"APRÈS NOUS LE DÉLUGE!"
As Gabriel's voice fell to silence, after the last words, a stillness
came upon the lamp-lit room, a hush broken only by the snapping of the
pine-root fire on the hearth and by the busy ticking of the clock upon
the chimneypiece. Then, after a minute's pause, Craig reached over and
took Gabriel by the hand.
"I salute you, O poet of the Revolution now impending!" he cried, while
Catherine's eyes gleamed bright with tears. "Would God that _I_ could
write like that, old man!"
"And would God that my paper was still being issued!" Brevard added,
making a gesture with the pipe that, in his eagerness to hear, he had
allowed to die. "If it were I'd give that poem my front page, and fling
its message full in the faces of Plutocracy!"
Gabriel smiled a bit nervously.
"Don't, please don't," he begged. "If you really do like it help me
spread it. Don't waste words on praise, but plan with me, tonight, how
we can get this to the people--how we can perfect our final
arrangements--what we must do, now, at once, to meet the Air Trust and
defeat it before its terrible and unrelenting grip closes on the throat
of the world!"
"Right!" said Craig. "We must act at once, while there's yet time.
today, all seems safe. The Air Trust spies haven't ferreted this place
out. A week from now, they may have, and one of the most secure and
useful Socialist refuges in the country may be only a heap of
ashes--like the ones at Kenwyck, Hampden, Mount Desert and Loftiss.
Every day is precious. Every one helps to perfect Gabriel's disguise and
adds materially to his strength."
"True," assented Gabriel. "We mustn't wait too long, now. That last
report we got yesterday, by our wireless, ought to stimulate us.
Brainard says, in it, that the Air Trust people are now putting the
finishing touches on the Niagara plant. That will give them condensing
machinery for over 90,000,000 horsepower, all told. As I see the thing,
it looks absolutely as though, when _that_ is done, the whole Capitalist
system of the world will center right there--focus there, as at a point.
Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our
own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall
Street play at finance and power. All, all are empty and meaningless!
"Power has been sucked dry, out of them all, comrades. You know as well
as I know--better, perhaps--that all real power in the world, today,
whether economic or political--nay, even the power of life and death,
the power of breath or strangulation, has clotted at Niagara, in the
central offices of the Air Trust; nay, right in Flint and Waldron's own
inner office!"
Gabriel had stood up, while speaking; and now, pacing the floor of the
big living-room, glanced first at one eager and familiar face, then at
another.
"Comrades," said he, "we should not sleep, tonight. We should get out
all our plans and data, all the dispatches that have come to us here,
all the information at hand about our organization, whether open or
subterranean. We should make this room and this time, in fact, the place
and the hour for the planning of the last great blow on which hangs the
fate of the world. If it succeed, the human race goes free again. If it
fail--and God forbid!--then the whole world will lie in the grip of
Flint and Waldron! With our other centers broken up and under espionage,
our press forced into impotence--save our underground press--and
political action now rendered farcical as ever it was in Mexico, when
Diaz ruled, we have but one recourse!"
"And that is?" asked Catherine. "The general strike?"
"A final, general, paralyzing strike; and with it, the actual, physical
destruction of the colossal crime of crimes, the Air Trust works at
Niagara!"
A little silence followed. They all drew round the reading-table, now,
near the fireplace. Mrs. Grantham brought a lamp; and Brevard, opening a
chest near the book-case, fetched a portfolio of papers, dispatches,
plans, reports and data of all kinds.
"Gabriel's right," said he. "The time is ripe, now, or will be in a week
or so. Nothing can be gained by delaying any longer. Every day adds to
their power and may weaken ours. Our organization, for the strike and
the attack on the works, is as complete as we can make it. We must come
to extreme measures, at once, or world-strangulation will set in, and we
shall be eternally too late!"
"Extreme measures, yes," said Gabriel, while Brevard spread the papers
out and sorted them, and Craig drew contemplatively at his pipe. "The
masters would have it so. Our one-time academic discussion about ways
and means has become absurd, in the face of plutocratic savagery. We're
up against facts, now, not theories. God knows it's against the dictates
of my heart to do what must be done; but it's that or stand back and see
the world be murdered, together with our own selves! And in a case of
self-defense, no measures are unjustifiable.
"Whatever happens our hands are clean. The plutocrats are the attacking
force. They have chosen, and must take the consequences; they have sown,
and must reap. One by one, they have limited and withdrawn every
political right. They have taken away free speech and free assemblage,
free press and universal suffrage. They have limited the right to vote,
by property qualifications that have deprived the proletariat of every
chance to make their will felt. They have put through this National
Censorship outrage and--still worse--the National Mounted Police Bill,
making Cossack rule supreme in the United States of America, as they
have made it in the United States of Europe.
"Before they elected that tool of tools, President Supple, in 1920, on
the Anti-Socialist ticket, we still had some constitutional rights
left--a few. But now, all are gone. With the absorption and annexation
of Canada, Mexico and Central America, slavery full and absolute settled
down upon us. The unions simply crumbled to dust as you know, in face of
all those millions of Mexican peons swamping the labor-market with
starvation-wage labor. Then, as we all remember, came the terrible
series of strikes in 1921 and 1922, and the massacres at Hopedale and
Boulder, at Los Angeles and Pittsburg, and, worst of all, Gary. That
finished what few rights were left, that killing did. And then came the
army of spies, and the proscriptions, and the electrocution of those
hundred and eleven editors, speakers and organizers--why bring up all
these things that we all know so well? _We_ were willing to play the
game fair and square, and _they_ refused. Say that, and you say all.
"No need to dwell on details, comrades. The Air Trust has had its will
with the world, so far. It has crushed all opposition as relentlessly as
the car of Juggernaut used to crush its blind, fanatical devotees. True,
our Party still exists and has some standing and some representatives;
but we all know what _power_ it has--in the open! Not _that_ much!" And
he snapped his fingers in the air.
"In the open, none!" said Craig, blowing a cloud of smoke. "I admit
that, Gabriel. But, underground--ah!"
"Underground," Gabriel took up the word, "forces are now at work that
can shatter the whole infernal slavery to dust! This way of working is
not our choice; it is theirs. They would have it so--now let them take
their medicine!"
"Yes, yes," eagerly exclaimed Catherine, her face flushed and intense.
"I'm with you, Gabriel. To work!"
"To work, yes," put in Craig, "but with system, order and method. My
experience in Congress has taught me some valuable lessons. The
universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our
strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their
system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a
flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling
experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I
tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being
infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise,
or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make
possible, is theirs. And back of that, military power, and the courts
and the prisons and the electric chair! And back of all _those_, the
power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!"
Gabriel thought, a moment, before replying. Then said he:
"I know it, Craig. All the more reason why we must hit them at once, and
hit hard! These reports here," and he gestured at the papers that
Brevard had spread out under the lamp-light, "prove that, at the proper
signal, every chance indicates that we can paralyze transportation--the
keynote of the whole situation.
"True, the government--that is to say, the Air Trust, and _that_ is to
say, Flint and Waldron--can keep men in every engine-cab in the country.
They can keep them at every switch and junction. But this isn't France,
remember, nor is it any small, compact European country. Conditions are
wholly different here. Everywhere, vast stretches of track exist. No
power on earth--not even Flint and Waldron's--can guard all those
hundreds of thousands of miles. And so I tell you, taking our data
simply from these reports and not counting on any more organized
strength than they show, we have today got the means of cutting and
crippling, for a week at least, the movements of troops to Niagara. And
that, just that, is all we need!"
A little silence. Then said Catherine:
"You mean, Gabriel, that if we can keep the troops back for a little
while, and annihilate the Air Trust plant itself, the great revolution
will follow?"
He nodded, with a smouldering fire in his eyes.
"Yes," said he. "If we can loosen the grip of this monster for only
forty-eight hours, and flash the news to this bleeding, sweating,
choking land that the grip _is_ loosened--after that we need do no more.
_Après nous, le déluge_; only not now in the sense of wreck and ruin,
but meaning that this deluge shall forever wash away the tyranny and
crime of Capitalism! Forever and a day, to leave us free once more, free
men and women, standing erect and facing God's own sunlight, our
heritage and birthplace in this world!"
Catherine made no answer, but her hand clasped his. The light on her
magnificent masses of copper-golden hair, braided about her head,
enhanced her beauty. And so for a moment, the little group sat there
about the table--the group on which now so infinitely much depended; and
the lamp-glow shone upon their precious plans, reports and diagrams.
Into each others' eyes they looked, and knew the moment of final
conflict was drawn very near, at last. The moment which, in failure or
success, should for long years, for decades, for centuries perhaps,
determine whether the world and all its teeming millions were to be
slave or free.
They spoke no word and took no oath of life-and-death fidelity, those
men and women who now had been entrusted with the fate of the world. But
in their eyes one read unshakable devotion to the Cause of Man,
unswerving loyalty to the Great Ideal, and a calm, holy faith that would
make light of death itself, could death but pave the way to victory!