Front matter (continued 5)

He did not stop in his own office. He went at once to the committee-room, which opened from that of the typists'. The Committee must have received a special summons and begun its work before the usual time. Business, as Luke entered, was already under weigh, and the room was filled. In the body of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together, which undertakers hire out for funerals; most of the men had cigars in their mouths, and the smoky air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action of alcohol on the digestive juices. On a small platform at one end of the room sat Venable, who was chairman, and, among the several persons grouped about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates and Nelson. Nearly all of the company looked at the newcomer, and Venable, after looking, glanced quickly away. Several committeemen whispered together, and one laughed.

Luke sat in the first vacant chair that he could find.

"It is moved and seconded," Venable was saying, "that the order of business be suspended. All those in favor will signify their consent in the usual manner."

A droning assent answered him.

"So ordered," said Venable, and looked uneasily in Luke's direction.

There was an embarrassed pause. Finally Yeates got to his feet.

"Mr. Chairman," he said.

Venable bowed.

Yeates's hands were in his pockets; his glance was fixed on the floor.

"I propose this resolution," he said, his voice low, his words coming rapidly: "That it is the belief of the Executive Committee of the Municipal Reform League of New York that Mr. Luke Huber should be asked to withdraw from its ticket, on which he now appears as its candidate for District-Attorney, and that he is hereby so asked to do."

There was no hubbub; everybody but Luke appeared to have known what was coming. If there was any discomposure, it was plainly due to Luke's unexpectedly early appearance. Everybody looked at him again.

From a front seat, one man, evidently assigned to the task, rose abruptly.

"Second the motion," he mumbled, and sat down.

Luke was standing before Venable could ask:

"Any remarks?"

"Yes," said Luke.

"Question! Question!" called a dozen voices.

Luke's voice was raised above theirs.

"I want——" he began.

"Sit down!" yelled somebody behind him.

Luke turned, but the interrupter did not reveal himself.

"I want to say one word about this motion," Luke began. He swept the room with a steady gaze and then let his eyes rest on the chairman.

Perhaps because their candidate had never seemed more lazy or unconcerned, the Committee offered no immediate objection. It was Venable that, without meeting Luke's glance, interposed.

"Considering the topic under discussion," said he, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if Mr. Huber were not in the hall."

"Good for you!" cried a man in the back row of chairs.

"No! Give him a chance!" cried another.

Luke raised his hand to quiet them.

"Considering that this is supposed to be a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League," he said, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if any motions made to it were made by members of the Committee. Mr. Yeates is not even a member of the League."

"Sit down!" said the voice from the back row.

"Oh, sit down!" echoed a neighbor wearily.

"We can easy find somebody else if Yeates won't do!" cried another voice.

"I am well aware of that," said Luke, "and so I don't propose to quibble——"

"Ain't he obligin'?" called the back-row man.

"And besides," Luke continued, "if you would only listen to me for a minute, you'll find out that I came here with my mind made up to do just what you're now asking me to do."

He could feel their amazement at his words and so he no longer heeded the back-row man's comment:

"You mean you came here to sit down?"

"Have I the floor?" asked Luke of Venable.

The chairman writhed.

"In that case," Luke pursued, choosing to accept Venable's movement as a sign of assent, "I only want to say that I made up my mind this morning, of my own free will, to leave the ticket and the League."

He was interrupted by a roar of disapproval. The crowd had recovered its wits. Resignation would not suit its purpose. Dismissal alone would suit that. A turmoil of voices arose.

As if to climb above their noise, Luke stood on tiptoe.

"Because this morning," he shouted, "I discovered——"

Old Venable banged his desk with the gavel

"Out of order!" he bawled.

Luke waved him down.

"That this League," he yelled, "was as corrupt as——"

They were all on their feet. Some were standing on their chairs. The men next to Luke tugged at his coat. Other men rushed at him crying threats. They shook their fists and cursed him.

Luke was as mad as any of them now. His hands struck out at the twisting figures about him. The tendons of his throat swelled like knots as he screamed:

"——as corrupt as its enemies! Corrupt! Corrupt! Corrupt! And I leave you to your own rottenness!"

He fought his way through them to the door. He flung one man across a chair that crashed under its sudden burden. Another man who stood in his way, he struck with an upper-cut under the chin and sent him bouncing against the wall. Hooting, swearing, yelling, they crowded behind him, and he fought his way clear and almost ran through the outer room full of astonished stenographers.

A girl ran after him.

"Someone was wantin' you on the telephone, Mr. Huber," she panted. "I think he said his name was Forbes and I know he said it was very important."

Luke paused, looked at her as if she were speaking an alien tongue and, unanswering, pressed on to the elevators.

§5. What now?

He thought about the newspapers, because his whole soul was still set upon self-justification. He went to the Union Square Hotel; found the public stenographer, dictated to her, and signed, copies of a statement briefly saying that he had left the ticket of the League because he had found the organization corrupt; posted these to the press, and then, already wondering why he had bothered to follow a course of publicity that was really directed solely by habit, turned again into the street.

The idea of party had been torn out of him, and he felt as if an arm or a leg had been torn out of him. He could not imagine a man being whole without being part of a party and thereby having a party as part of him. Even yet the lingering hope of the impossible made its claim.

But his reason fought that claim with the sword of remembered experiences. It recalled his faith in the party into which, almost literally, he had been born, and how that faith was shattered; his subsequent belief in the theory of reform within the party, or the party's ability to reform itself, and how that belief was broken; his intimate knowledge of corruption at the head of the other two parties; his discovery, that morning, of the same baseness in independent reform movements. Certain as he was of the rightness of his attitude toward those strikers at the Forbes mill, he was yet able to see that even the working-class, cheated by one political organization after the other, could not win its ultimate desires through any political organization, though they formed one of their own. Where was the entity? What was a party but the people that composed it? Could a party be a thing-in-itself? Could it have any existence save in and through its members? That mattered nothing. Whether the members imposed evil upon the organization that they created, or whether the thing that they created imposed evil on its creators, the evil was inherent in Party. The irrefutable fact was that the disease lay not in the form of a party and political system, but in the system itself: parties were wrong ab initio, politics were evil in their conception and being. Not this or that party was responsible, nor were these or those politics; parties were not diseased, politics were not diseased. Party in the abstract, Politics in themselves were the disease.

Nevertheless, he would hold those letters for a little while....

§6. That turn of his passing thought toward the position of Labor reminded him of the message that the stenographer had given him. He went to a telephone and called up the factory.

Over the wire, Forbes's voice came in a broken cry. Breil's men had arrived on time, and the strikers were waiting for them. There was a pitched battle in the street. The few policemen on duty disappeared. The strike-breakers fled into the factory, where two of them now lay dangerously wounded and a dozen others were badly cut and bruised.

"Why didn't you telephone sooner?" Forbes demanded. "It's awful! I sent for doctors and nurses. I've been trying everywhere to get you. There's one man—I couldn't find you anywhere—I don't know——"

Luke gritted his teeth.

"Haven't you 'phoned for more police?" he asked.

"Of course I have; but the Commissioner said it wasn't anything but a street-fight."

"Then I'll try the Mayor."

"I have done that, Huber."

"What did he say?"

"He said—you would hardly believe it—he said that these matters were the Commissioner's business."

§7. Luke went himself to the Commissioner and the Mayor, and was given the answers that Forbes had been given. The Commissioner said that he had the reports of his patrolmen, and that these spoke of the matter as trivial when it happened and described it as now ended. In the Mayor's office he was told:

"I have to depend on the word of my Commissioner."

Luke spent the remainder of the afternoon trying by long-distance telephone to reach the executive office at Albany. When he got an answer, it was from the Governor's secretary, and was to the effect that he now expected: no troops could be called out for service in any county of the State until the local civil authorities asked for them.

§8. That night, when there was a lull in the turmoil around the factory, Luke and Forbes sat late in the library of Forbes's house, trying to devise some plan to save the situation. It was two o'clock in the morning when Luke walked into the darkened hall; but there Betty's warm arms were around his neck, and Betty's voice was whispering in his ear:

"It will come out all right. I know it will come out all right, because we're right."

He kissed her.

"I hope I do better at this than I did in politics," he said. "I haven't had time to tell you, but I lost there, dear."

"No, you didn't." He felt her hair brush his cheek as she shook her head in contradiction. "No, you didn't. You had your choice between doing what was right and what was wrong. The only way to win was the way they thought was losing. But you did what was right—and so it was they that lost, and it was my brave man that won!"

CHAPTER XV

Something had gone wrong again with the head of that office in the Wall Street skyscraper where George Washington watched the stock-ticker and where the windows looked down on filmy streets full of figures bobbing like entangled flies: the plump man in brown, the man with the pointed teeth and the beady eyes, was once more absent. The slight cold that the doctors mentioned, the catarrhal affection, had returned; the mucous membranes of the throat were re-inflamed; the malady that no newspaper gave a name to renewed its war.

As always, the office work proceeded with silent regularity. Simpson, the almoner, saw callers. Atwood, the chief broker, telephoned for orders uptown. Conover, the confidential clerk, traveled several times a day between his master's house and his master's place of business in one of his master's motor-cars. At the brown man's home, the famous physicians issued their non-committal bulletins; L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett came in and went out, the former worried and elliptical, the latter loud in denial. And directly across the street the relays of reporters resumed their watching, asked hourly the same questions and received always the same replies. Rumor once more hinted dark things about a ruined digestion and an overworked brain.

Nevertheless, there was a difference between this occasion and its predecessors, and the delicate nerves of the financial world quivered with their subtle and sure appreciation of it. The interval of good health had been briefer than ever before. Simpson looked grave. Atwood received few orders. Conover more often than not failed to see whom he sought. The famous physicians called other famous physicians into consultation. Rivington and Hallett were sometimes denied audience. The reporters sent their chiefs a word that made every newspaper-office in the country hunt up a certain long-prepared obituary, set it in type and keep it standing on the bank with a slug-line that read, "Hold for Orders." Rumor shook its thousand heads, and this time rumor was right: the thumbs of the gods were turned down.

No more rising early and working late for the man with the beady eyes and hairy hands. No more gluttony. No more scheming. All hours are alike in the sickroom; his only food was tepid broth, and about a brain too tired to scheme for itself, the only scheming was how to drag forward from minute to minute its life that was death-in-life.

In the street straw had one day been strewn to quiet the noise of traffic, and the next day commands from City Hall closed that street to traffic. Outside was silence, and silence was inside, behind the brownstone walls and shuttered windows, over the rich rugs, among the pictures by the great dead artists.

In a darkened room, in a big Louis XV. bed, bought from the poor descendant of a Provençal marquis for whose mistress it was made, the patient lay. His legs were beneath the covers, but an upholstered bed-rest propped him so that his trunk was almost upright, wrapped in a house-jacket of French flannel, russet brown. Freshly shaven and carefully brushed, he was as neat as if he were about to go to business; but his cheeks hung like folds of dough over his heavy jaw-bone; his short-sighted eyes were fixed on the tapestried canopy above him, which showed the rape of Europa; his lips, turned pale, were pulled back tightly over his yellow fangs. On the edge of the coverlet, high-drawn, his hairy hands gave the only sign of life in all his body: the rounded tips of their stumpy fingers moved constantly as if they were spinning ... spinning...

He would not go to business any more.

It was the day on which Luke's month of promised suppression was to expire. In the sick-room of the man in russet-brown two doctors stood at one side of the bed now, with a nurse between them. L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett were admitted to the room, and Rivington stood at the foot of the bed with his trembling hand before his face, while Hallett, beside him, squared his jaw and looked at the dying man, who did not look at him. Some servants that had worked in the house for twenty years hovered in the shadows and sobbed, because they loved their master and had long cause to love him. A clergyman, in his vestments, knelt at the side of the bed opposite the doctors and read from a little book.

"O Almighty God," read the clergyman, his voice sounding loud in the quiet of the room—"with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; we humbly commend the soul of thy servant, our dear brother, into thy hands..."

One doctor quietly reached out and placed a seeking finger on the dying man's wrist.

"... that it may be precious in thy sight..."

The doctor looked over his shoulder at his colleague. The colleague's eyes asked a question. The examining doctor nodded.

"... it may be presented pure and without spot before thee."

Then the man on the bed died. He died silently, speedily, grimly. The stumpy fingers stopped their weaving motion; they shot into the palms of the hands, and the hands clenched until only their hairy backs were visible. The lips tightened for a moment until the pointed fangs seemed to have bitten through them; the beady eyes protruded still farther from their sockets; the crooked arms curved stiffly toward the belly; the crooked knees shot toward the chest; the whole figure seemed to curl up; the mouth fell open.

The clergyman looked, hesitated and continued:

"... teach us who survive, in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality, to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is; and so to number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts to that holy and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live here, which may in the end bring us to life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, thine only Son our Lord. Amen."

Far down in the offices on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, everything was going on as usual. Only one room of the suite was empty, and even in it, under the solemn Washington, the stock-ticker was weaving out its yards and yards of tape by the windows that looked to the web of streets on which the people buzzed always like entangled flies.

CHAPTER XVI

§1. Public opinion had been unanimous concerning Luke's break with the Municipal Reform League. Only in the terms of their condemnation did the newspapers differ: they were all agreed that Luke was anathema. His letters to the press served him to small purpose; the Executive Committee issued a statement declaring that his withdrawal had been requested "because of inflammatory utterances and practical policies contrary to the spirit and purpose of the organization." The official statement was accepted and his individual version treated as a futile attempt to blacken a reputable, if mistaken, movement. It was everywhere believed that he had been forced to resign because of his Cooper Union speech, and it was in some quarters hinted that his former comrades held him responsible for the attempt to bribe the Heney lieutenant—a scandal made the most of during the subsequent period of the campaign and thereafter dropped before it reached the courts. In spite of the fact that the Committee had met in secret session, some of its members gave their own story of its turbulent dénouement to the reporters, and this was published in a form that made Luke appear as a cornered bully.

"Mr. Huber [said the most dignified editorial on the subject] was once doubtless a well-intentioned young man, but his first taste of popular applause seems to have intoxicated him, made him see visions of one real evil in every impossible quarter and caused a fit of that acute mania wherein one's best friends are mistaken for one's worst enemies. This is the only charitable explanation of the tragic end to a promising career, but on that end the Municipal Reform League is certainly to be congratulated."

Other editorials laughed at Luke's habit of hitting at vast conspiracies of which he never produced proof, and some charged him with flagrant dishonesty. He reverted for a time to his belief in publicity and bombarded the papers with letters of explanation; but the papers at first garbled and then forgot to print what he wrote. He sent for reporters to give them interviews, but, although the men still liked him, and politely took down his every word, they could never get their "copy" beyond the editorial desks. Within a few days, the former candidate was a newspaper joke.

He had, of course, written to his mother and sister about his engagement to Betty, since publicly announced, and they had replied with kindly letters, glad because of his planned marriage to the daughter of a man of good family supposed to be well-to-do, and hopeful for his continued happiness. Now, with the news of his political overthrow published broadcast, Jane wrote to ask him why he had been so foolish and to quote her husband the Congressman, to the effect that what Luke needed was an apprenticeship at practical politics; his mother's comment was one of love triumphant over the defects of the loved object and forgiveness for behavior inexplicable in his father's son.

The strike dragged on wearily. After the first outbreak of violence, the leaders were able, for a time, to prevail upon the strikers to use more peaceable methods; but the resulting days of siege were as trying for both sides as the active warfare had been. Forbes's boasts to the contrary notwithstanding, the firm, handicapped by the unskilled labor of the strike-breakers, found itself unable to fulfil its contracts; the new recruits were all raw men, whereas much of the factory's work was intended for trained women: badly needed money was being forfeited. The dispossessed employees, on the other hand, rapidly exhausted their own supplies; because they had gone over to industrial unionism, the American Federation of Labor, to which their old "local" had been attached through the trade-union that it was a part of, refused help and forbade the union to give any; there had been a national reaction against the I.W.W., and it could furnish but little money. The strikers held angry meetings and faced starvation; Luke and Forbes met in long conferences and faced ruin.

In those days, only Luke's love for Betty sustained him, and Betty, being new to both love and disaster, remained loyal. She was confident that the politicians and the papers were conspiring against him, and, knowing her father's gentleness in his home, she was equally confident that the strikers were wrong.

Luke did not inquire as to the reasons of her steadfastness. In the first darkness of disaster, he was too glad for support to quarrel with its origin. She was warm and human, sympathetic and at hand; she loved him. With all his heart and soul, he returned her love. In the last analysis, he fought, he told himself, for an ideal that, if greater than them both or separately, was yet necessary to them. The ideal had an undeniable lien upon the best of his strength of body and mind; yet whatever of these the ideal could spare was not for him, but for Betty.

Then came the death of the man whom Luke had regarded as the personification of the evils from which the country was suffering. It came close enough upon the Cooper Union speech to make that speech appear in the worst possible taste; but it was an event considered of such tremendous importance in itself that Luke was forgotten and once for all swept from the columns of the newspapers.

Those papers, even the daring few that had once or twice had the temerity feebly to question the lesser schemes of the man who now pursued no more schemes, were crowded with reverential accounts of his illness, awed pictures of his last moments, laudatory descriptions of his Napoleonic career, and editorials that spoke only of his undeniable greatness and his outstanding benefactions. The country talked as if its king had died; the achievements of none of the three presidents killed while in office had received louder praise or more lengthy attention. He left two large fortunes to individuals: one to the niece to whom Yeates was engaged, and one to be divided among more distant relatives, with bequests to faithful servants in his house and businesses; but the bulk of his money went to the colleges and hospitals that he had so magnificently assisted during his life. Firmly, the entire press observed the Latin maxim: they let nothing but good be spoken of the dead.

Luke was by this time prepared for such an attitude on the part of the papers, but, on his own part, he permitted no illusions. The fact of death must always be solemn; but the force that ended wrong-doing did not palliate it. This blow was like a judgment from Heaven. Luke did not think so much of how it would benefit him as of how it would benefit the country, but he was of too common clay not to spare some reflection to the influence of the event upon his own affairs: it would probably mean the dissolution of the antagonism to him in business; it would surely mean the cessation of the personal persecution that had already wrecked his political and professional career. Yet it was more for the triumph of the larger and broader good that he felt ready to chant a Jubilate.

Once the thoughts crossed his mind: If Heaven were just, and this death were indeed Heaven's judgment, why had Heaven's judgment been so long delayed? And, since Heaven had been tardy when the death of a single man could thus ease the world and make for social righteousness, how could he have held it wrong had some sufferer from that evil struck, in Heaven's default, this single blow for the freedom of society? But he was in no mood to front casuistry: the thing had happened, and that was happiness enough.

He was reading the news in his rooms at the Arapahoe. He had sat up late with Forbes the night before and had risen late this morning, breakfasting in the apartment house. He knew that he ought to go to the factory, but he could not go at once.

He began again to dream dreams as he used to dream them. His personal failure counted for nothing in what must happen now. Suppose he were discredited and unable to win back the public confidence: somebody, without party and without politics, a larger and better man than he had been, would assume a national leadership, where his had been small and local, and would now bring the whole country back to the simple political faith and the plain, honest financial and industrial policies of the nation's founders. The mercenaries of darkness that had served the evil mind could not now, with the evil mind in perdition, stand for one day against the Army of Light.

Himself? He would begin over again, with Betty and for her. In the new order, under the reign of equity, public opinion would soon clarify, and he could re-establish himself and perform some part, however small, of the mighty work of reconstruction. He had been too busy of late with love and politics and business to continue in the social life in which Jack Porcellis had launched him. Porcellis's sporadic returns to New York—the man was just now in India on the pretense of studying its religions—were, latterly, Luke's sole occasions of approaching that existence. Save to secure the loan, he now contritely recalled, he had neglected Ruysdael, whose agent as yet evinced no misgivings over the effect of the strike upon Forbes's securities, and on his last incursions into Mrs. Ruysdael's set, though Luke had found himself liked, he was made aware that the liking for his small-talk was severely tempered by scorn for his enthusiasms. He must overcome all that now. To be of use, to help Betty, he must regain.

When he was a small boy, his ambition in life had been carpentry. At some remote time or other, he must have seen and admired one of those journeymen joiners of the elder type that used to tramp the country roads from small town to town and keep alive by doing odd jobs at the houses on their endless way. He loved tools and he loved wandering; even yet he loved them, and this figure had once represented Romance to him as definitely as the dead man in russet brown, long afterward, represented Evil. This morning, while he smiled at the memory of those young imaginings, Luke felt a little of their charm: it seemed impossible for him to form, as he should, his new plans while he sat in an apartment house in the city in which his plans must eventually be applied; he wished that he could drop everything for the day and go somewhere far out into the country to tramp the dusty roads and dream at ease.

It was then that the telephone announced a caller: ex-Judge Stein.

§2. The Judge, as he entered, presented the same dignified figure that he had presented when Luke last talked with him. His strong face was solemn, but undisturbed by its solemnity. He arranged with care the tails of his frock-coat as he seated himself in the best chair, but on this occasion he came directly to the point of his visit.

"Mr. Huber," he said, "a great many things have happened since we met."

Luke shrugged his shoulders.

"I'll admit you've kept me pretty busy, Judge."

"I was not referring to the unnecessary trouble in which you involved yourself. I was referring to the fact that your month has elapsed and that the man you threatened is dead."

The news of the morning had temporarily annulled Luke's sense of time. Only yesterday he had wondered what use he should make of the Rollins letters, now carried in a safer place than his coat-pocket; to-day he had forgotten them.

"Yes," he said, gathering his thoughts behind his impassive face: "the month's over and the man's dead."

The Judge leaned impressively forward. He shook his white head gravely.

"Death," said the Judge, "wipes out all animosities. I know you would not use those letters now, Mr. Huber, because I know you would not strike a dead man. So I have come to ask you to deliver them to me." He held out his opened hand.

Luke blinked at it.

"I don't understand," said he. "I thought you always represented yourself as—well, as not professionally retained in this matter?"

"I am now," said the Judge.

"Oh! By the estate?"

"Not directly and not altogether." Stein chose his words. "I am retained by the company whose property those letters are."

"I thought you had left the railroad-claim business long ago. Perhaps you are specially retained for this one job?"

The Judge looked hurt. His firm mouth quivered.

"Mr. Huber," he said, "I am in no frame of mind for joking to-day. This man is dead, and he was my friend——"

"I'm sorry to have seemed to joke," Luke interrupted.

Stein bowed and went on:

"He is dead, and whatever his faults—we all have our faults, Mr. Huber—they died with him. I am here only to ask you to show a decent respect for the memory of a dead enemy. I am here to ask you to be magnanimous, Mr. Huber."

"Magnanimous? You talk as if I had won!"

"The living are always the winners," said the Judge.

Luke began to doubt that theory.

"And so you want me to surrender these letters?"

"Exactly. What use can they be to you now?"

"There were other people involved. Are they willing to accept my terms? I know they can't hurt me, because I know they haven't the courage or the power of the man you've been talking about. But that's neither here nor there: will they accept my terms?"

"They did not write either of the letters, Mr. Huber."

"They're inculpated by them."

"Not legally."

"Enough inculpated to serve my purpose."

"If you think that," said the Judge, "I can only repeat the offer I made you when I called here before."

Luke smiled.

"And I can only refuse it."

"Mr. Huber," the Judge began again, "the man is dead——"

Luke's nerves had been strained for many a day. He leaped to his feet.

"Of course the man's dead!" he cried. "He was dead this morning, and he's still dead. Why do you keep saying that over and over? I'm tired of hearing it." He saw the look of pain return. "I beg your pardon," he said; "but I might as well tell you first and last that I won't surrender those letters, no matter what you plead or threaten. I won't tell you what I intend to do with them, either. And the only reason I know that they must be of use to me is your coming here and saying they aren't any use."

The Judge rose also.

"Mr. Huber," said he, "I am very sorry to hear you speak this way. I can't tell you how sorry I am. You ought to know by this time——"

"I couldn't know anything," Luke cut in, "that would make me change my mind."

"But suppose," said the Judge heavily, "suppose my friends happen to know that the situation of the Forbes Company——"

Luke's face went very white.

He opened the door.

"Good-morning, Judge," he said.

§3. Stein's polite, but portentous adieux were not a quarter of an hour old before Luke sought the office of the newspaper that had been the last to refuse him space in its columns for his political explanations. The man that was dead had, it seemed, left a something of his influence behind him: Luke resolved to strike at it.

The office-boy was a long time returning, and, when he did, it was to announce:

"He says ter find out whatcher want."

"Give me my card," said Luke.

He scribbled on the card: "Non-political."

"Now," he said, "try him again."

§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."

§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."

§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.

§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?'"

§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.

§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

§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.

§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.

§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!"

§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 fiancée 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.

§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.

§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.

§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."

§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.

§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."

§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

§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.

§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....

§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:

"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!"

Breil stepped to the window.

"That's them. That's the others. They're comin'," he said.

§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.

§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....

§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.

§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."

§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?"