§12. Luke would not have had to open the offices of the Municipal League; that was being attended to. While he was still in the Subway train returning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, two men, one of them carrying a small bundle, crossed Union Square and turned down Broadway. Before the entrance to the building in which the League was housed, they paused to speak to a policeman."That's all right," he told them. "I know. I got me orders ten minutes ago. That's why I'm standin' here. But get a move on, you fellows. I don't want to stick here all night."The two men rounded a corner.In the deserted street, the officer of the law walked up and down, twenty paces to the north, then twenty to the south. A party of strayed revelers came by and tried to talk with him; but he ordered them to move on if they didn't want him to arrest them. He resumed his walk when they had gone, his thumbs tucked in his belt, his lips pursed and whistling softly a popular tune. Once he heard the sound of a window opened overhead. A little later he saw a dim light pass from one window to another in the building above him. A dulled report sounded from behind the walls: the Elevated is not near Broadway at this spot, but in the night noises travel far, and this noise might have been the crash of a late train. The officer of the law did not raise his head....Around the corner came two figures. Both of them carried bundles now.The officer of the law strolled past them. He did not stop as he spoke."All right?" he asked."All right," said one of the figures.The officer of the law walked on, whistling his popular tune.§13. Somewhat nearer the hour of sunrise, Mr. Irwin, his merry eyes grown weary, stood in the sitting-room of the Hon. Marcus Stein's suite of hotel apartments. He was bending over a table on which lay an opened bundle.Stein was bending over the table, too. His dignified demeanor was ruffled."This is nothing but a collection of junk," he was saying. "It is no use to anybody but its owners. Get it out of here at once, Mr. Irwin, and tell your friends to return it to the place they got it from."CHAPTER XIV§1. As every man has his day in court, so nearly every man has his day in the newspapers, and which is the more trying it is difficult to decide. The day following the night of the Cooper Union meeting was Luke's: the morning papers seemed to contain little news that did not refer to him; the editorial columns presented satiric paragraphs and serious leaders regarding his speech and his position before the public, and spread over the first pages were accounts of his address and stories of the strike in the factory, with which his connection was now loudly heralded.Comment on the speech was about equally divided. Half of the press ridiculed it as the vaporing of a misinformed dreamer, and half denounced it as an anarchistic appeal to the violence of the mob. Some journals gave stenographic reports of the entire matter; most printed only those portions which, lifted from their context, were best suited to the policy of the paper using them. The extremes were shown by two headlines. One read:NIGHTMARES OF A CANDIDATEBr'er Huber Consults His Dream-BookAnd Says Innocent New York IsBeing Tortured WithoutKnowing ItAnd the other flung across eight columns, in letters of vermilion, the legend:CANDIDATE PREACHES PRIVATE WARWITH FIRE AND SWORD!In the treatment of the strike, Luke fared even worse. He was held up as a hypocrite that championed the People from the platform and sweated the poor in the shops. He was paraded as the real owner of R. H. Forbes & Son. The papers generally most bitter against labor movements published long accounts of the strike, denunciatory interviews with the strike-leaders, and tables showing how badly the wages paid by the Forbes firm compared with the wage-scale already in operation in the factories controlled by the clothing-trust. There was a hurriedly drawn cartoon that depicted Luke wearing a Liberty-cap and hurling a bomb at a figure labeled "Conservative Business": he was addressing a mob from a soap-box that was supported by the bowed shoulders of his oppressed employees. The most respectable newspaper in New York hinted that his political attack was made against his business rivals solely because they were his business rivals, and the least respectable declared that his quarrel with the workers stamped his election doctrines as the gospel of Murder for Profit.As Luke entered the door of the Broadway building in which the Municipal Reform League had its headquarters, he came up with Venable also going in. The old man's hand trembled as he greeted the candidate."We seem to have raised a real thunderstorm," said Luke, smiling. "I hope it'll clear the atmosphere.""Then you know?" asked Venable. "You've seen it in the papers?""How could I help it?" said Luke. "It's all over them.""Oh, the speech?""That and this strike at the Forbes factory, yes.""I didn't mean those things," said Venable. "I meant this."He took from his coat-pocket a folded newspaper open at the financial and real estate page. He pointed a shaking finger at first one and then another obscure paragraph, both printed in small type and far separated.Luke read the paragraphs. Each applied to the same block of an uptown street. The former said that a new branch of an elevated railroad would be run through this street, and the latter curtly announced that two of the apartment houses in the block were about to be converted into tenements for negroes."My apartment house," said Venable simply, "the one that all my money is invested in, will have those 'L'-tracks running in front of its second-floor windows. It is just between the two houses that are to to be made into tenements."Luke swore softly."Who's back of this?" he demanded."You know what influences control that elevated road," said Venable."And the tenements?""They've just been bought by Hallett.""It's ruin?""It will be very close to it."Luke gripped Venable's shoulder."You get out of this," he commanded. "Leave the League and go to them; they'll change their plans: that's why they've made their plans the way they have.""No," said Venable, "I won't do it. I can't. I'm pretty old to be poor, but I'm too old to change my opinions."He was still talking in this manner when they entered the League's quarters and were greeted with the news that burglars had been there the night before."Nothin's been touched in any of the offices but yours, Mr. Huber," said the breathless clerk who poured out this story to them; "but there the safe's been blown open, and I don't know what's missin'. I sent for the police right away.""The police?" said Luke. "Stop your joking, Charley.""I'm not jokin', Mr. Huber. I did send for them. They've been here. They said they'd have a detective over from headquarters before long."Luke hurried to his office. Bits of charred blanket and several match-ends lay about the floor. The door of the safe swung lamely upon a single hinge. Inside was a tumbled mass of papers. Otherwise the room seemed undisturbed.Quickly, Luke ran over the papers in the yawning safe. He looked up at Venable."Everything's here," he said."Are you sure?" asked Venable."Quite." Luke went to his desk. Its lock had been forced. There had been a rude attempt to restore the contents to the order in which Luke had left them when he quitted the office the day before, but he saw at once that everything had been examined. "And they didn't get anything from here, either," he added."I wonder what they were after?" said Venable."So do I," said Luke acridly. "At any rate, they didn't get it." The telephone rang as he bent beside it. He took the receiver from its hook. "Yes?" he said. "Oh, Mr. Venable? Yes, he's here—right: he's here in my office, I say. Want to talk to him?" He held up the receiver. "It's that new worker, Jarvie," he explained. "He wants to talk to you."Rapidly as events had of late happened to Luke and the Municipal Reform League, they were happening this morning with a speed theretofore unequaled. Venable had not exchanged a dozen sentences over the telephone before he told Jarvie to wait a minute and, ringing off, faced Luke, with his cheeks gone gray."This—this is the worst thing yet!" he gasped.Luke was leaning against the desk, his hands closed over its edge."What is?""This, that Jarvie says. It's—Oh!" Venable flung up his hands. "It's too much!"Luke's grip tightened."Tell me what it is."Venable crumpled into the chair before the telephone."A couple of the Progressives' detectives have caught Jarvie trying to buy one of Heney's lieutenants.""What?" cried Luke. The veins stood out, big and blue, on his gripping hands."Of course the Heney man was really working with the detectives," moaned Venable; "but that won't help. They had a dictaphone in the hotel room——""In what hotel room?""The one that Jarvie was to meet the Heney man in. I thought he'd be more careful. I told him——"Luke stood erect. He folded his arms. Venable's confession shook him, but he exerted all his strength of will to command himself."What are you telling me?" he asked. "Are you telling me that the League has been going in for rotten work of that sort? Are you telling me that you—you of all people—have been engineering it?"Venable's terror gave quick place to amazement."You don't mean to say you didn't understand that?" he countered. "How do you suppose politics are run, anyway? Where have you been all these years under Leighton?" Anger came to his aid; his loose jaw wagged. "Don't try to get out of this trouble by pretending you didn't know about it. What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have always said—always—that the only way to beat the devil is to fight him with fire.""Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?""I say we have always fought the devil with fire.""And this campaign. You've used your fire in it?""As little as possible. We never used more than we could help.""Did the committee know it?"Venable reached for the telephone."I can't waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie's arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our defense.""But the committee knew?""Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course, they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were sent to school, and they are not fools.""You bet Iwillask them!" said Luke.He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the street.§2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother's living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of his firm imperiled; the factory's employees fronting starvation and threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in the evils it sought to reform—these were the present results of his endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked? Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the question.To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have ceased their work in anger.Luke saw them glance up at him as his open taxicab whirled past them: uncouth, slouching figures, with stooped shoulders and sullen faces. He had not supposed that he could be known to a score of them, but the portraits of him distributed for campaign purposes had made him familiar: the first few groups merely looked at him and sneered; then someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when the cab drew up before the office-door of the factory, a half-brick, tossed from the farther side of the street, shattered the glass windscreen at the chauffeur's back.Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal. He jumped from the taxi and darted around it.On the other side of the street there was only a single figure in sight: a figure that leaned against a lamp-post. Once it had been a woman; now it was only misery. Red toes burst from its bulging shoes from which the stockings fell so far that, the filthy skirt held up by a claw-like hand, at least six inches of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible. The ragged jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed a flat chest. Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and almost hid a red and swollen face. Through the hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned yellow. The right hand was extended, clenched."You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.Luke turned toward the factory-door. To reach it, he had to press through a double line of men and women, silent, ominous: the strikers' picket-line. The woman's voice croaked from across the street:"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!Halleyloolyah, bum again!"Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room papered in green, with framed advertisements about the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby hat....Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to Forbes's office.§3. The office was crowded. Forbes, determined, sat at his desk; he faced a line of slouching men in shabby clothes, who held their hats in their hands and shuffled their uneasy feet, and were headed by one man, dressed as they were, but better fed and brawny, his large face hard, his hat upon his head. Luke knew that this was the workers' committee led by the organizer."I haven't another word to say," Forbes was declaring. A hint of relief came to his voice when he saw Luke. "Oh, Huber," he broke off: "Good-morning. Come over here and sit down. I am just telling these men for the last time that we will meet them in the matter of hours, but we can't and won't grant them the ruinous increase of wages they want." As Luke took a chair beside him, he continued, addressing his employees and carefully avoiding the organizer: "I have one gang of men coming here in half an hour to take your jobs. There are more where they came from, and we'll be running full blast this time to-morrow. If you're not back at work by the time the first gang of men gets here, you'll never get back."Luke expected a growl of anger: there was no sound from them.The organizer coughed."Mr. Forbes——" he began.Forbes smacked his hands together."I don't know you!" he snapped."You know who I am," said the organizer calmly. "I told you.""I don't recognize your right to be here.""I haven't any right, because it's against the principles of our organization to treat with employers, but I thought——"Raging, Forbes stood up."Againstyourprinciples, is it?" he cried. "Well, it's against the principles of this firm to talk toyou!""Mr. Forbes——""That's all I've got to say."The organizer was unruffled. He maintained a rather terrifying dignity. He turned to the men."Come on, fellows," he said.With a loud scraping of feet, the strikers and their leader passed out of the room.Luke and Forbes remained quiet. Even for some time after the room was empty, they said nothing, and while they sat thus, a boyish voice rose from the street:"Oh, I love my boss:He's a good friend o' mine;An' that's why I'm starvingOut in the bread-line!"Somebody laughed, and several voices took up the chorus:"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."The boyish voice continued:"Oh, why don't you workLike other men do?How in Hell can I workWhen there's no work to do?""That's their logic," said Forbes fretfully. He nodded toward the street. "How can you argue with people of that sort?""It didn't strike me that you were arguing," said Luke. "What are you going to do?""What I said.""You meant it, then?""Every word. I've taken your advice, after all: I've employed that strike-breaker: Breil, you know."Luke had heard of him. Breil, he knew, owned several hundred fighting-men and took them to all parts of the country under the pretense that they were workers anxious to start the wheels of industries stopped by strikers. Wherever Breil went, trouble followed."Then you'd better employ the Pinkertons, too," said Luke."They're too expensive," Forbes said. "Besides," he added, "that sort of thing's un-American. We won't need detectives to protect the right of the worker to work. If we need any help, we'll call in the police. I thought you understood that. I'm afraid you will never learn the art of handling men, Huber."Luke was anxious for a fight. The corruption that he had discovered in the League fired his primitive instincts. He was angry, and it was of small consequence to him upon whom he visited his anger. Here his own fortune, honestly come by, was threatened; his mother's support, Forbes's and Betty's. It was an excellent opportunity."I'm with you," he said. "When do you expect the first contingent of Breil's men?""When I said: in half an hour.""Have you 'phoned police headquarters?""No. What's the use? I don't want to court a fight. The presence of the police before there was a fight might only start one. Headquarters sent me down two extra men this morning when I asked for them, and that's enough for the present."Luke bent to the telephone."I don't agree with you," he said.Forbes's protest was mild. Luke called police headquarters and stated his case. When he mentioned his name, he was told that the Police Commissioner was not to be found."Then find him," said Luke."I think he's gone out," came the answer."If you don't find him after what I've told you, I'll show up your action at the next meeting I speak at," said Luke.The Commissioner was found."But what trouble have you had so far?" he demanded."We haven't had any so far," said Luke. "What we want is to avoid trouble.""I think you're easy scared," laughed the Commissioner. "Have there been any threats?""No.""Well, what's itching you, anyhow? My department's got three campaign parades and a dozen meetings on its hands to-day besides its regular business. I can't spare my men unless I know they're needed."He rang off.§4. Luke wanted to stay for the arrival of Breil's men; but there was something else that he had to do and could not postpone. He left the factory a few minutes before the hour at which the strike-breakers were to arrive. He passed into a street slowly filling with strikers, but he reassured himself by the reflection that what he had to do would be brief and that he would soon be free to return. He hurried to the League's headquarters, where he knew that the Committee would soon be in session.For, under all his absorption in the affairs of the factory, and in spite of his desire to abjure thought for action, his brain had been busy. It was telling him something new about politics. It was receiving the truth about parties as, from his vantage-ground, he had seen it.He did not stop in his own office. He went at once to the committee-room, which opened from that of the typists'. The Committee must have received a special summons and begun its work before the usual time. Business, as Luke entered, was already under weigh, and the room was filled. In the body of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together, which undertakers hire out for funerals; most of the men had cigars in their mouths, and the smoky air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action of alcohol on the digestive juices. On a small platform at one end of the room sat Venable, who was chairman, and, among the several persons grouped about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates and Nelson. Nearly all of the company looked at the newcomer, and Venable, after looking, glanced quickly away. Several committeemen whispered together, and one laughed.Luke sat in the first vacant chair that he could find."It is moved and seconded," Venable was saying, "that the order of business be suspended. All those in favor will signify their consent in the usual manner."A droning assent answered him."So ordered," said Venable, and looked uneasily in Luke's direction.There was an embarrassed pause. Finally Yeates got to his feet."Mr. Chairman," he said.Venable bowed.Yeates's hands were in his pockets; his glance was fixed on the floor."I propose this resolution," he said, his voice low, his words coming rapidly: "That it is the belief of the Executive Committee of the Municipal Reform League of New York that Mr. Luke Huber should be asked to withdraw from its ticket, on which he now appears as its candidate for District-Attorney, and that he is hereby so asked to do."There was no hubbub; everybody but Luke appeared to have known what was coming. If there was any discomposure, it was plainly due to Luke's unexpectedly early appearance. Everybody looked at him again.From a front seat, one man, evidently assigned to the task, rose abruptly."Second the motion," he mumbled, and sat down.Luke was standing before Venable could ask:"Any remarks?""Yes," said Luke."Question! Question!" called a dozen voices.Luke's voice was raised above theirs."I want——" he began."Sit down!" yelled somebody behind him.Luke turned, but the interrupter did not reveal himself."I want to say one word about this motion," Luke began. He swept the room with a steady gaze and then let his eyes rest on the chairman.Perhaps because their candidate had never seemed more lazy or unconcerned, the Committee offered no immediate objection. It was Venable that, without meeting Luke's glance, interposed."Considering the topic under discussion," said he, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if Mr. Huber were not in the hall.""Good for you!" cried a man in the back row of chairs."No! Give him a chance!" cried another.Luke raised his hand to quiet them."Considering that this is supposed to be a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League," he said, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if any motions made to it were made by members of the Committee. Mr. Yeates is not even a member of the League.""Sitdown!" said the voice from the back row."Oh, sitdown!" 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, becausewe'reright."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 XVSomething 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."
§12. Luke would not have had to open the offices of the Municipal League; that was being attended to. While he was still in the Subway train returning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, two men, one of them carrying a small bundle, crossed Union Square and turned down Broadway. Before the entrance to the building in which the League was housed, they paused to speak to a policeman.
"That's all right," he told them. "I know. I got me orders ten minutes ago. That's why I'm standin' here. But get a move on, you fellows. I don't want to stick here all night."
The two men rounded a corner.
In the deserted street, the officer of the law walked up and down, twenty paces to the north, then twenty to the south. A party of strayed revelers came by and tried to talk with him; but he ordered them to move on if they didn't want him to arrest them. He resumed his walk when they had gone, his thumbs tucked in his belt, his lips pursed and whistling softly a popular tune. Once he heard the sound of a window opened overhead. A little later he saw a dim light pass from one window to another in the building above him. A dulled report sounded from behind the walls: the Elevated is not near Broadway at this spot, but in the night noises travel far, and this noise might have been the crash of a late train. The officer of the law did not raise his head....
Around the corner came two figures. Both of them carried bundles now.
The officer of the law strolled past them. He did not stop as he spoke.
"All right?" he asked.
"All right," said one of the figures.
The officer of the law walked on, whistling his popular tune.
§13. Somewhat nearer the hour of sunrise, Mr. Irwin, his merry eyes grown weary, stood in the sitting-room of the Hon. Marcus Stein's suite of hotel apartments. He was bending over a table on which lay an opened bundle.
Stein was bending over the table, too. His dignified demeanor was ruffled.
"This is nothing but a collection of junk," he was saying. "It is no use to anybody but its owners. Get it out of here at once, Mr. Irwin, and tell your friends to return it to the place they got it from."
CHAPTER XIV
§1. As every man has his day in court, so nearly every man has his day in the newspapers, and which is the more trying it is difficult to decide. The day following the night of the Cooper Union meeting was Luke's: the morning papers seemed to contain little news that did not refer to him; the editorial columns presented satiric paragraphs and serious leaders regarding his speech and his position before the public, and spread over the first pages were accounts of his address and stories of the strike in the factory, with which his connection was now loudly heralded.
Comment on the speech was about equally divided. Half of the press ridiculed it as the vaporing of a misinformed dreamer, and half denounced it as an anarchistic appeal to the violence of the mob. Some journals gave stenographic reports of the entire matter; most printed only those portions which, lifted from their context, were best suited to the policy of the paper using them. The extremes were shown by two headlines. One read:
NIGHTMARES OF A CANDIDATE
Br'er Huber Consults His Dream-BookAnd Says Innocent New York IsBeing Tortured WithoutKnowing It
And the other flung across eight columns, in letters of vermilion, the legend:
CANDIDATE PREACHES PRIVATE WARWITH FIRE AND SWORD!
In the treatment of the strike, Luke fared even worse. He was held up as a hypocrite that championed the People from the platform and sweated the poor in the shops. He was paraded as the real owner of R. H. Forbes & Son. The papers generally most bitter against labor movements published long accounts of the strike, denunciatory interviews with the strike-leaders, and tables showing how badly the wages paid by the Forbes firm compared with the wage-scale already in operation in the factories controlled by the clothing-trust. There was a hurriedly drawn cartoon that depicted Luke wearing a Liberty-cap and hurling a bomb at a figure labeled "Conservative Business": he was addressing a mob from a soap-box that was supported by the bowed shoulders of his oppressed employees. The most respectable newspaper in New York hinted that his political attack was made against his business rivals solely because they were his business rivals, and the least respectable declared that his quarrel with the workers stamped his election doctrines as the gospel of Murder for Profit.
As Luke entered the door of the Broadway building in which the Municipal Reform League had its headquarters, he came up with Venable also going in. The old man's hand trembled as he greeted the candidate.
"We seem to have raised a real thunderstorm," said Luke, smiling. "I hope it'll clear the atmosphere."
"Then you know?" asked Venable. "You've seen it in the papers?"
"How could I help it?" said Luke. "It's all over them."
"Oh, the speech?"
"That and this strike at the Forbes factory, yes."
"I didn't mean those things," said Venable. "I meant this."
He took from his coat-pocket a folded newspaper open at the financial and real estate page. He pointed a shaking finger at first one and then another obscure paragraph, both printed in small type and far separated.
Luke read the paragraphs. Each applied to the same block of an uptown street. The former said that a new branch of an elevated railroad would be run through this street, and the latter curtly announced that two of the apartment houses in the block were about to be converted into tenements for negroes.
"My apartment house," said Venable simply, "the one that all my money is invested in, will have those 'L'-tracks running in front of its second-floor windows. It is just between the two houses that are to to be made into tenements."
Luke swore softly.
"Who's back of this?" he demanded.
"You know what influences control that elevated road," said Venable.
"And the tenements?"
"They've just been bought by Hallett."
"It's ruin?"
"It will be very close to it."
Luke gripped Venable's shoulder.
"You get out of this," he commanded. "Leave the League and go to them; they'll change their plans: that's why they've made their plans the way they have."
"No," said Venable, "I won't do it. I can't. I'm pretty old to be poor, but I'm too old to change my opinions."
He was still talking in this manner when they entered the League's quarters and were greeted with the news that burglars had been there the night before.
"Nothin's been touched in any of the offices but yours, Mr. Huber," said the breathless clerk who poured out this story to them; "but there the safe's been blown open, and I don't know what's missin'. I sent for the police right away."
"The police?" said Luke. "Stop your joking, Charley."
"I'm not jokin', Mr. Huber. I did send for them. They've been here. They said they'd have a detective over from headquarters before long."
Luke hurried to his office. Bits of charred blanket and several match-ends lay about the floor. The door of the safe swung lamely upon a single hinge. Inside was a tumbled mass of papers. Otherwise the room seemed undisturbed.
Quickly, Luke ran over the papers in the yawning safe. He looked up at Venable.
"Everything's here," he said.
"Are you sure?" asked Venable.
"Quite." Luke went to his desk. Its lock had been forced. There had been a rude attempt to restore the contents to the order in which Luke had left them when he quitted the office the day before, but he saw at once that everything had been examined. "And they didn't get anything from here, either," he added.
"I wonder what they were after?" said Venable.
"So do I," said Luke acridly. "At any rate, they didn't get it." The telephone rang as he bent beside it. He took the receiver from its hook. "Yes?" he said. "Oh, Mr. Venable? Yes, he's here—right: he's here in my office, I say. Want to talk to him?" He held up the receiver. "It's that new worker, Jarvie," he explained. "He wants to talk to you."
Rapidly as events had of late happened to Luke and the Municipal Reform League, they were happening this morning with a speed theretofore unequaled. Venable had not exchanged a dozen sentences over the telephone before he told Jarvie to wait a minute and, ringing off, faced Luke, with his cheeks gone gray.
"This—this is the worst thing yet!" he gasped.
Luke was leaning against the desk, his hands closed over its edge.
"What is?"
"This, that Jarvie says. It's—Oh!" Venable flung up his hands. "It's too much!"
Luke's grip tightened.
"Tell me what it is."
Venable crumpled into the chair before the telephone.
"A couple of the Progressives' detectives have caught Jarvie trying to buy one of Heney's lieutenants."
"What?" cried Luke. The veins stood out, big and blue, on his gripping hands.
"Of course the Heney man was really working with the detectives," moaned Venable; "but that won't help. They had a dictaphone in the hotel room——"
"In what hotel room?"
"The one that Jarvie was to meet the Heney man in. I thought he'd be more careful. I told him——"
Luke stood erect. He folded his arms. Venable's confession shook him, but he exerted all his strength of will to command himself.
"What are you telling me?" he asked. "Are you telling me that the League has been going in for rotten work of that sort? Are you telling me that you—you of all people—have been engineering it?"
Venable's terror gave quick place to amazement.
"You don't mean to say you didn't understand that?" he countered. "How do you suppose politics are run, anyway? Where have you been all these years under Leighton?" Anger came to his aid; his loose jaw wagged. "Don't try to get out of this trouble by pretending you didn't know about it. What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have always said—always—that the only way to beat the devil is to fight him with fire."
"Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?"
"I say we have always fought the devil with fire."
"And this campaign. You've used your fire in it?"
"As little as possible. We never used more than we could help."
"Did the committee know it?"
Venable reached for the telephone.
"I can't waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie's arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our defense."
"But the committee knew?"
"Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course, they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were sent to school, and they are not fools."
"You bet Iwillask them!" said Luke.
He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the street.
§2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother's living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of his firm imperiled; the factory's employees fronting starvation and threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in the evils it sought to reform—these were the present results of his endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked? Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the question.
To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.
The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have ceased their work in anger.
Luke saw them glance up at him as his open taxicab whirled past them: uncouth, slouching figures, with stooped shoulders and sullen faces. He had not supposed that he could be known to a score of them, but the portraits of him distributed for campaign purposes had made him familiar: the first few groups merely looked at him and sneered; then someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when the cab drew up before the office-door of the factory, a half-brick, tossed from the farther side of the street, shattered the glass windscreen at the chauffeur's back.
Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal. He jumped from the taxi and darted around it.
On the other side of the street there was only a single figure in sight: a figure that leaned against a lamp-post. Once it had been a woman; now it was only misery. Red toes burst from its bulging shoes from which the stockings fell so far that, the filthy skirt held up by a claw-like hand, at least six inches of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible. The ragged jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed a flat chest. Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and almost hid a red and swollen face. Through the hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned yellow. The right hand was extended, clenched.
"You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.
Luke turned toward the factory-door. To reach it, he had to press through a double line of men and women, silent, ominous: the strikers' picket-line. The woman's voice croaked from across the street:
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!
Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room papered in green, with framed advertisements about the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby hat....
Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to Forbes's office.
§3. The office was crowded. Forbes, determined, sat at his desk; he faced a line of slouching men in shabby clothes, who held their hats in their hands and shuffled their uneasy feet, and were headed by one man, dressed as they were, but better fed and brawny, his large face hard, his hat upon his head. Luke knew that this was the workers' committee led by the organizer.
"I haven't another word to say," Forbes was declaring. A hint of relief came to his voice when he saw Luke. "Oh, Huber," he broke off: "Good-morning. Come over here and sit down. I am just telling these men for the last time that we will meet them in the matter of hours, but we can't and won't grant them the ruinous increase of wages they want." As Luke took a chair beside him, he continued, addressing his employees and carefully avoiding the organizer: "I have one gang of men coming here in half an hour to take your jobs. There are more where they came from, and we'll be running full blast this time to-morrow. If you're not back at work by the time the first gang of men gets here, you'll never get back."
Luke expected a growl of anger: there was no sound from them.
The organizer coughed.
"Mr. Forbes——" he began.
Forbes smacked his hands together.
"I don't know you!" he snapped.
"You know who I am," said the organizer calmly. "I told you."
"I don't recognize your right to be here."
"I haven't any right, because it's against the principles of our organization to treat with employers, but I thought——"
Raging, Forbes stood up.
"Againstyourprinciples, is it?" he cried. "Well, it's against the principles of this firm to talk toyou!"
"Mr. Forbes——"
"That's all I've got to say."
The organizer was unruffled. He maintained a rather terrifying dignity. He turned to the men.
"Come on, fellows," he said.
With a loud scraping of feet, the strikers and their leader passed out of the room.
Luke and Forbes remained quiet. Even for some time after the room was empty, they said nothing, and while they sat thus, a boyish voice rose from the street:
"Oh, I love my boss:He's a good friend o' mine;An' that's why I'm starvingOut in the bread-line!"
"Oh, I love my boss:He's a good friend o' mine;An' that's why I'm starvingOut in the bread-line!"
"Oh, I love my boss:
He's a good friend o' mine;
He's a good friend o' mine;
An' that's why I'm starving
Out in the bread-line!"
Out in the bread-line!"
Somebody laughed, and several voices took up the chorus:
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."
The boyish voice continued:
"Oh, why don't you workLike other men do?How in Hell can I workWhen there's no work to do?"
"Oh, why don't you workLike other men do?How in Hell can I workWhen there's no work to do?"
"Oh, why don't you work
Like other men do?
Like other men do?
How in Hell can I work
When there's no work to do?"
When there's no work to do?"
"That's their logic," said Forbes fretfully. He nodded toward the street. "How can you argue with people of that sort?"
"It didn't strike me that you were arguing," said Luke. "What are you going to do?"
"What I said."
"You meant it, then?"
"Every word. I've taken your advice, after all: I've employed that strike-breaker: Breil, you know."
Luke had heard of him. Breil, he knew, owned several hundred fighting-men and took them to all parts of the country under the pretense that they were workers anxious to start the wheels of industries stopped by strikers. Wherever Breil went, trouble followed.
"Then you'd better employ the Pinkertons, too," said Luke.
"They're too expensive," Forbes said. "Besides," he added, "that sort of thing's un-American. We won't need detectives to protect the right of the worker to work. If we need any help, we'll call in the police. I thought you understood that. I'm afraid you will never learn the art of handling men, Huber."
Luke was anxious for a fight. The corruption that he had discovered in the League fired his primitive instincts. He was angry, and it was of small consequence to him upon whom he visited his anger. Here his own fortune, honestly come by, was threatened; his mother's support, Forbes's and Betty's. It was an excellent opportunity.
"I'm with you," he said. "When do you expect the first contingent of Breil's men?"
"When I said: in half an hour."
"Have you 'phoned police headquarters?"
"No. What's the use? I don't want to court a fight. The presence of the police before there was a fight might only start one. Headquarters sent me down two extra men this morning when I asked for them, and that's enough for the present."
Luke bent to the telephone.
"I don't agree with you," he said.
Forbes's protest was mild. Luke called police headquarters and stated his case. When he mentioned his name, he was told that the Police Commissioner was not to be found.
"Then find him," said Luke.
"I think he's gone out," came the answer.
"If you don't find him after what I've told you, I'll show up your action at the next meeting I speak at," said Luke.
The Commissioner was found.
"But what trouble have you had so far?" he demanded.
"We haven't had any so far," said Luke. "What we want is to avoid trouble."
"I think you're easy scared," laughed the Commissioner. "Have there been any threats?"
"No."
"Well, what's itching you, anyhow? My department's got three campaign parades and a dozen meetings on its hands to-day besides its regular business. I can't spare my men unless I know they're needed."
He rang off.
§4. Luke wanted to stay for the arrival of Breil's men; but there was something else that he had to do and could not postpone. He left the factory a few minutes before the hour at which the strike-breakers were to arrive. He passed into a street slowly filling with strikers, but he reassured himself by the reflection that what he had to do would be brief and that he would soon be free to return. He hurried to the League's headquarters, where he knew that the Committee would soon be in session.
For, under all his absorption in the affairs of the factory, and in spite of his desire to abjure thought for action, his brain had been busy. It was telling him something new about politics. It was receiving the truth about parties as, from his vantage-ground, he had seen it.
He did not stop in his own office. He went at once to the committee-room, which opened from that of the typists'. The Committee must have received a special summons and begun its work before the usual time. Business, as Luke entered, was already under weigh, and the room was filled. In the body of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together, which undertakers hire out for funerals; most of the men had cigars in their mouths, and the smoky air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action of alcohol on the digestive juices. On a small platform at one end of the room sat Venable, who was chairman, and, among the several persons grouped about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates and Nelson. Nearly all of the company looked at the newcomer, and Venable, after looking, glanced quickly away. Several committeemen whispered together, and one laughed.
Luke sat in the first vacant chair that he could find.
"It is moved and seconded," Venable was saying, "that the order of business be suspended. All those in favor will signify their consent in the usual manner."
A droning assent answered him.
"So ordered," said Venable, and looked uneasily in Luke's direction.
There was an embarrassed pause. Finally Yeates got to his feet.
"Mr. Chairman," he said.
Venable bowed.
Yeates's hands were in his pockets; his glance was fixed on the floor.
"I propose this resolution," he said, his voice low, his words coming rapidly: "That it is the belief of the Executive Committee of the Municipal Reform League of New York that Mr. Luke Huber should be asked to withdraw from its ticket, on which he now appears as its candidate for District-Attorney, and that he is hereby so asked to do."
There was no hubbub; everybody but Luke appeared to have known what was coming. If there was any discomposure, it was plainly due to Luke's unexpectedly early appearance. Everybody looked at him again.
From a front seat, one man, evidently assigned to the task, rose abruptly.
"Second the motion," he mumbled, and sat down.
Luke was standing before Venable could ask:
"Any remarks?"
"Yes," said Luke.
"Question! Question!" called a dozen voices.
Luke's voice was raised above theirs.
"I want——" he began.
"Sit down!" yelled somebody behind him.
Luke turned, but the interrupter did not reveal himself.
"I want to say one word about this motion," Luke began. He swept the room with a steady gaze and then let his eyes rest on the chairman.
Perhaps because their candidate had never seemed more lazy or unconcerned, the Committee offered no immediate objection. It was Venable that, without meeting Luke's glance, interposed.
"Considering the topic under discussion," said he, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if Mr. Huber were not in the hall."
"Good for you!" cried a man in the back row of chairs.
"No! Give him a chance!" cried another.
Luke raised his hand to quiet them.
"Considering that this is supposed to be a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League," he said, "it would be more in accord with the usual procedure if any motions made to it were made by members of the Committee. Mr. Yeates is not even a member of the League."
"Sitdown!" said the voice from the back row.
"Oh, sitdown!" 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, becausewe'reright."
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."