"Now," he said, "try him again."
Sec.4. The editor was one of those men whom newspaper-work so affects
that they look any age between thirty and fifty. His nervous face was
full of tense lines, and every few minutes his mouth twitched.
Luke told his story and showed the letters. The editor read them.
"Why do you want to do this?" he asked.
"Why?" Luke was amazed. "Because I want to protect the public."
"Then you'd better go to the M. & N. railroad."
"But you know they wouldn't do anything. They've promised before."
"I can't believe that," said the editor.
"I know it," said Luke.
"I can't believe it. You have always been too sudden, Mr. Huber--if
you'll pardon my saying so. At any rate, we can't print these things."
He returned the letters. "After all, the man's dead, you know."
"What's that got to do with it?" Luke's voice rose in reply to the hated
phrase. "I want to keep some other people from dying."
The editor picked up a proof-sheet and began to read it.
"It would be bad taste for us to print that, just now," he said. "Come
around in a couple of weeks, and we may think about it. Why, the body's
hardly cold yet."
Sec.5. As Forbes had once gone from bank to bank, Luke went that
morning from newspaper-office to newspaper-office. Yet there was this
difference: that, whereas Forbes had only tried a few banks, Luke tried
a dozen newspaper-offices. His search included the papers notoriously
controlled by the money or the advertising of the power that opposed
him; he even tried some of those journals of the city which are printed
in foreign tongues, and he tried the radical press. He tried all in
vain.
Most of the editors were men that had fought him when he was the
candidate of the Municipal Reform League; some that he sought were of
those who had tired of him when he pestered them with explanations of
his political overthrow. Many refused to see him; one or two pronounced
him mad. The radicals shared the view of the man with whom he first
spoke: they would not be guilty of bad taste. Wherever he got word with
a person in authority, the word was the same; he met with that
all-sufficient argument:
"After all, the man's dead."
Sec.6. When, finally, he acknowledged defeat, his wearied nerves
manifested their condition through deep physical exhaustion. He could
not front the thought of passing the remainder of the day at the
factory; could not go at once from one losing fight to another. However
much he might be needed, he could not do it. Until he had rested, he
would be useless, and worse than useless.
He did not go back to the Arapahoe. Instead, with the open country
calling him, he went to the Grand Central Station and took a train into
Connecticut.
The day was Saturday, and the cars were filled with released workers,
but Luke avoided them by going far and descending at the least important
of the train's stops. Tired though he was, he walked beyond the little
town. He cut across fields to a hill crowned by a clump of trees and
there, in the shade, threw himself on the ground and lay for hours
thinking of nothing and looking at white clouds sailing across a blue
sky. He wished that he could lie here forever....
It was one o'clock in the morning before he returned to his rooms. It
was far too late to reply to the score of telephone-calls that, he was
told, Forbes had made on him.
Luke remembered that he had promised Betty to go with her to service at
Nicholson's church.
Sec.7. He was strengthened by his brief rest, and he went to Betty with
a heart renewed.
"Father's still asleep," she said, as she met him in the hall of the
Forbes house, her gloved fingers busied with her hair, preventing the
escape of one of the yellow wire pins that held the few strands too
short for her pins of tortoise-shell. "He wanted to be called, but he
was so tired out, I told the maid not to disturb him. He sat up ever so
late, waiting for you. Where were you, Luke?"
Luke had rarely seen her looking better. The Sunday calm had erased all
the tokens of the recent trying days from her face: it was rosy and
young; it was appealingly almost childish. The morning sun was in her
hair; her brown eyes were wide and bright. He did not want to spoil her
by the story of his yesterday's defeat, and so he passed it by with some
facile excuses for his absence from the factory.
"We're late," he said, as he helped her into the Forbes motor-car.
The chauffeur ran close to the speed-laws all the way to Manhattan.
They reached their journey's end immediately after the choir had taken
its position in the chancel.
The ritualistic church of St. Athanasius is one of the handsomest in New
York. It was built in close imitation of Beverley Minster, and so
elaborate was the work done upon it that, in spite of its wealthy
congregation's assistance, it still staggered under the load of a heavy
debt. It has the Yorkshire building's two Early English transepts,
Perpendicular towers, and a Late Decorated nave with flying and
pinnacled buttresses. Inside, as Luke and Betty entered it, the
warmly-colored light fell through many Lancet windows on the crowd of
fashionable worshipers kneeling before narrow chairs. Nicholson's
voice, coming from behind the choir-screen, sounded clear but far away.
Luke and Betty walked up the nearest aisle and took the seats assigned
to the Forbes family, close to the carved pulpit and under the
triforium. The high arches were carried on clustered pillars, and, down
the perspective of the nave, Luke could see into the choir, to the
Decorated reredos, where, as in Beverley, the piers increased in size by
successive groups of shafts that projected like corbels. He knelt
beside her and tried to give his mind to the service; but his eyes,
familiar though they were with the church, wandered to the north aisle's
windows and the ogee and foliated arcade under them, to the people in
front of him, and so, inevitably, to the girl at his side.
The service proceeded. The people said the Lord's Prayer; Nicholson
recited the collect, and then read the Ten Commandments of Moses, the
congregation responding.
"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."
After the creed, Nicholson walked to the pulpit. He climbed its steps,
and for a few moments only his clasped hands were visible as he knelt
inside. Then rising, he took his stole from the pulpit rail, kissed the
cross embroidered at the top of the stole, and put it on.
"In the Book of Ecclesiastes," he began, "in the ninth chapter and the
second verse, it is written:
"'All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and
to the wicked; to the good, and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him
that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.'"
Nicholson's face was earnest. It was at once stern and irradiated, the
face of an ascetic turned seer.
"And in the General Epistle of St. James," he proceeded, "in the second
chapter and the twenty-second verse:
"'Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith
made perfect?'"
Nicholson spoke without notes, but without hesitation.
"A great man," he said, "has just died. We have heard evil report of
him, and good report. We have heard whispers against him, and we have
seen good that he has done; but his greatness no man questioned. To-day
he has passed to his last account. To-day the dead man stands before his
Eternal Judge. One of those events that happen to the rich and poor
alike has happened to him. With what he has done that is over, the
Court of Heaven now alone, in all its boundless mercy, has to deal. We
that remain here on earth may not judge of that. We that remain on
earth must consider the things that he has done and are not over, the
things he has left behind; we must concern ourselves only with what
concerns us; it is our duty to remember him by the works that he has
made his monument."
The preacher dwelt upon the dead man's rise from poverty to vast riches,
a hopeful lesson in the reward of thrift and wisdom to every poor boy in
a republic that grants equal opportunity to all. He spoke with an
admiration of the genius that had carved its way to power until its will
was felt in the uttermost corners of the earth.
As he proceeded, Nicholson seemed to forget his admonition against the
judgment of things over and done with. He made direct reference to
Luke's Cooper Union speech, and he looked full in Luke's face as he made
it.
"Not long ago," he said, "while this man was tottering upon the brink of
eternity, another man, a sincere, but misguided man, made terrible
charges against him, charges that reflected, however veiled, upon the
character and motives not only of the man now dead, but a whole group of
people eminent in public and business life. And what was the result?
Nothing that lent the least credit to the accuser's intelligence or
appreciation of the value of evidence, for nothing at all was proven,
nothing even corroborated."
Luke flushed. He felt Betty looking at him, but he would not return her
gaze. He felt other people in the congregation turned toward him. He
could not guess what had changed Nicholson.
The sermon was proceeding with praises of the dead man's benefactions.
One by one they were described and extolled.
"His greatness," said Nicholson, "would have availed him nothing at this
one event for the righteous and the wicked if he had not had charity,
for we are told that though we speak with the tongues of men and of
angels and have not charity, we are become as sounding brass and
tinkling cymbal. Charity, however, this man had. The institutions that
he supported and has endowed have given and now forever will give
learning to thousands who, but for them, would have lived in
ignorance--healing to thousands who, but for them, would have died in
agony.
"Charity: but charity alone will not suffice. Sounding brass itself,
unless it is informed by faith! And this man's sublime faith even his
worst enemy cannot deny. For his counsel and advice, for his
painstaking and sagacious investment of its funds the Church is indebted
to this man as it is to no other. Many a denomination outside our own
fold can truly say the same of him and should say and does say how much
we owe him, also, for the unceasing flow of his money into our
treasuries. He did not speak of these things. He did not let his right
hand know what his left hand did; but we of the Church remember that he
gave millions of dollars to the faith.
"The faith of men of money is tested by their money; yet this man's
faith had many another test and rose triumphant from them all. His
attendance at the Church's services--not only on Sundays, but on
fast-days and holidays, on saints'-days and work-days--never failed.
His wisdom was free to our councils, and I have been told on reliable
authority that he never rose in the morning, went to bed at night, or
embarked on any business enterprise, however small, without first humbly
and privately asking direction of the Most High. He knew in his every
act that the greatest man is as nothing before God; and when he came to
die, he died like a Christian, a priest of God by his side and the words
of God's mercy sounding in his dulling ears. From first to last, his
works and his faith were one: 'Seest thou how faith wrought with his
works, and by works was faith made perfect?' For us who are Christians,
that is enough. It is enough to make us each pray to meet his end, each
at his own station in life, as this great man met his. _De mortuis nil
nisi bonum_."
Only amazement had held Luke in his chair. At this phrase, he half
rose.
Nicholson, however, was concluding:
"There is but one word more, a word personal to us of this congregation,
to be said. I need not recall to you the heavy privations that this
church in which we now are has undergone. They were generously met and
nobly borne, but, in spite of all your nobility and all your generosity,
the time came, a week since, when it seemed indeed as if the forces of
evil were about to conquer, and as if, unless Heaven intervened, this
beautiful building must pass out of our hands.
"Three days before the death of the man I have been speaking of this
morning, an impulse came to me, and I wrote him a letter. My friends, I
do not believe that that impulse was of this world.
"I have since been told that when the letter reached him, his eyes were
too dim to read it; yet, when he was informed of its purport, he asked
that it be read to him. It was read, and then, with a hand already
trembling at the touch of death, he took a pen and signed the last check
of his career. That check was our emancipation; it was a check for the
entire sum for which this Church of St. Athanasius--this beautiful
church in which it is our privilege to worship God--stood indebted. I
ask you to join in prayer for the soul of our dead benefactor and then
to unite in the doxology for thanksgiving to God. 'Seest thou how faith
wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?'"
Sec.8. "Where are you going?" gasped Betty.
The people were kneeling, but Luke was on his feet.
"I'm going to get out of here," he answered. "I'm going to get into the
open. I want fresh air."
He strode down the aisle under the clustered pillars of the triforium,
and Betty hurried after. At the church door stood a table bearing a
pile of leaflets, and unconsciously he took one as he passed.
Sec.9. In the sunlit street, he felt a little ashamed of his
impetuosity. Betty was indignant.
"Why did you make such a scene?" she asked.
"I'm sorry," said Luke. "I simply couldn't stand it. A priest talking
like that! And Nicholson the priest!"
"He shouldn't have attacked you," Betty granted, "but you didn't put him
in the wrong by behaving impolitely."
"Oh, I don't care about putting him in the wrong, and I don't care about
his attacking me!" Luke helped her into the waiting motor, and the car
started smoothly on its return journey. "What I couldn't stand was the
Church making a hero out of such a man; the Church selling itself for a
few thousand dollars."
"But the man did do good, Luke."
"How much--compared with the evil he did?"
"I can't know that. Who can?"
"You talk like Nicholson!"
"No, I don't." She put her hand on his. "But what good can come of
abusing the man?"
"I don't want him abused: I only don't want God's Church to make a saint
out of him."
"Nobody's doing that, Luke. They're simply being decent about him.
After all, he _is_ dead."
Luke shook her hand free. Then, suddenly, he tossed back his head and
broke into a high laugh. He frightened her.
"Luke! What is it?"
He could not at once answer.
"Oh, what is the matter?" she pleaded.
"You!" he laughed. "You, too!" To control himself he unfolded and
looked at the leaflet that he had picked up in the church doorway, and
had been heedlessly folding and unfolding ever since. His mirth
stopped. "Listen to this," he ordered. "By Jove, it's not Nicholson
alone; it's the whole bunch, and speaking officially, too! Listen to
this. It's a printed statement issued by the General Executive
Committee of the whole church--not St. Athanasius alone, but the entire
denomination--and it's worse than Nicholson's sermon." His eyes ran
from line to line. "'We call upon the prayers of the faithful,'" he
read as well as the motion of the car permitted.... "'He has not buried
his talent nor hidden his candle under a bushel.... So far as a man's
life can, his life exemplified Law and Order, realized the truth uttered
by Richard Hooker: "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that
her seat is in the bosom of God, the harmony of the world."'"
Betty had been listening attentively.
"Well?" she asked.
"'Well?'" repeated Luke. "'Well?' Don't you see? The whole Church is
standing up for him. And not our Church alone: all churches. He'd
bought them--bought them!"
"Luke! How can you?"
"Yes, he has. One way or another. He or his kind: for I'm beginning to
see at last he wasn't alone--never was and never will be. And seeing
that, I'm not blaming him so much--any of the _hims_. I don't say, any
more, he was worse than the rest of us; he was only stronger. Maybe he
was only the average man in extraordinary circumstances. He didn't make
them--I'm beginning to believe that, too,--they made him. But the
Church! The churches! They've sinned against the light. They're
liars. They're--why, they must be founded on a lie: their light must be
darkness!"
The girl had edged away from him, her brown eyes big with horror at his
blasphemy. The motor was drawing up before the door of the Forbes
house; it was drawing up in a quiet Brooklyn street. And there, in that
Sunday stillness, and among those surroundings of commonplace
respectability, suddenly the Marvel came to him.
It came to him, this denial of Religion, as a profound religious
experience. It was Miracle, burning, blinding, transfiguring.
Elemental, tremendous. It was a stroke that affected his entire being;
suffused him; changed him, spiritually, in every atom. It hurled him
from all his old bases and set him in a new relation to the universe.
It was not reformation; it was revolution. Luke was another
personality: this was the "new birth." He saw the glory of
individuality, the divinity of his humanity. In the flash of
revelation, he learned to walk and knew that for all his life he had
been permitting himself to be carried. Without guessing it, he had
been, he now knew, all these years, afraid, and now, with this new
inspiration, he faced all things and feared none. Believing, he had been
dead, but denying, was alive again; faithful, he had been lost,
faithless, he was found, and not by any other help than his own: he had
found himself. It was the thing that, in the twinkling of an eye, can
make an honest man of a liar, an abstainer of a dipsomaniac, good out of
evil. It was the same thing that happens to a penitent at the moment of
"conversion," of "receiving grace," of "experiencing religion"; the same
force operating with the same power and the same manner, but in an
opposite direction.
As St. Paul rose from the earth after his vision near Damascus, so Luke
staggered from the Forbes motor-car. His hands groped at the air.
"Betty!" he gasped; "tell your father I can't see him. Not now.--I'll
be back later.--Perhaps in a little while.--Later."
She put out her arms to him.
"What is it, Luke?" she cried. "What's the matter?"
His eyes looked at her, but he did not see her. He turned from her to
the street.
"I don't know," he said, "but I think--I think I'm Being Saved."
*CHAPTER XVII*
Sec.1. For an hour, for two hours, he tried to adjust his mental and
spiritual sight to the blazing illumination; but adjustment, he at
length realized, must be a matter of many days. The illumination was
too sudden and too intense. He could no more assess moral values and
determine ethical duties than a new-born baby can know the use of those
objects most habitual to its elders--a new-born baby to whom the lamp on
a table and the moon in the sky are one and the same. There must be
false starts on wrong roads; there must be disappointment and stumbling;
there must even be moments of relapse. The great thing for Luke was
that, as the lives of some men are changed forever for the better by an
affirmation of faith, his life had now forever been changed for the
better by a rejection of faith. He had denied the superhuman in man's
affairs, and the banishment of the superhuman raised the human; it left
the man no longer a pigmy trembling before a giant, but himself a giant,
limited and mortal, yet self-sufficient and divine. He had found what
was for him the ultimate strength; for the knowledge of how to use that
strength rightly he could wait.
Meanwhile, there was the patent obligation to Forbes. Forbes needed
him; Luke returned to the Forbes house.
Sec.2. Forbes was waiting in the library.
"Where were you yesterday? Are you going crazy, Huber? You knew I
needed you."
The elder man had borne disaster hardly. He looked tired and ill.
"I'm sorry," said Luke. "I was busy."
"Busy? What could have kept you busy in town when you knew this strike
was going on? And you went to church this morning instead of waking me!
Betty says you're sick. Are you?"
"No. I'm only getting well."
Forbes's tone was more considerate:
"Anyhow, you might have come in to luncheon. Have you had anything to
eat?"
"I'm all right," said Luke.
"But Betty says----"
"Where is she?"
"She's in her room. I told her to lie down. She's all upset. Really,
Huber----"
Luke seated himself by the table covered with magazines and sprawling
sections of the Sunday newspapers. Outwardly, he was as self-contained
as during his days in Leighton's office.
"What was it you wanted to see me about?" he interrupted.
Forbes took a chair opposite. He assumed the voice of persuasion.
"I want to be perfectly frank with you, Huber," he began.
Luke thought: "I wonder what he is going to keep back." All that he
said was: "Yes?"
"Yes," resumed Forbes, "and I want you to be perfectly frank with me.
You once told me you'd made enemies of the people who've since made such
trouble for us, because you had some letters or other that belonged to
them, didn't you?"
Luke bowed assent. He knew now what to expect.
"Well," Forbes went on, "the only use those letters were to you was
political. Now that you can't use them politically, why don't you give
them up?"
"You mean now that I've been chucked out of politics?"
"Well, you know you've ruined yourself there. You can never get back
again. When you can't hurt your enemies, why not make them your
friends?"
"No, thank you."
"But these letters are of no use to you."
"How do you know that?" asked Luke quietly.
Forbes blushed.
"Are they?" he countered.
"And why," persisted Luke, "didn't you suggest this to me days ago?"
His eyes probed the man before him. "What else did Judge Stein say to
you?" he demanded.
Forbes drew back in his chair. His flush deepened, but presently he
made an impatient gesture.
"Oh, very well," he said defiantly, "the Judge did see me yesterday, and
if you had been at the factory, as you should have been, you'd have seen
him, too."
Luke thought it unnecessary to remark that he had been honored by a
previous call from Stein.
"What else did he say?" Luke repeated.
"He said a great deal; but the upshot of it was that he would induce
your enemies, who are the men that control the trust we're competing
with, to lower wages and join the fight against the employees, if you
would agree to surrender those letters."
"I won't do it," said Luke.
"Don't be hasty," Forbes implored. "Think of me. Think of Betty----"
Luke winced.
"Don't begin that," he commanded.
"But what have you to gain?" asked Forbes.
"Nothing. I've nothing to gain. I've only something to keep: my
self-respect."
"Your self-conceit, you mean. Be reasonable, Huber. These people won't
give in."
"So I must?"
"They won't give in, and you can't get back to politics and can't get
any paper to take up your case."
"Oh,"--Luke could have laughed--"so Stein told you that, too, did he?"
"Never mind what he told me. The point is: his people can help you if
you'll only acknowledge defeat, now that you're defeated. They can give
you back all you've lost, and nobody else can."
"And if I don't admit I'm whipped, they'll whip me some more?"
"They'll finish what they've begun, Huber; they will wipe out the
Business, too."
"I'm sorry," said Luke--"very sorry for you, I mean. But there's no use
arguing: I won't give in."
Forbes exhausted his every resource. He pleaded for the business, for
Luke, for Betty. For an hour he sent the squadrons of his appeal
against the impregnable wall of Luke's determination.
"What have you to gain?" he reiterated; and once he said: "The worst of
the crowd is dead, anyhow."
Luke was not listening. He was saying to himself:
"What is it I am to do next? There is still a little money left to my
account at the bank. It will keep me for a year and mother for a
year--and then? I'm making Forbes hold out against the trust, and if he
does hold out his mill is doomed. No hope there! Can I go back to the
Law? I can't, because the Law is just what the Church is. The Law was
made by the powerful, it is interpreted by their paid servants and
administered by their slaves. It is a game devised by the crafty
powerful to cheat the simple weak. The last five years have proved that
to me, and I'm ashamed that it took me so long to learn. Betty----"
He did not dare to think of Betty. He thought rather of the open
country, of the smell of the earth on which he had been lying
twenty-four hours ago, and the coolness and freedom of the white clouds
against that sky of blue....
Forbes was saying something about his grandfather and the Business.
Luke got up.
"There's no use your wasting your breath," he declared. "Nothing that
you could say would change me--no, nothing that even Betty could say!
But I'll do this: I'll never be away from the factory again when I ought
to be there; I'll stand by you till we've beaten these strikers or till
they've ruined us."
He walked out of the room and closed the door before Forbes could answer
him, and he walked into Betty's arms.
Sec.3. "Luke," she whispered, "what was the matter this morning? Won't
you tell me, dear?"
He felt the blood mount hotly to his head. Her hair was sweet to his
nostrils.
"Don't," he said sharply.
"But, Luke----"
He drew her hands from his neck. He imprisoned her wrists in his grasp.
"I don't quite know what's the matter--yet," he said. "It's all come
too suddenly. But, Betty--O, Betty, I don't believe I'm the man for
you!"
She asked him what he meant, and he could not tell her. She pressed
him, and he could only repeat his conviction.
"Do you mean"--she drew her hands away--"that you like some other girl
better?"
He laughed rudely.
"No," he said, "not that."
"But you don't care for me?" She recovered all her dignity. "If you
don't care for me, why aren't you brave enough to say so?"
The afternoon sun fell through the hall-window and showed her to him
very fair.
"Betty," he said slowly, "there are only two kinds of marriages you
understand: there is the Church, but I don't believe any more in any
church; and there's the Law, but the Law can't make a marriage for me."
At least the immediate purport of the words she understood. Her face
burned red and then became white and still.
"You mean----" she began. Her hands clenched. "Oh!" she cried.
She tried to pass him.
Passion left him, but a great sorrow took its place as his master. He
wanted to justify himself; he even so wanted to repair the hurt done her
that he would have shut his eyes to the new light. He seized her hand.
"Betty!"
She wrenched her hand.
"Let me go! I want to go to father! Let me go!"
"But, Betty, wait--listen----"
She freed her hand.
"I shan't tell him. Don't be afraid. He has enough to worry him. Only
don't let me ever see you again!"
Sec.4. All that night Luke walked the streets. It was breakfast-time
when he returned to the Arapahoe. His letters and the morning papers
were lying on the floor of his sitting-room where they had fallen when
the bell-boy dropped them through the slit in the door.
He read the letters first. There were not many, for his correspondence
had of late declined to almost nothing. The only things of interest
were a note from Porcellis, announcing that he would soon return to New
York and a letter from Luke's mother, saying that she had written Betty
to pay her a visit: "It is only right that your fiancee should do this,"
wrote Mrs. Huber, "and that I should have an early chance of knowing the
girl that is to be my son's wife."
Luke wondered how Betty would reply to the invitation. As he was
thinking of this, his eye caught the heaviest headlines on the first
page of the newspaper: during the night, a body of strikers at the
Forbes factory had marched to the main entrance and battered down the
door in an endeavor to drag out the Breil men who slept there as guards
by night and worked there by day; the Breil men resisted; there was a
general battle with at least two deaths; the attacking party were
repulsed, but the police, summoned by a riot-call, gained what appeared
to be no more than a preliminary skirmish, for the entire neighborhood
was in arms and more bloodshed was expected to-day.
Luke dropped the paper with an oath. He was more hungry than before for
a part in this fight--in any fight. If Religion was a coward, he would
make one more appeal to Government, to force. He called Albany on the
long-distance telephone. He kept on calling until he had brought the
Governor to the other end of the wire, and then he was astonished to
hear that the proper civil authorities in New York had already asked for
troops.
"It is always best," he was told, "not to drag local men into an affair
of this sort, if it can be helped; so I'm having the Adjutant General
send down a company from Poughkeepsie. That ought to be enough for the
present, and they ought to get there by noon."
Luke muttered his thanks and rang off.
"I know why that was done," he said to himself: "They think they'll make
more trouble for us with the militia here than without it. Well, we'll
see."
He stripped off his clothes, went to the bathroom, and began to run the
water for a cold plunge. He was talking to himself.
"The worst of the crowd's dead," he said. "That was Forbes's way of
putting it. There he had a glimpse. Started down to rock-bottom. But
he didn't arrive. I felt that way till only a little while ago. But I
see I was wrong. I thought this was a one-man show; I believed in a
sort of personal Devil. I wish I'd been right. It would have been all
so simple, if I'd been right in that. But I wasn't. It isn't the men;
it's the system. The man didn't make the system; the system made the
man."
He was wonderfully clear about that now. All his fight against evil had
been directed toward one man, and the man was dead and the evil
remained. He could almost pity that man in russet brown. That man who
had sat at the fountain of forces reaching up and down through all the
life of the world, seemed to originate the forces and use them for his
own malign purpose; but now--and herein lay one of the reasons for
Luke's present wonder at life--he perceived certainly that the man had
been only a little better treated by the forces than the forces treated
all the rest of mankind, was their creation and their slave just as
wholly as the most obscure victim. Industrial evolution, working
through the collective ignorance of the race, had devised the Great
Evil. Here was a web that no spider wove, a web that killed spiders as
well as flies, lived on with a life of its own, grew and spread of
itself. So long as the web existed, there would always be a spider.
The Web remained. It was the Web that must be broken.
Yet he wanted to fight. He would fight. The Gospel of Negation had
given him its light; it had yet to teach him to see.
Sec.5. Other forces vitally affecting Luke were at work that day, at
first far distant from the factory. They were forces that had affected
him imperfectly heretofore, but that now were set in motion in a manner
no longer to be diverted.
Ex-Judge Stein was summoned from his office almost at the moment of his
appearance there. His motor-car took him into Wall Street, to a certain
skyscraper, into which he went and was taken as far as the twentieth
floor.
He entered an unmarked door and passed an attendant who bowed to him
respectfully. He passed another attendant. A third, at sight of him,
got up and went through a second door, leaving the Judge to wait in
dignified repose. Then the last attendant reappeared and nodded, and
the Judge passed the second door.
He remained inside for an hour. When he came out his mien was
undisturbed, but his strong and kindly face was even graver than usual.
He almost forgot to return the farewells of the attendants as he left
them. He rang twice for the elevator, although the elevator was not
long delayed.
"The office," he said to his chauffeur as he climbed again into the car.
Sec.6. Returned at his own quarters at half-past ten, he sent
immediately for Irwin, to whom he talked for perhaps forty-five minutes.
He spoke with a sad inevitability.
"No more excuses, no more extensions of time, no more delays," he
concluded--"and no more failures."
The twinkle left Irwin's eyes.
"I understand," he said.
He could not fail to understand. His superior had been once and for all
explicit. Judge Stein, during his service to the public on the bench,
had never been called upon to pronounce a sentence of death, but, had he
been so called upon, he would have spoken much as he now spoke to Irwin.
Sec.7. "I hate to have to tell you this," said Irwin to Quirk at noon
in the latter's shabby law-office, "but if that job isn't done before
to-morrow morning, those affidavits charging you with jury-fixing are
going to be turned over to the District-Attorney, and the people that
have them are now in a position to make Leighton act on them, too."
Irwin also had become specific. The plump Mr. Quirk lost his habitual
smile.
"It's a rotten business," he said.
"It is," Irwin agreed; "but your arrest would be a worse one--for you."
"We may have to go the limit," said Quirk.
"Then," said Irwin, "you'd better go it. That's no affair of mine."
Sec.8. "This time," said Quirk, "you've got till to-night to make up
your mind."
He was talking to Police-Lieutenant Donovan. It was just after
lunch-time.
"What about?" asked Donovan.
"Whether you want to bluff us again or lose your job."
"We never did bluff you."
"Well, then: whether you want to get those letters or get fired. Not
_try_ to get them: _get_ them. It's get them or get out." All the
kindliness and good-fellowship was missing from Quirk's voice. "It's
one thing or the other. We got evidence to fire you on. You knew we
had, last time I talked to you. Well, they were easy on you then,
Hughie. This time they mean business."
Donovan looked at Quirk.
"Suppose somebody gets hurt?" he said.
Quirk shrugged his shoulders.
Sec.9. When Guth came in late in the afternoon, Donovan said:
"I got a warrant in my desk for you, Guth. A friend o' mine swore it
out. If I don't stop him, it means a criminal trial where you won't
have the chance of a goat. You know what it's for: that little girl up
in Fifty-second Street. The only way I can get him to hold off's for
you to get Reddy Rawn to do what you'd ought t' got him to do long ago.
If somebody gets hurt, it ain't our fault."
Sec.10. At eight p.m. in the shadowy alley near Forty-third Street and
Third Avenue, Patrolman Guth's twisted mouth was menacing the darkness.
"He's down at the Forbes factory now," said Guth. "There's sure to be a
fight there to-night, an' anybody can get in. It's a cinch."
The darkness did not reply.
"Anyhow, you got to," said Guth. "The old man's crazy mad. He says
it's the chair for yours if you fall down this time. Crab Rotello's got
worse. He can't live the night, an' the old man says he's goin' to have
you railroaded soon as Crab cashes in, if you don't do what he says. He
means it, too, Reddy."
Out of the darkness came the answer:
"I'll maybe have to croak this guy."
"That's up to you," said Guth. "It'll look like some strikers done it.
It's his own fault for bein' a fool. What in hell do you care, anyway?
We'll look out for you."
"All right," said the darkness.
"Mind you," Guth repeated, "no more stallin' this time. If you don't
get the goods, an' get 'em to-night, you're a dead boy, Reddy."
There was an instant of silence. Then the darkness spoke again:
"It won't be me's the dead one."
*CHAPTER XVIII*
Sec.1. The text of the newspaper article, which Luke read carefully
while he dressed, added few facts to those marshaled in its headlines.
To Luke it was evident that the past few days had brought the strikers
to desperation. Their own funds were gone, and they had no help from
outside. They were not strong in numbers, and many of them were women.
The ranks of the men had, however, been swelled to a formidable figure
by unsought additions from the hundreds of hooligans that, in every
city, are attracted to seats of industrial war, and these provided an
element which the leaders were unable to control. The affair had gone
the usual way: a picket had jeered at a non-union worker; two policemen
attacked the offending picket; the crowd ran to the rescue, and a
general disturbance, with the assault on the mill, was the inevitable
result. Now there was no telling to what extent the trouble might go.
Luke was savagely glad that physical action was imperative. He wanted
something that would stop thought. He wanted rest from thought: from
the spiritual strain, from the yearning for Betty. Again and again, as
he hurried through a breakfast forced upon himself only by the knowledge
of his need, he found his mind playing with the childish idea of the
carpenter that he wanted to be, tramping the country roads from casual
job to job. He might well come to that. Meanwhile, it was good to have
this chance for a fight.
Sec.2. Luke drove to the factory in a taxicab that he insisted should
be open. As he neared his destination through rows of grimy buildings
and vacant lots in which goats grazed among ash-heaps and tin cans and
"For Sale" signs, the streets began to look as if a heavy skirmish had
been fought through them. Knots of idle sightseers already lined the
uneven sidewalks and pointed to the relics of the conflict; at corners
the former workers were gathered in low-speaking groups--shrunken
figures; slouching forms in poor clothing, whose business was the making
of better clothes for luckier beings; faces angry and sullen, faces
savage, debased, hungry; women's faces as sexless as the men's--and
everywhere, furtive and sinister, those other faces, the faces most to
be feared, of the gathered condors of the underworld, the feeders on
economic carrion, who had slunk here from the darkest corners of
Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, rising from a hundred alleys and
pot-houses, and circling toward the factory as birds of prey come from
the four quarters of the compass toward a battlefield; he saw them
crouched at the shadowy thresholds of tumble-down dwellings, leering
from fetid passageways, peering from the swinging doors of stinking
saloons, stealthy, determined.
Overhead the sky was clear sapphire. A strong breeze came in from the
Sound, laden with health. It fanned the memories of yesterday out of his
brain and for a moment made the present seem a picture from the remote
past. It was unreal: he felt himself an unimportant spectator of some
unconvincing play.
Then, rising above rows of rickety houses, the mill came into sight,
blocking the street-end, and restored his appreciation of the imminent.
A wrecked coal-wagon lay horseless in the middle of the street opposite
a bent lamp-post, the coal heaped where it had fallen. Battered hats
were in the gutter, and on the pavement was a coat, torn and muddy. No
smoke curled to-day from the chimney of the mill's engine-room, and in
front of its shattered main-door, rudely repaired by unpainted planks of
fresh pine, two policemen lounged, facing a string of mute pickets.
Luke passed the door unmolested and entered the office. The
superintendent, a whiskered man named Whitaker, was there, and one or
two pasty and frightened clerks.
"Mr. Forbes down yet?" asked Luke briskly.
"No, sir," said Whitaker. "He just sent word he was sick."
"Sick? What's the matter with him?"
"I don't know exactly, Mr. Huber. It was Miss Forbes telephoned, and
she said he'd had a kind of fainting fit right after breakfast."
Luke sat down at the desk and called up the Forbes house.
"Mr. Forbes there?" he asked of the maid that answered him.
"No, sir. Mr. Forbes is in bed."
"Ill?"
"Not very well."
"Ask Miss Forbes to come to the 'phone. This is Mr. Huber talking. I'm
at the factory, and I must know something about Mr. Forbes' condition."
The maid assented, but, after he had waited, it was again she that spoke
to him.
"Miss Forbes asks you please to excuse her. She's very busy. She says
to tell you Mr. Forbes was a little dizzy and had to lie down. He
thinks he can get to his office late in the day."
Luke felt the mortification that it was patently intended he should
feel; but he lost no time over it. He turned at once to Whitaker and the
clerks, and secured from them what verification he could of the
newspaper's story. Then he sent for the brawny, flannel-shirted Breil
and learned what remained for him to know.
"You think there'll be more trouble?" he asked, after he had sent
Whitaker and his assistant from the room.
"Sure there will," said Breil cheerfully, "but not before to-night."
"When'll the soldiers get here?"
"'Long about noon, I guess."
"How many police have they given us?"
"Half a dozen. I couldn't beg more."
"Better send some of them out to have that coal cleared away."
"I tried to, but they said it wasn't their duty, an' I couldn't get any
satisfaction at City Hall. You know how these cops are."
"Couldn't you have a detail of your own men do it?"
"I'd like to first-rate; but it'd mean a fight, an' we don't want to put
ourselves in the position, to the public, of courtin' that. Mr. Forbes
said Saturday----"
"He was right. How many men have you in good shape?"
"Seventy-two. I'd send for more, but they're on a job at Hazleton."
"Will City Hall send more police if there's trouble?"
"Not till they can't help doin' it."
The hours passed slowly. Luke made the rounds of the mill as the
commander of a fortress inspects it before an attack. He saw that the
strike-breakers, an anxious lot of men, were stationed at the vulnerable
places, and he talked again with Breil.
Forbes did not appear, and Luke was too proud to try a second time to
question Betty about him; but reporters came and sent in urgent requests
for a statement from the company. Luke refused to see them. It was his
turn to refuse the newspapers.
"Better feed 'em a little pap," Breil advised.
"I won't so much as look at them," said Luke.
"They'll knock us if you don't."
"That can't hurt us. I won't see them and you're not to talk to them
either, Breil."
He began to chafe under the delay. He made the rounds of the mill again
and smoked incessantly at cigars that he found in a box in Forbes's
desk. He bolted a cold lunch sent in at noon, and he wondered why the
soldiers were late.
The soldiers came at two o'clock. Out in the street there were some
derisive shouts, and then the regular tramp of marching feet. Luke
hurried to an office above Forbes's, a room furnished with a small desk
at one side, a large table in the center, and a few chairs, and there,
from a window, saw the column of men in khaki, advancing four abreast,
down the street.
"They're nothing but a lot of boys," he said as, when they drew nearer,
he looked at their young faces. "It's a shame to send a lot of kids
like that into--a mix-up of this kind."
He received the Captain and the first-lieutenant in the main office.
The Captain had taken off his broad-brimmed service hat and was mopping
his face with a blue bandana handkerchief.
"Phew!" he said. "This looks as if it was goin' to be the real thing!"
"It _is_ the real thing," said Luke.
"You haven't got a drink handy, have you?" asked the Captain. He was an
olive-complexioned young man of twenty-two or -three with a girlish
mouth and bright black eyes.
Luke produced a bottle and glasses, and the Captain drank. He spoke in
the high tone of excitement as he rattled on:
"Somebody threw a brick at us just up here. Did you see 'em? It near
cracked Sergeant Schmidt's coco. Poor old Schmidt; he was scared
yellow, wasn't he, Terry?"
Terry was the lieutenant, a raw Irish lad with the face of a fighter.
"You bet," said he.
Luke drew the Captain aside.
"You may as well understand at once," said he, "that this isn't any
picnic. You've been sent here to protect our property, and you may have
a hot time doing it. We have seventy-two strike-breakers here under Mr.
Breil; the superintendent; one or two clerks; and five foremen who've
remained loyal to the company. That, with me, makes up the inside
force. There's half a dozen police, too. What I want you to do is to
draw a cordon of your men along the front of the building. Stand them
on the pavement. Breil's men'll watch the back. Half your people had
better go on duty now and be relieved by the other half at five o'clock.
But from seven on, we'll need your whole company on the job."
The Captain looked serious and worried.
"You think there'll be real trouble to-night?"
"I shouldn't be a bit surprised, especially as I see the Governor's sent
us just enough of you fellows to excite a mob and yet be powerless
against it. What were your instructions from up top?"
"I was to use my own discretion."
Luke looked at the young man and smiled at the idea of intrusting men's
lives to such discretion.
"Well, the main thing is not to lose your head," said Luke.
"They'll outnumber us?"
"If they attacked, yes--undoubtedly."
The Captain returned to the whiskey bottle.
"And we'd be powerless, unless----" He hesitated.
"Unless you fired," Luke concluded for him.
They looked at each other, the man and the boy.
"You mustn't fire," said Luke.
"No," said the boy.
"Unless you have to," said the man....
The afternoon dragged by. Luke gave up all hope of Forbes and spent
most of the time in the upper office, looking at the soldiers stationed
in front of the building and at the groups of men staring at the
soldiers. It seemed to Luke that the numbers of the staring men were
increasing....
Sec.3. The night was dark. The purple arc-lamp that burned directly in
front of the main entrance to the factory flared vividly upon a circle
of the street beneath it, but beyond this circle, which was long empty,
one could scarcely see, one could rather only feel, the presence of a
slowly gathering, silent crowd. In the main office, Luke was again
consulting with the Captain, Breil, and a policeman. The policeman, as
if acting under instructions, had sneered at the idea of further trouble
so long as the crowd was unmolested, and Luke would not ask again for
aid from City Hall. His lieutenants were standing about the room in
attitudes of uncertainty. All were agreed against precipitating a fight
by attempts to disperse the enemy.
The Captain drew up his boyish form.
"My men----" he began.
"Your kids," corrected Breil.
"We're all right, anyhow," the Captain lamely concluded, his cheeks hot
under this indignity.
Raucous cries came now and then from the street.
"You've got enough to take care of with your own affairs," said Luke.
He turned to the policeman.
"Are there many in that crowd out there?" he asked.
"Not many," said the policeman, "but I think there's more comin'!"
Still smarting under Breil's rebuke, the Captain felt some show of his
bravery to be a duty to the organization to which he belonged.
"We can handle 'em all right," he said, "however many there are.
They're mostly nothin' but foreigners, anyhow."
Luke wanted above all to preserve harmony in his ranks, but an imp of
perversity whipped his tongue.
"What's your name?" he asked the Captain.
"Antonio Facciolati," said the Captain, "but I'm a naturalized American
citizen."
Luke patted his shoulder.
"That's all right," he said reassuringly. "What have your men got in
their guns, Captain? Blank cartridges?"
"Not much," said the Captain boldly: "ball."
"Good," Luke smiled. "But don't use it. Butts are best for this work."
He decided that Forbes, well or ill, ought to know how things were
going. He bent to the telephone, placing the receiver to his ear.
There was no answer. He rattled the hook impatiently.
"What's the matter with this 'phone?" he growled.
He rattled the hook again, but could get no reply.
Breil left the room. Presently he returned.
"I've tried the one in the hall," he said, "and the one in the
cloth-room. The wires are cut."
For a moment nobody spoke. Facciolati's hand crept to his sword-hilt,
and the sword clattered. From somewhere far up the street came a choral
murmur of voices:
"_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!"
Breil stepped to the window.
"That's them. That's the others. They're comin'," he said.
Sec.4. The men ran to their posts. Luke climbed to the upper office
and went to its window.
They were coming indeed. They were there, vividly from the circle of
light beneath him, vaguely to the walls of the tumbledown dwellings
across the street. At his feet was a line of khaki-clad militiamen,
standing at ease beside their magazine-rifles, along the curb; beyond
them a few yards of open street, and then what at first looked to Luke
like a field of wheat under a high gale, gigantic wheat, black of stalk
and white of head, tossing in the wind: the shoving, swaying bodies, the
gesticulating arms, the threatening faces of the mob.
They had come to complete the work of the previous night. His startled
eyes could pick out no one individual, his ears could select no single
word; but he could see leaders, who had lost their leadership, making
gestures of despair; men, who had seized license, waving fists and
shaking sticks; could hear a turmoil of cries and curses. The whole
impression was blurred and general; yet, as he looked, the wheatfield
changed to a roaring sea, the black pitching and tossing of a terrible
tide ever mounting nearer, nearer to the soldiers drawn up in front of
the broken factory door.
The thought mastered him: this was his property which only that frail
door separated from them--that frail door and those frightened boys in
khaki. They were going to destroy his property--his!
A second street-lamp, farther up the way, lighted the rear of the crowd,
and into the circle of its illumination Luke saw running a motor-car.
He saw the mob scatter, the car stop, the crowd close around it. He
heard more distant shouts above the shouts that were nearer.
The broken section of the crowd swayed, hesitated, attacked the car.
For an instant, the arms of the chauffeur beat at the man that climbed
to his seat, and then the chauffeur was pulled to the ground. Luke
strained his eyes to see if the car were familiar to him. It was. There
was a woman in it: its only occupant. It was the Forbes car, and the
woman must be Betty.
Sec.5. Luke circled the center table and ran down the steps three at a
time. He nearly fell upon the huge form of Breil, coatless, a revolver
in his hand, hurtling from one group of his forces to another. Luke
pushed him away.
"Where are you going?" cried Breil.
Luke did not answer. He was tugging at the door.
Breil's heavy hand fell on Luke's arm.
"Here! Stop that!" he bellowed. "Where d'you think you're goin'?"
"Get away!" shouted Luke. "I'm going out."
The door leaped open. The howls of the mob beat upon the two men's
faces.
Breil thrust his lips against Luke's ear.
"Are you crazy?" he yelled.
"Yes!" said Luke.
He slipped through the door.
Facciolati was there, white-faced, standing behind his soldiers.
Luke made an egress through the ranks by shoving away a soldier with
either hand.
"You're not going out _there_?" cried the Captain. "They'll kill you!"
Luke jumped to the curb.
"I don't care!" he answered.
He was crazy, and he didn't care whether he was killed or not. Of these
two things he was certain. He was mad from the torments of his conflict
between logic and desire, and death would be an easy solution--perhaps
it was the only one. It flashed upon him that such a solution might be
cowardly; but the next instant he had but one impulse; he was going to
save Betty, and that was enough. A new madness, the madness of what
seemed an absolutely unselfish act, of an act that intoxicated him with
its unselfishness, gave him the strength of ten and fired a berserker
rage in his breast, hurled him forward like a rock from a ballista. He
was going to save Betty, and he was a hundred yards away from her in the
midst of a mob that hated him.
The ocean of raging men closed over his head; its pandemonium smashed
his ear-drums; but he was deep in the crowd before any of its members
realized whence he had come. He was clearing a way, striking, kicking,
biting, shouting he knew not what--shrill oaths and guttural
threats--thrusting their heavy bodies from side to side. He felt their
hot breath, encountered their resisting arms and legs, smelled the sweat
of them.
"Stop him!" yelled somebody. "He came out of the factory!"
He saw a host of faces about him, dark with anger; eyes big with hunger
and hate. He felt blows that could not hurt him, felt his own fists
sink into flabby bellies, crack upon stout skulls.
"The scab!"
A hand fell across his mouth, and he used his teeth like a were-wolf; he
tasted the smooth salt blood before it began to trickle down his jowl.
A second hand snatched at his collar, another grabbed his arm. He pulled
frenziedly, he struck out blindly, he threw all his weight far forward.
He knew that his coat ripped; he twisted his arm free, lowered his head
and dodged forward, men sprawling before him. He had gained the
motor-car.
Betty was standing up in the tonneau. Her hands were clasped before her
breast, her face was set. She saw him falling toward her.
Luke jumped beside her, his coat gone, his shirt torn, his face bleeding
from a cut above the right eye, his hair matted over his forehead. She
did not know him as he seized her roughly and picked her up in his arms;
but, in the moment that he balanced on the edge of the car, with the
light full in his face, the crowd knew him.
"That's him! That's Huber!" they shrieked.
He jumped with her directly back into the crowd.
While he was still in the air, he thought that was the worst thing to
have done. Without him, she might have had some chance; with him she
would have almost no chance at all. But it was too late now; he could
only fight until he could fight no more, and then they must die
together....
Sec.6. They did not die. Somebody, as the mob laid hold of them, broke
through its ranks--somebody with still some shred of authority left him.
"Get back, you fools! Get back! Do you want to kill the woman?"
It was that organizer of the strikers whom Luke had seen in Forbes's
office when the employees made their last appeal to Forbes. It was the
man Forbes had ignored.
With infinite slowness, against infinite opposition, the rescuer made
way for them. Grumbling, growling, threatening, the crowd fell back.
It menaced, it cursed, it hurled ribald jokes; but it fell back before
the leader that it no longer obeyed in anything else, until he, followed
by Luke with Betty in his arms, came to the line of soldiers at the
battered factory door.
Luke swayed a little. Facciolati stepped up and tried to steady him,
but he tossed Facciolati away. Luke turned to the organizer.
"Won't you come inside?" he panted.
The man shook his head.
"I'm--I can't tell you how much I owe you for this," said Luke.
"Oh, you go to Hell," said the man.
Sec.7. Inside the factory, Luke would not waste a glance on the
strike-breakers that gathered, open-mouthed, around him.
"Get away," he ordered. "I'm taking her to the upper office. Nobody is
to disturb her there. You understand? Nobody."
Sec.8. During all that frightful progress back through the mob, she had
lain in his arms silent, her eyes closed. Only now, when he brought her
to the upper office, banged the door behind them and put her in an
arm-chair, which he kicked the length of the room in order to place her
as far as might be from the window, did she look at him.
"I didn't faint," she said. "I only pretended. I thought that was
safest."
He had dropped to his knees beside her and had begun to chafe her hands.
He was unconscious of the renewed din outside. Thus alone with her, he
was thinking only how much he wanted her.
She was leaning far back in the chair. The rays of the street-lamp were
the only light in the room, and they made her face seem as peaceful as
the faces of the dead. When she opened her eyes, her eyes were
luminous.
"You're safe," she continued. "You're safe, aren't you?"
He kissed her hand hotly.
"You!" he said. "I'm all right. But you?"
She stood up, smiling.
"Quite."
He rose also.
"The brutes! the beasts! I'd like to--I'll do it, too!"
He had stepped into the light. His shirt was torn, his hair dank.
Blood caked over the cut on his forehead, and his jaws were red with the
blood of the man whose hand he had bitten.
"Luke! You _are_ hurt!"
She came toward him.
"No, I'm not," he persisted, but he let her fingers touch the wound on
his head, and her fingers thrilled him.
"Luke," she said, when she had convinced herself that the cut was
superficial, "I'm glad it was you."
"That came for you?"
"Yes."
"I didn't do much. I was nearly the death of you. For a minute I
thought it was death. That other fellow's the one you have to thank."
"Anyhow, I thank you." She pressed his hand.
A shout came from the mob. It brought him back to material concerns.
"How did you come to this part of town?"
She had complete command of herself.
"Can't you guess?" she asked.
Her eyes were unafraid.
"Don't say you came on my account."
"But I did; I did. Father's too ill to ask questions. It was a slight
heart attack, the doctor said: he's been so worried lately, Father has,
and so overworked. But I wanted to know, and I tried to telephone here,
but they said the connection was broken. Then I was sorry for not
answering that call you made before, and when they said you hadn't got
back to the Arapahoe, I was afraid. So I told Father I was going to Mr.
Nicholson's mission--he must have thought me dreadfully unkind to leave
him for that--and I had James drive me--Oh!" she broke off: "I wonder if
_he's_ hurt?"
"The chauffeur?" Luke remembered. "I saw him just as I got to the car,"
he chuckled. "He'd reached the outskirts of the crowd and was running
for dear life. I don't think they'll catch him."
The noise of the mob would grow from a hoarse mutter to a loud howl and
then sink to a low murmur.
"Luke," she said, "it _was_ you rescued me."
He listened to the noise.
"Then I've probably only rescued you from the frying-pan to dump you
into the fire. I wish I'd had the sense to take you in the opposite
direction. I don't know what I could have been thinking of. Of course,
they'll simply have to send more police soon and attack these fellows
from the rear: the soldiers haven't the right to drive away the crowd,
and Breil's men daren't leave the building. But I do wish I hadn't
brought you here!"
"You've brought me where _you_ are," said Betty.
Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. Luke's breath caught in his
throat.
"Betty," he said, "do you mean----"
She did not quail.
"I mean I love you."
"What?" He drew back, afraid of her, afraid of himself.
"I know you weren't yourself," she said. "I know how all this trouble
has upset you. I know you didn't mean those things."
The reversal was too much for him. He leaned against the table and
burst into laughter. An instant ago the roar of the crowd had seemed
miles away, had seemed no more than any recurrent noise of city life.
They two, Betty and he, had seemed to him set apart from it all, remote
from it, together. Now----
"Luke!" she was crying.
A picture drifted into his mind. It was a picture of pine trees and the
sun in a blue sky full of fleecy clouds and a long white road winding,
dusty and carefree, to the end of the world.
"Luke----"
He could not hear her now. He saw terror in her face, but the noise
from the street rose, rattled at the window-pane, and engulfed her
words.
A new cry rang out from the mob--a cry so sharp and loud that both the
persons in the room forgot themselves and ran to the window. They
looked out upon the tossing faces below.
The crowd had turned. It was elbowing, straining necks, rising on
tiptoe, gazing backward.
Far back there something dark fluttered in the night air. It was seized
and passed from hand to hand. It reached the circle of light and waved
high above the center of the crowd, a banner of crimson, tossing like a
beacon over the swarm of black heads, defiant, audacious: the Red Flag.
And then came a new sound. It began in the heart of the mob and spread
outwards like circles in water broken by a dropped stone. It did not
stop the other noises; it assimilated them. It was low, but strong; it
seemed to contain all the history of past wrongs, all the arsenal of
present determination; but it was touched with far hopes and freighted
with tremendous dreams. It was a chant, a song, a hymn, and all the
crowd was singing it with the strength of a thousand pair of lungs.
"What's that?" asked Luke, although he expected no answer.
But the girl gave him one.
"It's a thing called 'The International,'" she said, her voice
trembling. "I heard it once in Paris. It's a terrible song."
Luke's eyes were caught by a movement at the window of one of the
tumbledown dwellings across the street. He saw the window open and a
frowsy woman lean out. She held something white in her hands. She
raised it, then dashed its contents toward the nearest soldier. The
shot fell short, and two men in the crowd were drenched.
The hymn ended in a shriek. The mob believed that the insult had come
from the factory and instantly resolved itself into a fuming whirlpool.
Luke saw tossed aside people who were evidently strike-leaders
frantically trying to quiet their one-time followers, but he did not
guess the purport of the new commotion in the seething mass. Then he
saw something that made him jerk Betty away from the window and fling
her against the wall at its side.
There was a crash--a pause--a tinkling. A gust of air, fresh and cool,
invaded the room. A missile had broken the window. A whole volley
followed, smashing more glass and battering at the factory walls. The
mob was using the coals from the dismantled wagon that Luke had noticed
in the street hours ago.
[Illustration: THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON]
Somebody had been pounding unheard at the office-door. Luke saw the door
bend and ran to it. He flung it wide.
Breil stood there, his revolver in his hand.
"I've got to disturb you----" he began, and, though he shouted, his
voice did not reach to where Betty stood against the wall.
"That's all right," called Luke. "I've been a fool and a coward to stay
here. Give me that gun."
He wrenched the weapon from Breil's resisting hand. He leaped to Betty
and slipped the revolver to her.
"Got to go downstairs," he cried to her, for the broken window let in a
roar that made ordinary speaking tones futile. "Bolt the door after us!
You'll be safe! We'll fall back to the stairs, if we have to fall back.
Good-bye!"
He would not look back. His last sight of her was of a woman standing
erect, alert, comprehending, the revolver shining in her hand. Then,
with the following Breil calling out that he must go to his own men at
the rear, Luke ran down the stairs, opened the main door and, leaving it
gaping behind him, plunged outside.
Sec.9. Coherent purpose he had none. All that he realized was this:
here was a struggle; here was a final endeavor to destroy his property,
which, however endangered by the trust, was almost his sole means of
support. There would be no more chance given him for delay; there would
be no further help from the police--the half-dozen sent that morning had
disappeared--until help was too late; there was only the boyish
soldiery. He would go to them, and he would fight.
As he emerged upon the street, he saw the circle of light empty of the
human mass that had lately swirled there. A resounding cacophony from
the darkness, and dimly perceived objects moving a hundred yards and
more away, told him that the rioters had withdrawn to the upturned coal
wagon. At the moment of understanding this, he heard a rending staccato
noise.
The frightened Facciolati heard it, too. He was standing on the
pavement by the door and had drawn up his men in a closer column before
him. His bared sword was in his right hand.
"What's that?" asked Luke.
"It's the tongue of that coal wagon," gasped the Captain, "they're
rippin' it off."
"What? For a battering-ram? For this door?"
The Italian nodded.
"Yes. I heard someone yell for them to do it. Then they all ran over
there."
A terrible stillness fell. Behind the curtain of the night, the mob
only hummed and shuffled its feet.
"Well?" asked Luke.
His eyes pierced Facciolati's. His voice was pregnant with meaning.
"What had I better do?" faltered the Captain.
Before Luke could reply, a strident yell came from the invisible ranks
of the mob:
"Now then: come on! Burn their damned shop!"
A thousand voices echoed:
"Burn it! Burn it down!"
The Captain turned to Luke.
"You've got to stop them," said Luke.
The din increased.
"O my God!" said Facciolati.
In Luke blazed up all the furnace of battle. He gripped the Captain's
collar and shook the man as if he were a frightened, disobedient child.
"Give the order!" he commanded. He hated this boy.
In a shrill, hysterical voice that cut the rising noise of the mob,
Facciolati gave the preliminary order, and the rows of lads in khaki,
standing on the curb, raised their black-blue rifles to their shoulders.
"We won't shoot!" he called into Luke's ear. "We'll only frighten 'em!"
"Burn it----" From the street the cries were merged into a wordless
roar. There was the wild rush of two thousand feet, and into the light
burst the mob again: a long trotting column with the Red Flag swaying
overhead, and in the midst five or six men bearing the wagon-tongue
leveled like a lance.
A veil of crimson seemed to flutter before Luke's eyes--the eyes of the
man that had counseled caution and the use of only the butts of rifles.
He did not think, he could only feel--only feel that here at last was
the chance, here the unavoidable need of action that had the splendid
conclusiveness of brutality. This was man's work. This was no rescuing
of a girl: it was war. The world had meshed him in a net of
intellectual doubts and quibbles: here was his moment to cut the net,
and to cut his way to freedom, to take vengeance on the world.
That and something more. Betty was in danger and the property that was
partly his, that in part he owned and had bought. But above all this,
riding it all, goading it, spurning it, mad with its mastery, the
blood-lust, the Sense of Power, the dizzy knowledge that he could kill.
The mob was almost upon them. It was a tidal wave.
"Now!" shouted Luke to the Italian.
But the Captain caught his hand. He gabbled the nothings of panic.
Luke threw the boy to the pavement. With all the breath in his body he
vociferated:
"_Fire!_"
Sec.10. Hell belched its flames: a thunder-clap, a thunder-cloud knifed
by red flashes of lightning.
Luke felt his head bashed against the wall of the factory. He was
choking in a cloud of smoke. He could see nothing, but once he thought
he heard the crack of other shots from somewhere above.
Then he felt his knees clutched. He felt a pawing at his elbow; and
presently he heard the chattering voice of Facciolati screaming against
his cheek:
"Why in Hell did you do that? How in Hell did you dare?--Don't you know
what you might have done? Who's in command here?"
"Shut up," bellowed Luke, "or I'll show you who's in command." He tried
vainly to see through the smoke. "Take your hands off me!"
It was as if he were in the crater of an erupting volcano. The
reverberation split his head, and through it came shrieks, groans,
curses, and then, as the smoke slowly lifted, the pound of two thousand
feet on the paving-stones, while, with the Red Flag sagging to and fro
like a wounded eagle above it, the mob fled pell-mell up the street.
But the Captain had not heeded Luke's warning.
"Now they'll be back!" he was wailing. "We'll all be goners now. Why
did you give that order? Why didn't you let me change it?--I'd
instructed the men to fire over their heads--An' you didn't let me
change it--An' of course they _did_ fire over their heads--an' nobody's
hurt--Do you know what that means? They'll be back and kill all of us!"
It was impossible for Luke to believe. Then, not fear, but the rage of
thwarted blood-lust sent out his clawing hands.
"You did that?"
He caught Facciolati under the arm-pits and raised him clear of the
ground.
"You----"
A new sound interrupted him. At first he thought that the mob had
wheeled a machine-gun into the street and turned it on the factory.
Then the sound became a clatter and, looking through the ranks of
soldiers, Luke saw, far ahead, a tangle of rearing horses and falling
men: even City Hall had been unable longer to hold its hand; one of the
patrolmen who had fled to the factory must have telephoned a final word
to headquarters; the mounted police were charging the crowd; the riot
was ended.
Sec.11. Luke ran up the stairs to the upper office and found the door
unbolted. He did not know what he went for. He was not glad that the
riot was ended; he was raging like a man-eating tiger foiled of its
quarry.
Betty stood at the window in the full light of the street-lamp. He
scarcely knew her face. He had never seen her look like this. He had
never dreamed that she could look like this. Her hat had fallen to the
floor; her golden hair tossed above her head like licking tongues of
flame; her eyes were bright coals; her cheeks were scarlet; her white
upper teeth bit deep into the vermilion of her lower lip. As if to give
freer play to a breast that panted, she had torn open her dress at the
base of her splendid throat. The revolver was in her hand. It was
cocked and smoking. She looked like Bellona invoked and materialized
from the fire and smoke of that roaring inferno of the street.
"How many?" she gasped. "How many have we killed?"
Luke stopped at the door. He knew now that he had indeed heard shots
from overhead. He knew that the same primaeval passion which had made
him a tiger--and still maintained its sway--had worked this
metamorphosis also, had changed this gentle girl into what he saw. At
another time, in another mood, he would have loathed it; but in his
present mood he gloried in it. He thought that he had never seen her so
beautiful or imagined her so splendid; her madness matched his own.
He came toward her, circling the table that stood between them.
"None!" he cried. "That fool Captain told the men to shoot high."
He put out his arms. He wrenched her to him. His right arm clutched her
about the supple shoulders, the fingers of his right hand sinking into
her firm left breast. With his left hand he shoved her face upwards.
Brown from the caked blood of the man he had bitten, his opened mouth
closed upon hers.
He heard the revolver clatter to the floor. She writhed in his embrace.
He had expected the perfect response. Meeting an abrupt refusal, he was
taken off his guard, and she escaped from him.
She staggered into a corner. The devil that possessed him had lost its
power over her. She had reverted to her natural being. She did not
cry, but she stood there with her hands pressed tight against her
breast, the fingers mechanically busied with repairing the opened
blouse, her face all horror at the thing she had been.
"What must you think of me?" she was moaning--"I don't know what came
over me!--What must you think of me?"
He thought nothing. He could think nothing. He could realize only that
he was again to be robbed. Twice to-night the cheat that played with men
at the game of life had given him the winning hand, only to sweep the
stakes from the board just as Luke reached for what he had won. The
blood-lust changed its form; it assumed an ungovernable fury. Something
crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect feed-wires at the touch
of a trolley-wheel. The crimson veil fluttered again before his eyes.
He turned and bolted the door. He turned again and ran to her. His
face was wet with sweat, black with powder, terrible.
She understood. She lowered her head and tried to dodge past him. She
cried out.
His strong fingers caught her hair. The hair streamed down. Her
forward lurch brought it taut. He jerked at it; she fell toward him.
His free hand caught her throat and stopped her fall. He tossed her
against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but he pressed her
shoulders tight to the table's top. He bent over her, one hand at her
throat, the other raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her
face.
She was wholly in his power now. The outside world was impotent because
the outside world could not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself
was helpless because her captor's was the strongest body. Again came to
Luke the frightful sense of Power, again the dizzy knowledge that he
could do whatever he chose.
At that instant the madness fell from him.
A physical motive there of course was, since the more intense the
passion the briefer is its duration; but even if it originated in the
physical, this reaction transcended things material and wheeled about to
crush them. It was the second and fuller phase of that revelation which
had come to him in the Sunday quiet of the Brooklyn streets. Burning,
blinding, transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental and
tremendous, returned, and what they had once done from the flesh to the
spirit, they now did from the spirit to the flesh. They returned to
remain. They completed the revolution, the new birth.
Luke saw yet more dazzlingly the glory of individuality, the holiness of
his humanity; but it was as if scales fell from his eyes, for he saw
entire. Here had been one of the false starts on a wrong road, one of
the moments of relapse that he had expected. The individuality was
divine; physical passion was a splendid thing; but when the individual's
physical passion stooped to force or cunning, what had been splendid
became foul, and what had been divine was bestial. Luke, in his denial
of revealed Religion, was no longer a pygmy trembling before a giant; he
was himself a giant; but what he was in actuality he must recognize as
potential in his fellow creatures. His mental and spiritual sight was
at last adjusted to the new illumination. He could assess moral values,
could determine ethical duties now. It remained only to find their
reason and decipher their credentials. On Sunday he had gained his
strength; to-night he had gained the knowledge of how rightly to use it.
He ran to the door and tore back the bolt.
"Whitaker!" he called.
The superintendent came cringing from the main office, where he had
cowered through all the riot.
"Get two policemen and have them see Miss Forbes safely home."
Betty was secure now, and the mill was safe. He borrowed a hat too
large for him, and put over his ragged shirt the alpaca office-coat of
some clerk, which he found in a locker. He walked out into the street.
Far away he heard a woman's strident voice singing:
"Oh, why don't you save
All the money you earn?
_If I did not eat_
_I'd have money to burn._"
There was the sound of a distant shot.
Then silence.
*CHAPTER XIX*
Sec.1. He could not stay in the factory while she was there. To go to
the upper office where he had left her, to attempt to explain, to offer
a shoddy apology--this would be to add the last insult to the wrong that
he had done her. He thought that worse than to have completed the thing
that he had begun.
He cut northwestward toward the more peopled part of the borough, not
because he wanted to be among people, but because he did not even yet
want to have to think. He tried to think, but he did not want to. He
saw clearly his new duties and his new restrictions; but they presented
themselves to him as isolated facts which, offending his reason, spurred
his reason to demand their credentials, and these he could not yet read.
Moreover, the memory of the scene with Betty would rise before his
restless mind, burning all else away, and, to burn memory away, his
heart drove him into the more crowded streets.
Women of the streets accosted him. He passed a house from a window on
the ground-floor of which two girls with painted faces beckoned. He
passed brightly lighted saloons that sent into the street inviting
streams of light and the lure of clinking glasses and laughter. In a
jostling thoroughfare he noticed that passersby were looking strangely
at him and, recollecting what a queer picture his disordered clothes and
bloody face must present, he blamed himself for not repairing the
damages of the fight before setting out. He turned again into the less
frequented quarters.
Here he looked at his watch, but his watch had stopped at half-past
seven, the moment, probably, of his charge to Betty's rescue. Seeing
the lighted window of a jeweler's shop near by, he went to it and looked
at the clock displayed there. It was nine o'clock. As he could not
have been walking for more than an hour, and as the active rioting must
have begun no later than seven-fifteen, all the events of the riot must
have been massed within forty-five minutes. He turned back toward the
factory. He hated these city thoroughfares. His boyish dreams of the
open road and the tramping carpenter returned to him....
If he could only read his credentials....
Sec.2. When Luke entered the office on the ground floor, the little
militia captain was there. He had come for whiskey and finished the
bottle. He was quite drunk, and evinced a thick but facile desire to
describe the victory that his troops had won.
"Oh, go away!" said Luke.
He turned Facciolati out.
Breil came next, and some of the policemen, the former anxious to report
the present condition of the mill, the latter that of the streets; but
to these men Luke was scarcely more civil than he had been to the
Italian. Whether he liked it or not, he must think things out.
"There's no reason for you to stay any longer, if you don't want to,"
said Breil.
Luke looked at him vacantly.
"I do want to," he said.
One of the policemen glanced significantly at the empty whiskey-bottle
and smiled.
"I have some things to think about," said Luke. "I'll go up to the
office over this. Tell the fellows I don't want anybody to butt in,
Breil."
He decided that it would be well for him to do his thinking in the room
in which he had so nearly done Betty what she must consider the ultimate
wrong. He went there.
Sec.3. He closed, but did not lock the door; he trusted to his orders
against intrusion.
The street-lamp furnished the room with sufficient illumination. Luke
saw that one of the chairs had been overturned and lay close beside the
table. He must have overturned it while struggling with Betty, but, so
far as he could recollect--and his mind for some time employed itself
with such trifles--he had not remarked the fall at the moment of its
occurrence.
He went to the broken window and lounged there, now looking out upon the
scene of the street-battle, now back at the scene of the essentially
similar combat that had been fought inside. It was astonishing how
little he remembered of the details of either, but perhaps the reason
for that was to be found in the size of their results.
Something glittered in the lamplight on the floor at his feet. He
stooped and picked it up; it was one of those yellow wire hairpins that
Betty used to supplement the pins of tortoiseshell. Down in the street
he saw a draggled necktie that had been torn from the throat of some
striker. His gaze wandered from one object to the other and back again.
He stood there for a long time....
He was beginning to find out at last the logic that he had sought.
Betty was lost to him, and if she were not lost he must give her up.
All that was vital in what he had all along felt for her was only one of
the forces that go to make up complete love--right enough, he told
himself, when combined with its fellow elements; right enough upon
occasion when frankly acknowledged between a free woman and a free man;
but, he determined, disastrously insufficient to be made the sole
element of anything more than the briefest union between two
individuals, and criminal when it was the only motive of but one of the
individuals in any union. About what Betty had felt for him he was
equally clear; it was another of the forces that compose real love; it
was the element of Romance, just as insufficient and just as wrong, when
it was alone, or when it existed on the one side only, as was the merely
physical. Real love was the fusion of the physical, the romantic, the
spiritual and the comradely, the fusion of two people for whom there was
but one means of salvation. He knew now, beyond all questioning, that,
however they had deceived themselves, Betty's thoughts and his, her
hopes and his, her aims and his, her work and his, were and had always
been divided beyond the possibility of junction. No marriage service
that might have been performed between them could have married but the
least of their outlying selves. Not Church and State together could
have joined their true selves that, living where there was no church and
no state, had yet no natural relationship to each other. Some day real
love might come to him; some day it would surely come to Betty. To-day,
though it tore his heart, though it was as if he were ripping the heart
out of his breast, he must, for Betty's sake--since she was the
weaker--even more than for his own, tear her out of his life. His
desire for her would long remain; the moments would be full of her when
he sank from waking into sleep, or climbed from sleep to waking; but
though he might regain the power to enslave her soul and make a servant
of the self of which he could not make a work-fellow, to use that power
would be to sin against what was best in her. He must not see her
again, even were she willing to see him, and he must leave her thinking
the worst of him in order that she might the sooner want to forget him.
He tossed the gilt pin out of the window. Following its flight, his
glance came again to the worker's necktie, lying in the street.
What right had he over the man who had worn that? What right that he
did not have over Betty?
His reason answered: None.
There, he tremendously realized, was the key to his credentials. He
leaned heavily against the window-sill. He understood. It was a bitter
lesson, but he learned it, there and then.
What he had done to these men was what he had tried to do to Betty, not
in the riot only, but in accepting the position that society had offered
him in relation to them; it was what every employer, from the actual
boss to the smallest shareholder, everywhere was doing. It was living
upon the work of others, profiting by values for the creation of which
the pay had to be low enough to permit of profit. It was compulsion.
If he sold dear what he bought cheap, what was it that he bought cheap
but their labor? If he wanted pay for executive ability, what executive
ability did he, or any shareholder in any company, exercise? If he
claimed a return for the risk of his investment, what return did these
men get, who invested that labor-power which was their whole capital?
If any stockbuyer talked of profits as the reward of previous years of
saving, how could he explain the fact that his savings would secure no
profit until they employed labor to produce it? He had been fighting
against his own ideals. It was the workers that had been right and he
that had been wrong. What the man in russet brown had been to him, that
he and all who directly or indirectly employed labor for profit, had
been and were to the employed.
So, quite as suddenly as he had come to see life in the new light, he
came now, in the little office of the lonely factory, to see the reason
from which the light proceeded; there was only one evil in the world and
that was Compulsion; only one good, and that was power over one's self.
The awful thing, he said to himself as one who reads what is written,
was not to have too little power over others; it was to have too much.
To have the means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it was to
confuse the means with the right. Too much power over others and too
little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon
compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet
brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw
all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this,
he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one,
that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present
wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics,
governments, and property. To believe in any one of them, to traffic
with any of them, was now to exercise compulsion over his fellows and
now to delegate to his fellows his power over himself.
He must give up everything that was easy and comfortable--the easy
thought and faith as freely as the easy food and lodging. He must join
the oppressed.
He leaned through the battered window and filled his lungs with the pure
night air. He looked up to the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow
moon was riding.
"I haven't let their corruption destroy my purpose," he said to the
moon. "I've simply put myself where they can't destroy _me_. I've put
myself where they can't lie to me again. I'll fight them as one man
against the world; I'll lose, but I won't be using their weapons; I
won't be what they are, and I'll lose as a free man. So far as the
world inside of me's concerned, they invaded it and bossed it. I've
chucked them out of it, and _I've_ destroyed _them_!"
It seemed wonderfully simple now and wonderfully peaceful. He would go
to Forbes to-morrow and draw up a legal paper, the last legal paper he
would ever put his name to, his last compromise, turning over his
interest in this factory to his mother; and Forbes--poor old Forbes! He
was sorry for Forbes, but he knew what would happen; left alone, Forbes
would end by selling out, profitably, to the trust. And then for Luke
the open road, the old open road that he had always loved, the learning
of a manual trade, the sale of his labor-power no more than was
necessary to keep him alive and free to go wherever slaves fought the
system of corruption for their liberty, until sometime, when the
soldiers would have Luke before them instead of behind them, and did not
shoot over the heads of the mob. He was tasting of contentment for the
first time in his life. He was glad that he had not died out there in
the riot. There was so much to do. There was so much to do in this
life that he did not see how he had ever had time to think of any other.
And now he was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with open
eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with complete power over
himself, using no compulsion upon others and allowing no other to use
compulsion upon him. Luke had conquered. For every soul there is,
somewhere, a separate road to salvation. Luke had found his own....
Somewhere out in the city a clock struck eleven. He knew that he had
been standing at the window for a long time, but he had no idea it was
so long as this. If he had been so engrossed, what, he wondered, had
finally roused him. He remembered: it was something about the door. He
had not heard it move; he merely thought that it was moving. He turned
to it, but it did not move. Perhaps a draught of air had deceived him.
The factory was very quiet....
Sec.4. "Don't open your trap! I got you covered! If you let out one
yip, I'll croak you."
The door had opened and closed, letting in a figure that quickly bolted
it and then discreetly avoided the light from the window. Luke saw a
dim form in the shadow. All that projected into the shaft of light was
a fist tightly clenched about a leveled revolver.
"What do you want?" asked Luke.
He was not afraid to disregard this intruder's command to silence. He
was curiously fearless. He supposed that this unseen man was some
fanatic from the mob. Anybody could have slipped into the factory
through the door that Luke had left open when the terror of the
soldiers' fire swept the street and the smoke of it clouded the doorway.
This was an avenger thus arrived. Luke felt the presence of a certain
crude justice. He had deserved this.
"Don't worry; I'm not going to yell," he said.
He was expecting death now, expecting absolute extinction; but he faced
it with a serenity that mildly surprised him. This was not the mad
courage, too sudden to be fine, which had hurled him into the crater of
the riot to rescue Betty. It was a courage that weighed results. He
thought of the dusty, open road. He was rather sorry to have to miss
that, but no doubt he would never have got it anyhow.
"Well," he said with a faint touch of impatience, "why don't you answer
my question? What do you want?"
The barrel of the revolver wavered ever so slightly.
The intruder's voice came again out of the darkness; it was as if the
darkness itself made answer:
"I want them letters."
Luke's teeth came together with a snap. He had been carrying the
letters in a money-belt about his middle, next his body. It was hours
since he had thought of them. He had just now been feeling that perhaps
he ought to be shot, but this feeling had no origin in the affair of the
letters. They were a different matter. For the letters he had fought
so much and so fairly that he was ready and willing to fight for them
once more. He tried to gain time.
"What letters?" he asked.
"I dunno," said the darkness. "But you do. Come on, now; don't try to
flimflam me: them letters you got in your coat."
Luke glanced at the alpaca coat that he had put on when he last left the
factory.
"If you want anything that was in my coat, you'll have to look in the
street for it: I left it there."
The intruder did not at once reply. Luke saw the revolver advance
toward him in the light. It was followed by a thick, short arm, and the
arm was followed by a short thick man. He wore a velours Alpine hat.
It was pushed to one side of his head, and Luke saw that the hair below
it was red.
That was almost the last thing he did see before the shot was fired.
Luke made a flying leap at the red-headed man and tried to knock the
revolver into the air. As he did so, the revolver spat at him.
A loud report. A darting arrow of flame.
Luke lay on the office floor. The red-headed man's skilled fingers ran
deftly through his clothes. Then the killer raised the shattered window
and dropped into the street.
Sec.5. One of Breil's strike-breakers, making his round of the factory,
heard the shot and came running toward the noise. He ran to the upper
office and burst into the room.
A curling cloud of lazy smoke was weaving graceful figures in the shaft
of light from the street-lamp outside; it embraced an overturned chair,
and circled the top of the center table. Above it the strike-breaker
saw the upper half of a disheveled figure, the figure of Luke Huber,
leaning out of the window and shaking its fist at all the city round
about. In a high, cracked voice, Luke was yelling curses at the world.
"God damn your system and your politics!" yelled he. "God damn your law
and your government! God damn your god!"
He turned toward the noise behind him and showed himself with matted
hair and staring eyes, with a cut in his forehead and a white face that
had brown stains about its lolling mouth, with a slowly broadening patch
of blood in his torn shirt.
"Mr. Huber!" gasped the strike-breaker. He ran forward.
As he did so, Huber's voice howled into shattered song:
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum--bum!
Hallelujah, I'm a----"
He lurched forward into the strike-breaker's arms. Before those arms
closed about him, he was dead.
*CHAPTER XX*
On the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, in that office where
the engraving of George Washington hung between the windows, three men
sat in the mid-morning light, about the mahogany table. They were
talking business. Each man had his own offices and his own businesses,
but they frequently and quietly met in this one because most of the
businesses of each were closely allied with the business-interests of
all.
There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance or public actions
of this trio; they were apparently but three units of the legion that
makes this portion of New York a city by day and a desert by night.
Each had come down town in his own motor that morning, defying
speed-laws and traffic regulations, just as scores of his business
neighbors had done. Each had descended at his own offices, passed
through half a dozen doors guarded by six bowing attendants, and
proceeded to his own desk in his own private room, precisely as a small
army of other business men were doing at the same time within a radius
of half a mile. Each looked like the rest of that army. All three were
men of about the average height, not noticeably either above or below
it, and two were inclined to bulkiness. Those two had pale faces and
close mouths and steady eyes, which looked out from under bushy brows
with glances that gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the
little pouches of lax skin below their lower lids. They wore flowers in
the lapels of their coats; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped
mustache of one was black; that of the other was touched with grey.
Hallett chewed leisurely at the end of an unlighted cigar; Rivington's
slim hand stroked his mustache with a contemplative movement.
The man at the head of the table was almost of the age of the man that
used to sit there, but he was somewhat shorter, and he was thin. His
clothes fell loosely about his bony frame. His eyes were narrow. He
sat before a neat pile of memoranda, with his thin hands, the blue veins
of which marked them like a map, tapping upon the surface of the table.
Like his predecessor's, his elbows were raised at right angles to his
torso and pointed ceilingward; his chest heaved visibly, but his
breathing was inaudible. His eyes were everywhere.
He had come to his office betimes that morning. He had read his letters,
directed his charities, instructed his brokers, given his orders to
lieutenants at the state capitals and to such lieutenants at the
national capital as needed them. Now he was receiving his fellow
commanders in council.
"McKay?" he said in thin comment on some remark of Rivington. "What
McKay?"
"Henry," said Rivington. "Dohan's successor in the M. & N. He's the
sort of man----"
"We can unload this stock," said Hallett, "any time now."
Rivington began a question.
"It's all right," nodded Hallett. "And by the way, that little Forbes
concern's come into the combine."
"I know," said Rivington; "but those letters--You remember----"
"Stein sent 'em over to me yesterday morning. We'll burn 'em this time."
The man at the head of the table rapped with his spatulate finger-ends.
"We are too busy to bother with trifles," he said. "I've got here"--he
indicated the memoranda--"all the reports on the proposed foodstuffs
monopoly. I must decide on that right away...."
After a momentary silence, the stock-ticker, with metallic insistence,
went on weaving out its yards of tape beside the windows that looked
down to the web of radiating streets, on which minute black objects that
were men and women bobbed and buzzed like entangled flies....