but the resulting days of siege were as trying
for both sides as the active warfare had been. Forbes's boasts to the
contrary notwithstanding, the firm, handicapped by the unskilled labor
of the strike-breakers, found itself unable to fulfil its contracts; the
new recruits were all raw men, whereas much of the factory's work was
intended for trained women: badly needed money was being forfeited. The
dispossessed employees, on the other hand, rapidly exhausted their own
supplies; because they had gone over to industrial unionism, the
American Federation of Labor, to which their old "local" had been
attached through the trade-union that it was a part of, refused help and
forbade the union to give any; there had been a national reaction
against the I.W.W., and it could furnish but little money. The strikers
held angry meetings and faced starvation; Luke and Forbes met in long
conferences and faced ruin.
In those days, only Luke's love for Betty sustained him, and Betty,
being new to both love and disaster, remained loyal. She was confident
that the politicians and the papers were conspiring against him, and,
knowing her father's gentleness in his home, she was equally confident
that the strikers were wrong.
Luke did not inquire as to the reasons of her steadfastness. In the
first darkness of disaster, he was too glad for support to quarrel with
its origin. She was warm and human, sympathetic and at hand; she loved
him. With all his heart and soul, he returned her love. In the last
analysis, he fought, he told himself, for an ideal that, if greater than
them both or separately, was yet necessary to them. The ideal had an
undeniable lien upon the best of his strength of body and mind; yet
whatever of these the ideal could spare was not for him, but for Betty.
Then came the death of the man whom Luke had regarded as the
personification of the evils from which the country was suffering. It
came close enough upon the Cooper Union speech to make that speech
appear in the worst possible taste; but it was an event considered of
such tremendous importance in itself that Luke was forgotten and once
for all swept from the columns of the newspapers.
Those papers, even the daring few that had once or twice had the
temerity feebly to question the lesser schemes of the man who now
pursued no more schemes, were crowded with reverential accounts of his
illness, awed pictures of his last moments, laudatory descriptions of
his Napoleonic career, and editorials that spoke only of his undeniable
greatness and his outstanding benefactions. The country talked as if
its king had died; the achievements of none of the three presidents
killed while in office had received louder praise or more lengthy
attention. He left two large fortunes to individuals: one to the niece
to whom Yeates was engaged, and one to be divided among more distant
relatives, with bequests to faithful servants in his house and
businesses; but the bulk of his money went to the colleges and hospitals
that he had so magnificently assisted during his life. Firmly, the
entire press observed the Latin maxim: they let nothing but good be
spoken of the dead.
Luke was by this time prepared for such an attitude on the part of the
papers, but, on his own part, he permitted no illusions. The fact of
death must always be solemn; but the force that ended wrong-doing did
not palliate it. This blow was like a judgment from Heaven. Luke did
not think so much of how it would benefit him as of how it would benefit
the country, but he was of too common clay not to spare some reflection
to the influence of the event upon his own affairs: it would probably
mean the dissolution of the antagonism to him in business; it would
surely mean the cessation of the personal persecution that had already
wrecked his political and professional career. Yet it was more for the
triumph of the larger and broader good that he felt ready to chant a
_Jubilate_.
Once the thoughts crossed his mind: If Heaven were just, and this death
were indeed Heaven's judgment, why had Heaven's judgment been so long
delayed? And, since Heaven had been tardy when the death of a single
man could thus ease the world and make for social righteousness, how
could he have held it wrong had some sufferer from that evil struck, in
Heaven's default, this single blow for the freedom of society? But he
was in no mood to front casuistry: the thing had happened, and that was
happiness enough.
He was reading the news in his rooms at the Arapahoe. He had sat up
late with Forbes the night before and had risen late this morning,
breakfasting in the apartment house. He knew that he ought to go to the
factory, but he could not go at once.
He began again to dream dreams as he used to dream them. His personal
failure counted for nothing in what must happen now. Suppose he were
discredited and unable to win back the public confidence: somebody,
without party and without politics, a larger and better man than he had
been, would assume a national leadership, where his had been small and
local, and would now bring the whole country back to the simple
political faith and the plain, honest financial and industrial policies
of the nation's founders. The mercenaries of darkness that had served
the evil mind could not now, with the evil mind in perdition, stand for
one day against the Army of Light.
Himself? He would begin over again, with Betty and for her. In the new
order, under the reign of equity, public opinion would soon clarify, and
he could re-establish himself and perform some part, however small, of
the mighty work of reconstruction. He had been too busy of late with
love and politics and business to continue in the social life in which
Jack Porcellis had launched him. Porcellis's sporadic returns to New
York--the man was just now in India on the pretense of studying its
religions--were, latterly, Luke's sole occasions of approaching that
existence. Save to secure the loan, he now contritely recalled, he had
neglected Ruysdael, whose agent as yet evinced no misgivings over the
effect of the strike upon Forbes's securities, and on his last
incursions into Mrs. Ruysdael's set, though Luke had found himself
liked, he was made aware that the liking for his small-talk was severely
tempered by scorn for his enthusiasms. He must overcome all that now.
To be of use, to help Betty, he must regain.
When he was a small boy, his ambition in life had been carpentry. At
some remote time or other, he must have seen and admired one of those
journeymen joiners of the elder type that used to tramp the country
roads from small town to town and keep alive by doing odd jobs at the
houses on their endless way. He loved tools and he loved wandering;
even yet he loved them, and this figure had once represented Romance to
him as definitely as the dead man in russet brown, long afterward,
represented Evil. This morning, while he smiled at the memory of those
young imaginings, Luke felt a little of their charm: it seemed
impossible for him to form, as he should, his new plans while he sat in
an apartment house in the city in which his plans must eventually be
applied; he wished that he could drop everything for the day and go
somewhere far out into the country to tramp the dusty roads and dream at
ease.
It was then that the telephone announced a caller: ex-Judge Stein.
Sec.2. The Judge, as he entered, presented the same dignified figure
that he had presented when Luke last talked with him. His strong face
was solemn, but undisturbed by its solemnity. He arranged with care the
tails of his frock-coat as he seated himself in the best chair, but on
this occasion he came directly to the point of his visit.
"Mr. Huber," he said, "a great many things have happened since we met."
Luke shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll admit you've kept me pretty busy, Judge."
"I was not referring to the unnecessary trouble in which you involved
yourself. I was referring to the fact that your month has elapsed and
that the man you threatened is dead."
The news of the morning had temporarily annulled Luke's sense of time.
Only yesterday he had wondered what use he should make of the Rollins
letters, now carried in a safer place than his coat-pocket; to-day he
had forgotten them.
"Yes," he said, gathering his thoughts behind his impassive face: "the
month's over and the man's dead."
The Judge leaned impressively forward. He shook his white head gravely.
"Death," said the Judge, "wipes out all animosities. I know you would
not use those letters now, Mr. Huber, because I know you would not
strike a dead man. So I have come to ask you to deliver them to me."
He held out his opened hand.
Luke blinked at it.
"I don't understand," said he. "I thought you always represented
yourself as--well, as not professionally retained in this matter?"
"I am now," said the Judge.
"Oh! By the estate?"
"Not directly and not altogether." Stein chose his words. "I am
retained by the company whose property those letters are."
"I thought you had left the railroad-claim business long ago. Perhaps
you are specially retained for this one job?"
The Judge looked hurt. His firm mouth quivered.
"Mr. Huber," he said, "I am in no frame of mind for joking to-day. This
man is dead, and he was my friend----"
"I'm sorry to have seemed to joke," Luke interrupted.
Stein bowed and went on:
"He is dead, and whatever his faults--we all have our faults, Mr.
Huber--they died with him. I am here only to ask you to show a decent
respect for the memory of a dead enemy. I am here to ask you to be
magnanimous, Mr. Huber."
"Magnanimous? You talk as if I had won!"
"The living are always the winners," said the Judge.
Luke began to doubt that theory.
"And so you want me to surrender these letters?"
"Exactly. What use can they be to you now?"
"There were other people involved. Are they willing to accept my terms?
I know they can't hurt me, because I know they haven't the courage or
the power of the man you've been talking about. But that's neither here
nor there: will they accept my terms?"
"They did not write either of the letters, Mr. Huber."
"They're inculpated by them."
"Not legally."
"Enough inculpated to serve my purpose."
"If you think that," said the Judge, "I can only repeat the offer I made
you when I called here before."
Luke smiled.
"And I can only refuse it."
"Mr. Huber," the Judge began again, "the man is dead----"
Luke's nerves had been strained for many a day. He leaped to his feet.
"Of course the man's dead!" he cried. "He was dead this morning, and
he's still dead. Why do you keep saying that over and over? I'm tired
of hearing it." He saw the look of pain return. "I beg your pardon,"
he said; "but I might as well tell you first and last that I won't
surrender those letters, no matter what you plead or threaten. I won't
tell you what I intend to do with them, either. And the only reason I
know that they must be of use to me is your coming here and saying they
aren't any use."
The Judge rose also.
"Mr. Huber," said he, "I am very sorry to hear you speak this way. I
can't tell you how sorry I am. You ought to know by this time----"
"I couldn't know anything," Luke cut in, "that would make me change my
mind."
"But suppose," said the Judge heavily, "suppose my friends happen to
know that the situation of the Forbes Company----"
Luke's face went very white.
He opened the door.
"Good-morning, Judge," he said.
Sec.3. Stein's polite, but portentous adieux were not a quarter of an
hour old before Luke sought the office of the newspaper that had been
the last to refuse him space in its columns for his political
explanations. The man that was dead had, it seemed, left a something of
his influence behind him: Luke resolved to strike at it.
The office-boy was a long time returning, and, when he did, it was to
announce:
"He says ter find out whatcher want."
"Give me my card," said Luke.