[image]THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGONSomebody had been pounding unheard at the office-door. Luke saw the door bend and ran to it. He flung it wide.Breil stood there, his revolver in his hand."I've got to disturb you——" he began, and, though he shouted, his voice did not reach to where Betty stood against the wall."That's all right," called Luke. "I've been a fool and a coward to stay here. Give me that gun."He wrenched the weapon from Breil's resisting hand. He leaped to Betty and slipped the revolver to her."Got to go downstairs," he cried to her, for the broken window let in a roar that made ordinary speaking tones futile. "Bolt the door after us! You'll be safe! We'll fall back to the stairs, if we have to fall back. Good-bye!"He would not look back. His last sight of her was of a woman standing erect, alert, comprehending, the revolver shining in her hand. Then, with the following Breil calling out that he must go to his own men at the rear, Luke ran down the stairs, opened the main door and, leaving it gaping behind him, plunged outside.§9. Coherent purpose he had none. All that he realized was this: here was a struggle; here was a final endeavor to destroy his property, which, however endangered by the trust, was almost his sole means of support. There would be no more chance given him for delay; there would be no further help from the police—the half-dozen sent that morning had disappeared—until help was too late; there was only the boyish soldiery. He would go to them, and he would fight.As he emerged upon the street, he saw the circle of light empty of the human mass that had lately swirled there. A resounding cacophony from the darkness, and dimly perceived objects moving a hundred yards and more away, told him that the rioters had withdrawn to the upturned coal wagon. At the moment of understanding this, he heard a rending staccato noise.The frightened Facciolati heard it, too. He was standing on the pavement by the door and had drawn up his men in a closer column before him. His bared sword was in his right hand."What's that?" asked Luke."It's the tongue of that coal wagon," gasped the Captain, "they're rippin' it off.""What? For a battering-ram? For this door?"The Italian nodded."Yes. I heard someone yell for them to do it. Then they all ran over there."A terrible stillness fell. Behind the curtain of the night, the mob only hummed and shuffled its feet."Well?" asked Luke.His eyes pierced Facciolati's. His voice was pregnant with meaning."What had I better do?" faltered the Captain.Before Luke could reply, a strident yell came from the invisible ranks of the mob:"Now then: come on! Burn their damned shop!"A thousand voices echoed:"Burn it! Burn it down!"The Captain turned to Luke."You've got to stop them," said Luke.The din increased."O my God!" said Facciolati.In Luke blazed up all the furnace of battle. He gripped the Captain's collar and shook the man as if he were a frightened, disobedient child."Give the order!" he commanded. He hated this boy.In a shrill, hysterical voice that cut the rising noise of the mob, Facciolati gave the preliminary order, and the rows of lads in khaki, standing on the curb, raised their black-blue rifles to their shoulders."We won't shoot!" he called into Luke's ear. "We'll only frighten 'em!""Burn it——" From the street the cries were merged into a wordless roar. There was the wild rush of two thousand feet, and into the light burst the mob again: a long trotting column with the Red Flag swaying overhead, and in the midst five or six men bearing the wagon-tongue leveled like a lance.A veil of crimson seemed to flutter before Luke's eyes—the eyes of the man that had counseled caution and the use of only the butts of rifles. He did not think, he could only feel—only feel that here at last was the chance, here the unavoidable need of action that had the splendid conclusiveness of brutality. This was man's work. This was no rescuing of a girl: it was war. The world had meshed him in a net of intellectual doubts and quibbles: here was his moment to cut the net, and to cut his way to freedom, to take vengeance on the world.That and something more. Betty was in danger and the property that was partly his, that in part he owned and had bought. But above all this, riding it all, goading it, spurning it, mad with its mastery, the blood-lust, the Sense of Power, the dizzy knowledge that he could kill.The mob was almost upon them. It was a tidal wave."Now!" shouted Luke to the Italian.But the Captain caught his hand. He gabbled the nothings of panic. Luke threw the boy to the pavement. With all the breath in his body he vociferated:"Fire!"§10. Hell belched its flames: a thunder-clap, a thunder-cloud knifed by red flashes of lightning.Luke felt his head bashed against the wall of the factory. He was choking in a cloud of smoke. He could see nothing, but once he thought he heard the crack of other shots from somewhere above.Then he felt his knees clutched. He felt a pawing at his elbow; and presently he heard the chattering voice of Facciolati screaming against his cheek:"Why in Hell did you do that? How in Hell did you dare?—Don't you know what you might have done? Who's in command here?""Shut up," bellowed Luke, "or I'll show you who's in command." He tried vainly to see through the smoke. "Take your hands off me!"It was as if he were in the crater of an erupting volcano. The reverberation split his head, and through it came shrieks, groans, curses, and then, as the smoke slowly lifted, the pound of two thousand feet on the paving-stones, while, with the Red Flag sagging to and fro like a wounded eagle above it, the mob fled pell-mell up the street.But the Captain had not heeded Luke's warning."Now they'll be back!" he was wailing. "We'll all be goners now. Why did you give that order? Why didn't you let me change it?—I'd instructed the men to fire over their heads—An' you didn't let me change it—An' of course theydidfire over their heads—an' nobody's hurt—Do you know what that means? They'll be back and kill all of us!"It was impossible for Luke to believe. Then, not fear, but the rage of thwarted blood-lust sent out his clawing hands."You did that?"He caught Facciolati under the arm-pits and raised him clear of the ground."You——"A new sound interrupted him. At first he thought that the mob had wheeled a machine-gun into the street and turned it on the factory. Then the sound became a clatter and, looking through the ranks of soldiers, Luke saw, far ahead, a tangle of rearing horses and falling men: even City Hall had been unable longer to hold its hand; one of the patrolmen who had fled to the factory must have telephoned a final word to headquarters; the mounted police were charging the crowd; the riot was ended.§11. Luke ran up the stairs to the upper office and found the door unbolted. He did not know what he went for. He was not glad that the riot was ended; he was raging like a man-eating tiger foiled of its quarry.Betty stood at the window in the full light of the street-lamp. He scarcely knew her face. He had never seen her look like this. He had never dreamed that she could look like this. Her hat had fallen to the floor; her golden hair tossed above her head like licking tongues of flame; her eyes were bright coals; her cheeks were scarlet; her white upper teeth bit deep into the vermilion of her lower lip. As if to give freer play to a breast that panted, she had torn open her dress at the base of her splendid throat. The revolver was in her hand. It was cocked and smoking. She looked like Bellona invoked and materialized from the fire and smoke of that roaring inferno of the street."How many?" she gasped. "How many have we killed?"Luke stopped at the door. He knew now that he had indeed heard shots from overhead. He knew that the same primæval passion which had made him a tiger—and still maintained its sway—had worked this metamorphosis also, had changed this gentle girl into what he saw. At another time, in another mood, he would have loathed it; but in his present mood he gloried in it. He thought that he had never seen her so beautiful or imagined her so splendid; her madness matched his own.He came toward her, circling the table that stood between them."None!" he cried. "That fool Captain told the men to shoot high."He put out his arms. He wrenched her to him. His right arm clutched her about the supple shoulders, the fingers of his right hand sinking into her firm left breast. With his left hand he shoved her face upwards. Brown from the caked blood of the man he had bitten, his opened mouth closed upon hers.He heard the revolver clatter to the floor. She writhed in his embrace. He had expected the perfect response. Meeting an abrupt refusal, he was taken off his guard, and she escaped from him.She staggered into a corner. The devil that possessed him had lost its power over her. She had reverted to her natural being. She did not cry, but she stood there with her hands pressed tight against her breast, the fingers mechanically busied with repairing the opened blouse, her face all horror at the thing she had been."What must you think of me?" she was moaning—"I don't know what came over me!—What must you think of me?"He thought nothing. He could think nothing. He could realize only that he was again to be robbed. Twice to-night the cheat that played with men at the game of life had given him the winning hand, only to sweep the stakes from the board just as Luke reached for what he had won. The blood-lust changed its form; it assumed an ungovernable fury. Something crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect feed-wires at the touch of a trolley-wheel. The crimson veil fluttered again before his eyes.He turned and bolted the door. He turned again and ran to her. His face was wet with sweat, black with powder, terrible.She understood. She lowered her head and tried to dodge past him. She cried out.His strong fingers caught her hair. The hair streamed down. Her forward lurch brought it taut. He jerked at it; she fell toward him. His free hand caught her throat and stopped her fall. He tossed her against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but he pressed her shoulders tight to the table's top. He bent over her, one hand at her throat, the other raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her face.She was wholly in his power now. The outside world was impotent because the outside world could not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself was helpless because her captor's was the strongest body. Again came to Luke the frightful sense of Power, again the dizzy knowledge that he could do whatever he chose.At that instant the madness fell from him.A physical motive there of course was, since the more intense the passion the briefer is its duration; but even if it originated in the physical, this reaction transcended things material and wheeled about to crush them. It was the second and fuller phase of that revelation which had come to him in the Sunday quiet of the Brooklyn streets. Burning, blinding, transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental and tremendous, returned, and what they had once done from the flesh to the spirit, they now did from the spirit to the flesh. They returned to remain. They completed the revolution, the new birth.Luke saw yet more dazzlingly the glory of individuality, the holiness of his humanity; but it was as if scales fell from his eyes, for he saw entire. Here had been one of the false starts on a wrong road, one of the moments of relapse that he had expected. The individuality was divine; physical passion was a splendid thing; but when the individual's physical passion stooped to force or cunning, what had been splendid became foul, and what had been divine was bestial. Luke, in his denial of revealed Religion, was no longer a pygmy trembling before a giant; he was himself a giant; but what he was in actuality he must recognize as potential in his fellow creatures. His mental and spiritual sight was at last adjusted to the new illumination. He could assess moral values, could determine ethical duties now. It remained only to find their reason and decipher their credentials. On Sunday he had gained his strength; to-night he had gained the knowledge of how rightly to use it.He ran to the door and tore back the bolt."Whitaker!" he called.The superintendent came cringing from the main office, where he had cowered through all the riot."Get two policemen and have them see Miss Forbes safely home."Betty was secure now, and the mill was safe. He borrowed a hat too large for him, and put over his ragged shirt the alpaca office-coat of some clerk, which he found in a locker. He walked out into the street. Far away he heard a woman's strident voice singing:"Oh, why don't you saveAll the money you earn?If I did not eatI'd have money to burn."There was the sound of a distant shot.Then silence.CHAPTER XIX§1. He could not stay in the factory while she was there. To go to the upper office where he had left her, to attempt to explain, to offer a shoddy apology—this would be to add the last insult to the wrong that he had done her. He thought that worse than to have completed the thing that he had begun.He cut northwestward toward the more peopled part of the borough, not because he wanted to be among people, but because he did not even yet want to have to think. He tried to think, but he did not want to. He saw clearly his new duties and his new restrictions; but they presented themselves to him as isolated facts which, offending his reason, spurred his reason to demand their credentials, and these he could not yet read. Moreover, the memory of the scene with Betty would rise before his restless mind, burning all else away, and, to burn memory away, his heart drove him into the more crowded streets.Women of the streets accosted him. He passed a house from a window on the ground-floor of which two girls with painted faces beckoned. He passed brightly lighted saloons that sent into the street inviting streams of light and the lure of clinking glasses and laughter. In a jostling thoroughfare he noticed that passersby were looking strangely at him and, recollecting what a queer picture his disordered clothes and bloody face must present, he blamed himself for not repairing the damages of the fight before setting out. He turned again into the less frequented quarters.Here he looked at his watch, but his watch had stopped at half-past seven, the moment, probably, of his charge to Betty's rescue. Seeing the lighted window of a jeweler's shop near by, he went to it and looked at the clock displayed there. It was nine o'clock. As he could not have been walking for more than an hour, and as the active rioting must have begun no later than seven-fifteen, all the events of the riot must have been massed within forty-five minutes. He turned back toward the factory. He hated these city thoroughfares. His boyish dreams of the open road and the tramping carpenter returned to him....If he could only read his credentials....§2. When Luke entered the office on the ground floor, the little militia captain was there. He had come for whiskey and finished the bottle. He was quite drunk, and evinced a thick but facile desire to describe the victory that his troops had won."Oh, go away!" said Luke.He turned Facciolati out.Breil came next, and some of the policemen, the former anxious to report the present condition of the mill, the latter that of the streets; but to these men Luke was scarcely more civil than he had been to the Italian. Whether he liked it or not, he must think things out."There's no reason for you to stay any longer, if you don't want to," said Breil.Luke looked at him vacantly."I do want to," he said.One of the policemen glanced significantly at the empty whiskey-bottle and smiled."I have some things to think about," said Luke. "I'll go up to the office over this. Tell the fellows I don't want anybody to butt in, Breil."He decided that it would be well for him to do his thinking in the room in which he had so nearly done Betty what she must consider the ultimate wrong. He went there.§3. He closed, but did not lock the door; he trusted to his orders against intrusion.The street-lamp furnished the room with sufficient illumination. Luke saw that one of the chairs had been overturned and lay close beside the table. He must have overturned it while struggling with Betty, but, so far as he could recollect—and his mind for some time employed itself with such trifles—he had not remarked the fall at the moment of its occurrence.He went to the broken window and lounged there, now looking out upon the scene of the street-battle, now back at the scene of the essentially similar combat that had been fought inside. It was astonishing how little he remembered of the details of either, but perhaps the reason for that was to be found in the size of their results.Something glittered in the lamplight on the floor at his feet. He stooped and picked it up; it was one of those yellow wire hairpins that Betty used to supplement the pins of tortoiseshell. Down in the street he saw a draggled necktie that had been torn from the throat of some striker. His gaze wandered from one object to the other and back again.He stood there for a long time....He was beginning to find out at last the logic that he had sought.Betty was lost to him, and if she were not lost he must give her up. All that was vital in what he had all along felt for her was only one of the forces that go to make up complete love—right enough, he told himself, when combined with its fellow elements; right enough upon occasion when frankly acknowledged between a free woman and a free man; but, he determined, disastrously insufficient to be made the sole element of anything more than the briefest union between two individuals, and criminal when it was the only motive of but one of the individuals in any union. About what Betty had felt for him he was equally clear; it was another of the forces that compose real love; it was the element of Romance, just as insufficient and just as wrong, when it was alone, or when it existed on the one side only, as was the merely physical. Real love was the fusion of the physical, the romantic, the spiritual and the comradely, the fusion of two people for whom there was but one means of salvation. He knew now, beyond all questioning, that, however they had deceived themselves, Betty's thoughts and his, her hopes and his, her aims and his, her work and his, were and had always been divided beyond the possibility of junction. No marriage service that might have been performed between them could have married but the least of their outlying selves. Not Church and State together could have joined their true selves that, living where there was no church and no state, had yet no natural relationship to each other. Some day real love might come to him; some day it would surely come to Betty. To-day, though it tore his heart, though it was as if he were ripping the heart out of his breast, he must, for Betty's sake—since she was the weaker—even more than for his own, tear her out of his life. His desire for her would long remain; the moments would be full of her when he sank from waking into sleep, or climbed from sleep to waking; but though he might regain the power to enslave her soul and make a servant of the self of which he could not make a work-fellow, to use that power would be to sin against what was best in her. He must not see her again, even were she willing to see him, and he must leave her thinking the worst of him in order that she might the sooner want to forget him.He tossed the gilt pin out of the window. Following its flight, his glance came again to the worker's necktie, lying in the street.What right had he over the man who had worn that? What right that he did not have over Betty?His reason answered: None.There, he tremendously realized, was the key to his credentials. He leaned heavily against the window-sill. He understood. It was a bitter lesson, but he learned it, there and then.What he had done to these men was what he had tried to do to Betty, not in the riot only, but in accepting the position that society had offered him in relation to them; it was what every employer, from the actual boss to the smallest shareholder, everywhere was doing. It was living upon the work of others, profiting by values for the creation of which the pay had to be low enough to permit of profit. It was compulsion. If he sold dear what he bought cheap, what was it that he bought cheap but their labor? If he wanted pay for executive ability, what executive ability did he, or any shareholder in any company, exercise? If he claimed a return for the risk of his investment, what return did these men get, who invested that labor-power which was their whole capital? If any stockbuyer talked of profits as the reward of previous years of saving, how could he explain the fact that his savings would secure no profit until they employed labor to produce it? He had been fighting against his own ideals. It was the workers that had been right and he that had been wrong. What the man in russet brown had been to him, that he and all who directly or indirectly employed labor for profit, had been and were to the employed.So, quite as suddenly as he had come to see life in the new light, he came now, in the little office of the lonely factory, to see the reason from which the light proceeded; there was only one evil in the world and that was Compulsion; only one good, and that was power over one's self.The awful thing, he said to himself as one who reads what is written, was not to have too little power over others; it was to have too much. To have the means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it was to confuse the means with the right. Too much power over others and too little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this, he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics, governments, and property. To believe in any one of them, to traffic with any of them, was now to exercise compulsion over his fellows and now to delegate to his fellows his power over himself.He must give up everything that was easy and comfortable—the easy thought and faith as freely as the easy food and lodging. He must join the oppressed.He leaned through the battered window and filled his lungs with the pure night air. He looked up to the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow moon was riding."I haven't let their corruption destroy my purpose," he said to the moon. "I've simply put myself where they can't destroyme. I've put myself where they can't lie to me again. I'll fight them as one man against the world; I'll lose, but I won't be using their weapons; I won't be what they are, and I'll lose as a free man. So far as the world inside of me's concerned, they invaded it and bossed it. I've chucked them out of it, andI'vedestroyedthem!"It seemed wonderfully simple now and wonderfully peaceful. He would go to Forbes to-morrow and draw up a legal paper, the last legal paper he would ever put his name to, his last compromise, turning over his interest in this factory to his mother; and Forbes—poor old Forbes! He was sorry for Forbes, but he knew what would happen; left alone, Forbes would end by selling out, profitably, to the trust. And then for Luke the open road, the old open road that he had always loved, the learning of a manual trade, the sale of his labor-power no more than was necessary to keep him alive and free to go wherever slaves fought the system of corruption for their liberty, until sometime, when the soldiers would have Luke before them instead of behind them, and did not shoot over the heads of the mob. He was tasting of contentment for the first time in his life. He was glad that he had not died out there in the riot. There was so much to do. There was so much to do in this life that he did not see how he had ever had time to think of any other. And now he was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with open eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with complete power over himself, using no compulsion upon others and allowing no other to use compulsion upon him. Luke had conquered. For every soul there is, somewhere, a separate road to salvation. Luke had found his own....Somewhere out in the city a clock struck eleven. He knew that he had been standing at the window for a long time, but he had no idea it was so long as this. If he had been so engrossed, what, he wondered, had finally roused him. He remembered: it was something about the door. He had not heard it move; he merely thought that it was moving. He turned to it, but it did not move. Perhaps a draught of air had deceived him.The factory was very quiet....§4. "Don't open your trap! I got you covered! If you let out one yip, I'll croak you."The door had opened and closed, letting in a figure that quickly bolted it and then discreetly avoided the light from the window. Luke saw a dim form in the shadow. All that projected into the shaft of light was a fist tightly clenched about a leveled revolver."What do you want?" asked Luke.He was not afraid to disregard this intruder's command to silence. He was curiously fearless. He supposed that this unseen man was some fanatic from the mob. Anybody could have slipped into the factory through the door that Luke had left open when the terror of the soldiers' fire swept the street and the smoke of it clouded the doorway. This was an avenger thus arrived. Luke felt the presence of a certain crude justice. He had deserved this."Don't worry; I'm not going to yell," he said.He was expecting death now, expecting absolute extinction; but he faced it with a serenity that mildly surprised him. This was not the mad courage, too sudden to be fine, which had hurled him into the crater of the riot to rescue Betty. It was a courage that weighed results. He thought of the dusty, open road. He was rather sorry to have to miss that, but no doubt he would never have got it anyhow."Well," he said with a faint touch of impatience, "why don't you answer my question? What do you want?"The barrel of the revolver wavered ever so slightly.The intruder's voice came again out of the darkness; it was as if the darkness itself made answer:"I want them letters."Luke's teeth came together with a snap. He had been carrying the letters in a money-belt about his middle, next his body. It was hours since he had thought of them. He had just now been feeling that perhaps he ought to be shot, but this feeling had no origin in the affair of the letters. They were a different matter. For the letters he had fought so much and so fairly that he was ready and willing to fight for them once more. He tried to gain time."What letters?" he asked."I dunno," said the darkness. "But you do. Come on, now; don't try to flimflam me: them letters you got in your coat."Luke glanced at the alpaca coat that he had put on when he last left the factory."If you want anything that was in my coat, you'll have to look in the street for it: I left it there."The intruder did not at once reply. Luke saw the revolver advance toward him in the light. It was followed by a thick, short arm, and the arm was followed by a short thick man. He wore a velours Alpine hat. It was pushed to one side of his head, and Luke saw that the hair below it was red.That was almost the last thing he did see before the shot was fired. Luke made a flying leap at the red-headed man and tried to knock the revolver into the air. As he did so, the revolver spat at him.A loud report. A darting arrow of flame.Luke lay on the office floor. The red-headed man's skilled fingers ran deftly through his clothes. Then the killer raised the shattered window and dropped into the street.§5. One of Breil's strike-breakers, making his round of the factory, heard the shot and came running toward the noise. He ran to the upper office and burst into the room.A curling cloud of lazy smoke was weaving graceful figures in the shaft of light from the street-lamp outside; it embraced an overturned chair, and circled the top of the center table. Above it the strike-breaker saw the upper half of a disheveled figure, the figure of Luke Huber, leaning out of the window and shaking its fist at all the city round about. In a high, cracked voice, Luke was yelling curses at the world."God damn your system and your politics!" yelled he. "God damn your law and your government! God damn your god!"He turned toward the noise behind him and showed himself with matted hair and staring eyes, with a cut in his forehead and a white face that had brown stains about its lolling mouth, with a slowly broadening patch of blood in his torn shirt."Mr. Huber!" gasped the strike-breaker. He ran forward.As he did so, Huber's voice howled into shattered song:"Hallelujah, I'm a bum—bum!Hallelujah, I'm a——"He lurched forward into the strike-breaker's arms. Before those arms closed about him, he was dead.CHAPTER XXOn the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, in that office where the engraving of George Washington hung between the windows, three men sat in the mid-morning light, about the mahogany table. They were talking business. Each man had his own offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and quietly met in this one because most of the businesses of each were closely allied with the business-interests of all.There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance or public actions of this trio; they were apparently but three units of the legion that makes this portion of New York a city by day and a desert by night. Each had come down town in his own motor that morning, defying speed-laws and traffic regulations, just as scores of his business neighbors had done. Each had descended at his own offices, passed through half a dozen doors guarded by six bowing attendants, and proceeded to his own desk in his own private room, precisely as a small army of other business men were doing at the same time within a radius of half a mile. Each looked like the rest of that army. All three were men of about the average height, not noticeably either above or below it, and two were inclined to bulkiness. Those two had pale faces and close mouths and steady eyes, which looked out from under bushy brows with glances that gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the little pouches of lax skin below their lower lids. They wore flowers in the lapels of their coats; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was black; that of the other was touched with grey. Hallett chewed leisurely at the end of an unlighted cigar; Rivington's slim hand stroked his mustache with a contemplative movement.The man at the head of the table was almost of the age of the man that used to sit there, but he was somewhat shorter, and he was thin. His clothes fell loosely about his bony frame. His eyes were narrow. He sat before a neat pile of memoranda, with his thin hands, the blue veins of which marked them like a map, tapping upon the surface of the table. Like his predecessor's, his elbows were raised at right angles to his torso and pointed ceilingward; his chest heaved visibly, but his breathing was inaudible. His eyes were everywhere.He had come to his office betimes that morning. He had read his letters, directed his charities, instructed his brokers, given his orders to lieutenants at the state capitals and to such lieutenants at the national capital as needed them. Now he was receiving his fellow commanders in council."McKay?" he said in thin comment on some remark of Rivington. "What McKay?""Henry," said Rivington. "Dohan's successor in the M. & N. He's the sort of man——""We can unload this stock," said Hallett, "any time now."Rivington began a question."It's all right," nodded Hallett. "And by the way, that little Forbes concern's come into the combine.""I know," said Rivington; "but those letters—You remember——""Stein sent 'em over to me yesterday morning. We'll burn 'em this time."The man at the head of the table rapped with his spatulate finger-ends."We are too busy to bother with trifles," he said. "I've got here"—he indicated the memoranda—"all the reports on the proposed foodstuffs monopoly. I must decide on that right away...."After a momentary silence, the stock-ticker, with metallic insistence, went on weaving out its yards of tape beside the windows that looked down to the web of radiating streets, on which minute black objects that were men and women bobbed and buzzed like entangled flies....THE END* * * * * * * *BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHORTHE HOUSE OF BONDAGETHE GIRL THAT GOES WRONGTHE SENTENCE OF SILENCETHE WAY OF PEACEWHAT IS SOCIALISM?RUNNING SANDSTHE THINGS THAT ARE CÆSAR'SETC., ETC.*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE SPIDER'S WEB***
[image]THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON
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THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON
Somebody had been pounding unheard at the office-door. Luke saw the door bend and ran to it. He flung it wide.
Breil stood there, his revolver in his hand.
"I've got to disturb you——" he began, and, though he shouted, his voice did not reach to where Betty stood against the wall.
"That's all right," called Luke. "I've been a fool and a coward to stay here. Give me that gun."
He wrenched the weapon from Breil's resisting hand. He leaped to Betty and slipped the revolver to her.
"Got to go downstairs," he cried to her, for the broken window let in a roar that made ordinary speaking tones futile. "Bolt the door after us! You'll be safe! We'll fall back to the stairs, if we have to fall back. Good-bye!"
He would not look back. His last sight of her was of a woman standing erect, alert, comprehending, the revolver shining in her hand. Then, with the following Breil calling out that he must go to his own men at the rear, Luke ran down the stairs, opened the main door and, leaving it gaping behind him, plunged outside.
§9. Coherent purpose he had none. All that he realized was this: here was a struggle; here was a final endeavor to destroy his property, which, however endangered by the trust, was almost his sole means of support. There would be no more chance given him for delay; there would be no further help from the police—the half-dozen sent that morning had disappeared—until help was too late; there was only the boyish soldiery. He would go to them, and he would fight.
As he emerged upon the street, he saw the circle of light empty of the human mass that had lately swirled there. A resounding cacophony from the darkness, and dimly perceived objects moving a hundred yards and more away, told him that the rioters had withdrawn to the upturned coal wagon. At the moment of understanding this, he heard a rending staccato noise.
The frightened Facciolati heard it, too. He was standing on the pavement by the door and had drawn up his men in a closer column before him. His bared sword was in his right hand.
"What's that?" asked Luke.
"It's the tongue of that coal wagon," gasped the Captain, "they're rippin' it off."
"What? For a battering-ram? For this door?"
The Italian nodded.
"Yes. I heard someone yell for them to do it. Then they all ran over there."
A terrible stillness fell. Behind the curtain of the night, the mob only hummed and shuffled its feet.
"Well?" asked Luke.
His eyes pierced Facciolati's. His voice was pregnant with meaning.
"What had I better do?" faltered the Captain.
Before Luke could reply, a strident yell came from the invisible ranks of the mob:
"Now then: come on! Burn their damned shop!"
A thousand voices echoed:
"Burn it! Burn it down!"
The Captain turned to Luke.
"You've got to stop them," said Luke.
The din increased.
"O my God!" said Facciolati.
In Luke blazed up all the furnace of battle. He gripped the Captain's collar and shook the man as if he were a frightened, disobedient child.
"Give the order!" he commanded. He hated this boy.
In a shrill, hysterical voice that cut the rising noise of the mob, Facciolati gave the preliminary order, and the rows of lads in khaki, standing on the curb, raised their black-blue rifles to their shoulders.
"We won't shoot!" he called into Luke's ear. "We'll only frighten 'em!"
"Burn it——" From the street the cries were merged into a wordless roar. There was the wild rush of two thousand feet, and into the light burst the mob again: a long trotting column with the Red Flag swaying overhead, and in the midst five or six men bearing the wagon-tongue leveled like a lance.
A veil of crimson seemed to flutter before Luke's eyes—the eyes of the man that had counseled caution and the use of only the butts of rifles. He did not think, he could only feel—only feel that here at last was the chance, here the unavoidable need of action that had the splendid conclusiveness of brutality. This was man's work. This was no rescuing of a girl: it was war. The world had meshed him in a net of intellectual doubts and quibbles: here was his moment to cut the net, and to cut his way to freedom, to take vengeance on the world.
That and something more. Betty was in danger and the property that was partly his, that in part he owned and had bought. But above all this, riding it all, goading it, spurning it, mad with its mastery, the blood-lust, the Sense of Power, the dizzy knowledge that he could kill.
The mob was almost upon them. It was a tidal wave.
"Now!" shouted Luke to the Italian.
But the Captain caught his hand. He gabbled the nothings of panic. Luke threw the boy to the pavement. With all the breath in his body he vociferated:
"Fire!"
§10. Hell belched its flames: a thunder-clap, a thunder-cloud knifed by red flashes of lightning.
Luke felt his head bashed against the wall of the factory. He was choking in a cloud of smoke. He could see nothing, but once he thought he heard the crack of other shots from somewhere above.
Then he felt his knees clutched. He felt a pawing at his elbow; and presently he heard the chattering voice of Facciolati screaming against his cheek:
"Why in Hell did you do that? How in Hell did you dare?—Don't you know what you might have done? Who's in command here?"
"Shut up," bellowed Luke, "or I'll show you who's in command." He tried vainly to see through the smoke. "Take your hands off me!"
It was as if he were in the crater of an erupting volcano. The reverberation split his head, and through it came shrieks, groans, curses, and then, as the smoke slowly lifted, the pound of two thousand feet on the paving-stones, while, with the Red Flag sagging to and fro like a wounded eagle above it, the mob fled pell-mell up the street.
But the Captain had not heeded Luke's warning.
"Now they'll be back!" he was wailing. "We'll all be goners now. Why did you give that order? Why didn't you let me change it?—I'd instructed the men to fire over their heads—An' you didn't let me change it—An' of course theydidfire over their heads—an' nobody's hurt—Do you know what that means? They'll be back and kill all of us!"
It was impossible for Luke to believe. Then, not fear, but the rage of thwarted blood-lust sent out his clawing hands.
"You did that?"
He caught Facciolati under the arm-pits and raised him clear of the ground.
"You——"
A new sound interrupted him. At first he thought that the mob had wheeled a machine-gun into the street and turned it on the factory. Then the sound became a clatter and, looking through the ranks of soldiers, Luke saw, far ahead, a tangle of rearing horses and falling men: even City Hall had been unable longer to hold its hand; one of the patrolmen who had fled to the factory must have telephoned a final word to headquarters; the mounted police were charging the crowd; the riot was ended.
§11. Luke ran up the stairs to the upper office and found the door unbolted. He did not know what he went for. He was not glad that the riot was ended; he was raging like a man-eating tiger foiled of its quarry.
Betty stood at the window in the full light of the street-lamp. He scarcely knew her face. He had never seen her look like this. He had never dreamed that she could look like this. Her hat had fallen to the floor; her golden hair tossed above her head like licking tongues of flame; her eyes were bright coals; her cheeks were scarlet; her white upper teeth bit deep into the vermilion of her lower lip. As if to give freer play to a breast that panted, she had torn open her dress at the base of her splendid throat. The revolver was in her hand. It was cocked and smoking. She looked like Bellona invoked and materialized from the fire and smoke of that roaring inferno of the street.
"How many?" she gasped. "How many have we killed?"
Luke stopped at the door. He knew now that he had indeed heard shots from overhead. He knew that the same primæval passion which had made him a tiger—and still maintained its sway—had worked this metamorphosis also, had changed this gentle girl into what he saw. At another time, in another mood, he would have loathed it; but in his present mood he gloried in it. He thought that he had never seen her so beautiful or imagined her so splendid; her madness matched his own.
He came toward her, circling the table that stood between them.
"None!" he cried. "That fool Captain told the men to shoot high."
He put out his arms. He wrenched her to him. His right arm clutched her about the supple shoulders, the fingers of his right hand sinking into her firm left breast. With his left hand he shoved her face upwards. Brown from the caked blood of the man he had bitten, his opened mouth closed upon hers.
He heard the revolver clatter to the floor. She writhed in his embrace. He had expected the perfect response. Meeting an abrupt refusal, he was taken off his guard, and she escaped from him.
She staggered into a corner. The devil that possessed him had lost its power over her. She had reverted to her natural being. She did not cry, but she stood there with her hands pressed tight against her breast, the fingers mechanically busied with repairing the opened blouse, her face all horror at the thing she had been.
"What must you think of me?" she was moaning—"I don't know what came over me!—What must you think of me?"
He thought nothing. He could think nothing. He could realize only that he was again to be robbed. Twice to-night the cheat that played with men at the game of life had given him the winning hand, only to sweep the stakes from the board just as Luke reached for what he had won. The blood-lust changed its form; it assumed an ungovernable fury. Something crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect feed-wires at the touch of a trolley-wheel. The crimson veil fluttered again before his eyes.
He turned and bolted the door. He turned again and ran to her. His face was wet with sweat, black with powder, terrible.
She understood. She lowered her head and tried to dodge past him. She cried out.
His strong fingers caught her hair. The hair streamed down. Her forward lurch brought it taut. He jerked at it; she fell toward him. His free hand caught her throat and stopped her fall. He tossed her against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but he pressed her shoulders tight to the table's top. He bent over her, one hand at her throat, the other raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her face.
She was wholly in his power now. The outside world was impotent because the outside world could not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself was helpless because her captor's was the strongest body. Again came to Luke the frightful sense of Power, again the dizzy knowledge that he could do whatever he chose.
At that instant the madness fell from him.
A physical motive there of course was, since the more intense the passion the briefer is its duration; but even if it originated in the physical, this reaction transcended things material and wheeled about to crush them. It was the second and fuller phase of that revelation which had come to him in the Sunday quiet of the Brooklyn streets. Burning, blinding, transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental and tremendous, returned, and what they had once done from the flesh to the spirit, they now did from the spirit to the flesh. They returned to remain. They completed the revolution, the new birth.
Luke saw yet more dazzlingly the glory of individuality, the holiness of his humanity; but it was as if scales fell from his eyes, for he saw entire. Here had been one of the false starts on a wrong road, one of the moments of relapse that he had expected. The individuality was divine; physical passion was a splendid thing; but when the individual's physical passion stooped to force or cunning, what had been splendid became foul, and what had been divine was bestial. Luke, in his denial of revealed Religion, was no longer a pygmy trembling before a giant; he was himself a giant; but what he was in actuality he must recognize as potential in his fellow creatures. His mental and spiritual sight was at last adjusted to the new illumination. He could assess moral values, could determine ethical duties now. It remained only to find their reason and decipher their credentials. On Sunday he had gained his strength; to-night he had gained the knowledge of how rightly to use it.
He ran to the door and tore back the bolt.
"Whitaker!" he called.
The superintendent came cringing from the main office, where he had cowered through all the riot.
"Get two policemen and have them see Miss Forbes safely home."
Betty was secure now, and the mill was safe. He borrowed a hat too large for him, and put over his ragged shirt the alpaca office-coat of some clerk, which he found in a locker. He walked out into the street. Far away he heard a woman's strident voice singing:
"Oh, why don't you saveAll the money you earn?If I did not eatI'd have money to burn."
"Oh, why don't you saveAll the money you earn?If I did not eatI'd have money to burn."
"Oh, why don't you save
All the money you earn?
All the money you earn?
If I did not eat
I'd have money to burn."
I'd have money to burn."
There was the sound of a distant shot.
Then silence.
CHAPTER XIX
§1. He could not stay in the factory while she was there. To go to the upper office where he had left her, to attempt to explain, to offer a shoddy apology—this would be to add the last insult to the wrong that he had done her. He thought that worse than to have completed the thing that he had begun.
He cut northwestward toward the more peopled part of the borough, not because he wanted to be among people, but because he did not even yet want to have to think. He tried to think, but he did not want to. He saw clearly his new duties and his new restrictions; but they presented themselves to him as isolated facts which, offending his reason, spurred his reason to demand their credentials, and these he could not yet read. Moreover, the memory of the scene with Betty would rise before his restless mind, burning all else away, and, to burn memory away, his heart drove him into the more crowded streets.
Women of the streets accosted him. He passed a house from a window on the ground-floor of which two girls with painted faces beckoned. He passed brightly lighted saloons that sent into the street inviting streams of light and the lure of clinking glasses and laughter. In a jostling thoroughfare he noticed that passersby were looking strangely at him and, recollecting what a queer picture his disordered clothes and bloody face must present, he blamed himself for not repairing the damages of the fight before setting out. He turned again into the less frequented quarters.
Here he looked at his watch, but his watch had stopped at half-past seven, the moment, probably, of his charge to Betty's rescue. Seeing the lighted window of a jeweler's shop near by, he went to it and looked at the clock displayed there. It was nine o'clock. As he could not have been walking for more than an hour, and as the active rioting must have begun no later than seven-fifteen, all the events of the riot must have been massed within forty-five minutes. He turned back toward the factory. He hated these city thoroughfares. His boyish dreams of the open road and the tramping carpenter returned to him....
If he could only read his credentials....
§2. When Luke entered the office on the ground floor, the little militia captain was there. He had come for whiskey and finished the bottle. He was quite drunk, and evinced a thick but facile desire to describe the victory that his troops had won.
"Oh, go away!" said Luke.
He turned Facciolati out.
Breil came next, and some of the policemen, the former anxious to report the present condition of the mill, the latter that of the streets; but to these men Luke was scarcely more civil than he had been to the Italian. Whether he liked it or not, he must think things out.
"There's no reason for you to stay any longer, if you don't want to," said Breil.
Luke looked at him vacantly.
"I do want to," he said.
One of the policemen glanced significantly at the empty whiskey-bottle and smiled.
"I have some things to think about," said Luke. "I'll go up to the office over this. Tell the fellows I don't want anybody to butt in, Breil."
He decided that it would be well for him to do his thinking in the room in which he had so nearly done Betty what she must consider the ultimate wrong. He went there.
§3. He closed, but did not lock the door; he trusted to his orders against intrusion.
The street-lamp furnished the room with sufficient illumination. Luke saw that one of the chairs had been overturned and lay close beside the table. He must have overturned it while struggling with Betty, but, so far as he could recollect—and his mind for some time employed itself with such trifles—he had not remarked the fall at the moment of its occurrence.
He went to the broken window and lounged there, now looking out upon the scene of the street-battle, now back at the scene of the essentially similar combat that had been fought inside. It was astonishing how little he remembered of the details of either, but perhaps the reason for that was to be found in the size of their results.
Something glittered in the lamplight on the floor at his feet. He stooped and picked it up; it was one of those yellow wire hairpins that Betty used to supplement the pins of tortoiseshell. Down in the street he saw a draggled necktie that had been torn from the throat of some striker. His gaze wandered from one object to the other and back again.
He stood there for a long time....
He was beginning to find out at last the logic that he had sought.
Betty was lost to him, and if she were not lost he must give her up. All that was vital in what he had all along felt for her was only one of the forces that go to make up complete love—right enough, he told himself, when combined with its fellow elements; right enough upon occasion when frankly acknowledged between a free woman and a free man; but, he determined, disastrously insufficient to be made the sole element of anything more than the briefest union between two individuals, and criminal when it was the only motive of but one of the individuals in any union. About what Betty had felt for him he was equally clear; it was another of the forces that compose real love; it was the element of Romance, just as insufficient and just as wrong, when it was alone, or when it existed on the one side only, as was the merely physical. Real love was the fusion of the physical, the romantic, the spiritual and the comradely, the fusion of two people for whom there was but one means of salvation. He knew now, beyond all questioning, that, however they had deceived themselves, Betty's thoughts and his, her hopes and his, her aims and his, her work and his, were and had always been divided beyond the possibility of junction. No marriage service that might have been performed between them could have married but the least of their outlying selves. Not Church and State together could have joined their true selves that, living where there was no church and no state, had yet no natural relationship to each other. Some day real love might come to him; some day it would surely come to Betty. To-day, though it tore his heart, though it was as if he were ripping the heart out of his breast, he must, for Betty's sake—since she was the weaker—even more than for his own, tear her out of his life. His desire for her would long remain; the moments would be full of her when he sank from waking into sleep, or climbed from sleep to waking; but though he might regain the power to enslave her soul and make a servant of the self of which he could not make a work-fellow, to use that power would be to sin against what was best in her. He must not see her again, even were she willing to see him, and he must leave her thinking the worst of him in order that she might the sooner want to forget him.
He tossed the gilt pin out of the window. Following its flight, his glance came again to the worker's necktie, lying in the street.
What right had he over the man who had worn that? What right that he did not have over Betty?
His reason answered: None.
There, he tremendously realized, was the key to his credentials. He leaned heavily against the window-sill. He understood. It was a bitter lesson, but he learned it, there and then.
What he had done to these men was what he had tried to do to Betty, not in the riot only, but in accepting the position that society had offered him in relation to them; it was what every employer, from the actual boss to the smallest shareholder, everywhere was doing. It was living upon the work of others, profiting by values for the creation of which the pay had to be low enough to permit of profit. It was compulsion. If he sold dear what he bought cheap, what was it that he bought cheap but their labor? If he wanted pay for executive ability, what executive ability did he, or any shareholder in any company, exercise? If he claimed a return for the risk of his investment, what return did these men get, who invested that labor-power which was their whole capital? If any stockbuyer talked of profits as the reward of previous years of saving, how could he explain the fact that his savings would secure no profit until they employed labor to produce it? He had been fighting against his own ideals. It was the workers that had been right and he that had been wrong. What the man in russet brown had been to him, that he and all who directly or indirectly employed labor for profit, had been and were to the employed.
So, quite as suddenly as he had come to see life in the new light, he came now, in the little office of the lonely factory, to see the reason from which the light proceeded; there was only one evil in the world and that was Compulsion; only one good, and that was power over one's self.
The awful thing, he said to himself as one who reads what is written, was not to have too little power over others; it was to have too much. To have the means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it was to confuse the means with the right. Too much power over others and too little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this, he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics, governments, and property. To believe in any one of them, to traffic with any of them, was now to exercise compulsion over his fellows and now to delegate to his fellows his power over himself.
He must give up everything that was easy and comfortable—the easy thought and faith as freely as the easy food and lodging. He must join the oppressed.
He leaned through the battered window and filled his lungs with the pure night air. He looked up to the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow moon was riding.
"I haven't let their corruption destroy my purpose," he said to the moon. "I've simply put myself where they can't destroyme. I've put myself where they can't lie to me again. I'll fight them as one man against the world; I'll lose, but I won't be using their weapons; I won't be what they are, and I'll lose as a free man. So far as the world inside of me's concerned, they invaded it and bossed it. I've chucked them out of it, andI'vedestroyedthem!"
It seemed wonderfully simple now and wonderfully peaceful. He would go to Forbes to-morrow and draw up a legal paper, the last legal paper he would ever put his name to, his last compromise, turning over his interest in this factory to his mother; and Forbes—poor old Forbes! He was sorry for Forbes, but he knew what would happen; left alone, Forbes would end by selling out, profitably, to the trust. And then for Luke the open road, the old open road that he had always loved, the learning of a manual trade, the sale of his labor-power no more than was necessary to keep him alive and free to go wherever slaves fought the system of corruption for their liberty, until sometime, when the soldiers would have Luke before them instead of behind them, and did not shoot over the heads of the mob. He was tasting of contentment for the first time in his life. He was glad that he had not died out there in the riot. There was so much to do. There was so much to do in this life that he did not see how he had ever had time to think of any other. And now he was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with open eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with complete power over himself, using no compulsion upon others and allowing no other to use compulsion upon him. Luke had conquered. For every soul there is, somewhere, a separate road to salvation. Luke had found his own....
Somewhere out in the city a clock struck eleven. He knew that he had been standing at the window for a long time, but he had no idea it was so long as this. If he had been so engrossed, what, he wondered, had finally roused him. He remembered: it was something about the door. He had not heard it move; he merely thought that it was moving. He turned to it, but it did not move. Perhaps a draught of air had deceived him.
The factory was very quiet....
§4. "Don't open your trap! I got you covered! If you let out one yip, I'll croak you."
The door had opened and closed, letting in a figure that quickly bolted it and then discreetly avoided the light from the window. Luke saw a dim form in the shadow. All that projected into the shaft of light was a fist tightly clenched about a leveled revolver.
"What do you want?" asked Luke.
He was not afraid to disregard this intruder's command to silence. He was curiously fearless. He supposed that this unseen man was some fanatic from the mob. Anybody could have slipped into the factory through the door that Luke had left open when the terror of the soldiers' fire swept the street and the smoke of it clouded the doorway. This was an avenger thus arrived. Luke felt the presence of a certain crude justice. He had deserved this.
"Don't worry; I'm not going to yell," he said.
He was expecting death now, expecting absolute extinction; but he faced it with a serenity that mildly surprised him. This was not the mad courage, too sudden to be fine, which had hurled him into the crater of the riot to rescue Betty. It was a courage that weighed results. He thought of the dusty, open road. He was rather sorry to have to miss that, but no doubt he would never have got it anyhow.
"Well," he said with a faint touch of impatience, "why don't you answer my question? What do you want?"
The barrel of the revolver wavered ever so slightly.
The intruder's voice came again out of the darkness; it was as if the darkness itself made answer:
"I want them letters."
Luke's teeth came together with a snap. He had been carrying the letters in a money-belt about his middle, next his body. It was hours since he had thought of them. He had just now been feeling that perhaps he ought to be shot, but this feeling had no origin in the affair of the letters. They were a different matter. For the letters he had fought so much and so fairly that he was ready and willing to fight for them once more. He tried to gain time.
"What letters?" he asked.
"I dunno," said the darkness. "But you do. Come on, now; don't try to flimflam me: them letters you got in your coat."
Luke glanced at the alpaca coat that he had put on when he last left the factory.
"If you want anything that was in my coat, you'll have to look in the street for it: I left it there."
The intruder did not at once reply. Luke saw the revolver advance toward him in the light. It was followed by a thick, short arm, and the arm was followed by a short thick man. He wore a velours Alpine hat. It was pushed to one side of his head, and Luke saw that the hair below it was red.
That was almost the last thing he did see before the shot was fired. Luke made a flying leap at the red-headed man and tried to knock the revolver into the air. As he did so, the revolver spat at him.
A loud report. A darting arrow of flame.
Luke lay on the office floor. The red-headed man's skilled fingers ran deftly through his clothes. Then the killer raised the shattered window and dropped into the street.
§5. One of Breil's strike-breakers, making his round of the factory, heard the shot and came running toward the noise. He ran to the upper office and burst into the room.
A curling cloud of lazy smoke was weaving graceful figures in the shaft of light from the street-lamp outside; it embraced an overturned chair, and circled the top of the center table. Above it the strike-breaker saw the upper half of a disheveled figure, the figure of Luke Huber, leaning out of the window and shaking its fist at all the city round about. In a high, cracked voice, Luke was yelling curses at the world.
"God damn your system and your politics!" yelled he. "God damn your law and your government! God damn your god!"
He turned toward the noise behind him and showed himself with matted hair and staring eyes, with a cut in his forehead and a white face that had brown stains about its lolling mouth, with a slowly broadening patch of blood in his torn shirt.
"Mr. Huber!" gasped the strike-breaker. He ran forward.
As he did so, Huber's voice howled into shattered song:
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum—bum!Hallelujah, I'm a——"
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum—bum!Hallelujah, I'm a——"
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum—bum!
Hallelujah, I'm a——"
Hallelujah, I'm a——"
He lurched forward into the strike-breaker's arms. Before those arms closed about him, he was dead.
CHAPTER XX
On the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, in that office where the engraving of George Washington hung between the windows, three men sat in the mid-morning light, about the mahogany table. They were talking business. Each man had his own offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and quietly met in this one because most of the businesses of each were closely allied with the business-interests of all.
There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance or public actions of this trio; they were apparently but three units of the legion that makes this portion of New York a city by day and a desert by night. Each had come down town in his own motor that morning, defying speed-laws and traffic regulations, just as scores of his business neighbors had done. Each had descended at his own offices, passed through half a dozen doors guarded by six bowing attendants, and proceeded to his own desk in his own private room, precisely as a small army of other business men were doing at the same time within a radius of half a mile. Each looked like the rest of that army. All three were men of about the average height, not noticeably either above or below it, and two were inclined to bulkiness. Those two had pale faces and close mouths and steady eyes, which looked out from under bushy brows with glances that gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the little pouches of lax skin below their lower lids. They wore flowers in the lapels of their coats; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was black; that of the other was touched with grey. Hallett chewed leisurely at the end of an unlighted cigar; Rivington's slim hand stroked his mustache with a contemplative movement.
The man at the head of the table was almost of the age of the man that used to sit there, but he was somewhat shorter, and he was thin. His clothes fell loosely about his bony frame. His eyes were narrow. He sat before a neat pile of memoranda, with his thin hands, the blue veins of which marked them like a map, tapping upon the surface of the table. Like his predecessor's, his elbows were raised at right angles to his torso and pointed ceilingward; his chest heaved visibly, but his breathing was inaudible. His eyes were everywhere.
He had come to his office betimes that morning. He had read his letters, directed his charities, instructed his brokers, given his orders to lieutenants at the state capitals and to such lieutenants at the national capital as needed them. Now he was receiving his fellow commanders in council.
"McKay?" he said in thin comment on some remark of Rivington. "What McKay?"
"Henry," said Rivington. "Dohan's successor in the M. & N. He's the sort of man——"
"We can unload this stock," said Hallett, "any time now."
Rivington began a question.
"It's all right," nodded Hallett. "And by the way, that little Forbes concern's come into the combine."
"I know," said Rivington; "but those letters—You remember——"
"Stein sent 'em over to me yesterday morning. We'll burn 'em this time."
The man at the head of the table rapped with his spatulate finger-ends.
"We are too busy to bother with trifles," he said. "I've got here"—he indicated the memoranda—"all the reports on the proposed foodstuffs monopoly. I must decide on that right away...."
After a momentary silence, the stock-ticker, with metallic insistence, went on weaving out its yards of tape beside the windows that looked down to the web of radiating streets, on which minute black objects that were men and women bobbed and buzzed like entangled flies....
THE END
* * * * * * * *
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGETHE GIRL THAT GOES WRONGTHE SENTENCE OF SILENCETHE WAY OF PEACEWHAT IS SOCIALISM?RUNNING SANDSTHE THINGS THAT ARE CÆSAR'SETC., ETC.
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