CHAPTER XVII

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Sec.1. For an hour, for two hours, he tried to adjust his mental and spiritual sight to the blazing illumination; but adjustment, he at length realized, must be a matter of many days. The illumination was too sudden and too intense. He could no more assess moral values and determine ethical duties than a new-born baby can know the use of those objects most habitual to its elders--a new-born baby to whom the lamp on a table and the moon in the sky are one and the same. There must be false starts on wrong roads; there must be disappointment and stumbling; there must even be moments of relapse. The great thing for Luke was that, as the lives of some men are changed forever for the better by an affirmation of faith, his life had now forever been changed for the better by a rejection of faith. He had denied the superhuman in man's affairs, and the banishment of the superhuman raised the human; it left the man no longer a pigmy trembling before a giant, but himself a giant, limited and mortal, yet self-sufficient and divine. He had found what was for him the ultimate strength; for the knowledge of how to use that strength rightly he could wait.

Meanwhile, there was the patent obligation to Forbes. Forbes needed him; Luke returned to the Forbes house.

Sec.2. Forbes was waiting in the library.

"Where were you yesterday? Are you going crazy, Huber? You knew I needed you."

The elder man had borne disaster hardly. He looked tired and ill.

"I'm sorry," said Luke. "I was busy."

"Busy? What could have kept you busy in town when you knew this strike was going on? And you went to church this morning instead of waking me! Betty says you're sick. Are you?"

"No. I'm only getting well."

Forbes's tone was more considerate:

"Anyhow, you might have come in to luncheon. Have you had anything to eat?"

"I'm all right," said Luke.

"But Betty says----"

"Where is she?"

"She's in her room. I told her to lie down. She's all upset. Really, Huber----"

Luke seated himself by the table covered with magazines and sprawling sections of the Sunday newspapers. Outwardly, he was as self-contained as during his days in Leighton's office.

"What was it you wanted to see me about?" he interrupted.

Forbes took a chair opposite. He assumed the voice of persuasion.

"I want to be perfectly frank with you, Huber," he began.

Luke thought: "I wonder what he is going to keep back." All that he said was: "Yes?"

"Yes," resumed Forbes, "and I want you to be perfectly frank with me. You once told me you'd made enemies of the people who've since made such trouble for us, because you had some letters or other that belonged to them, didn't you?"

Luke bowed assent. He knew now what to expect.

"Well," Forbes went on, "the only use those letters were to you was political. Now that you can't use them politically, why don't you give them up?"

"You mean now that I've been chucked out of politics?"

"Well, you know you've ruined yourself there. You can never get back again. When you can't hurt your enemies, why not make them your friends?"

"No, thank you."

"But these letters are of no use to you."

"How do you know that?" asked Luke quietly.

Forbes blushed.

"Are they?" he countered.

"And why," persisted Luke, "didn't you suggest this to me days ago?" His eyes probed the man before him. "What else did Judge Stein say to you?" he demanded.

Forbes drew back in his chair. His flush deepened, but presently he made an impatient gesture.

"Oh, very well," he said defiantly, "the Judge did see me yesterday, and if you had been at the factory, as you should have been, you'd have seen him, too."

Luke thought it unnecessary to remark that he had been honored by a previous call from Stein.

"What else did he say?" Luke repeated.

"He said a great deal; but the upshot of it was that he would induce your enemies, who are the men that control the trust we're competing with, to lower wages and join the fight against the employees, if you would agree to surrender those letters."

"I won't do it," said Luke.

"Don't be hasty," Forbes implored. "Think of me. Think of Betty----"

Luke winced.

"Don't begin that," he commanded.

"But what have you to gain?" asked Forbes.

"Nothing. I've nothing to gain. I've only something to keep: my self-respect."

"Your self-conceit, you mean. Be reasonable, Huber. These people won't give in."

"So I must?"

"They won't give in, and you can't get back to politics and can't get any paper to take up your case."

"Oh,"--Luke could have laughed--"so Stein told you that, too, did he?"

"Never mind what he told me. The point is: his people can help you if you'll only acknowledge defeat, now that you're defeated. They can give you back all you've lost, and nobody else can."

"And if I don't admit I'm whipped, they'll whip me some more?"

"They'll finish what they've begun, Huber; they will wipe out the Business, too."

"I'm sorry," said Luke--"very sorry for you, I mean. But there's no use arguing: I won't give in."

Forbes exhausted his every resource. He pleaded for the business, for Luke, for Betty. For an hour he sent the squadrons of his appeal against the impregnable wall of Luke's determination.

"What have you to gain?" he reiterated; and once he said: "The worst of the crowd is dead, anyhow."

Luke was not listening. He was saying to himself:

"What is it I am to do next? There is still a little money left to my account at the bank. It will keep me for a year and mother for a year--and then? I'm making Forbes hold out against the trust, and if he does hold out his mill is doomed. No hope there! Can I go back to the Law? I can't, because the Law is just what the Church is. The Law was made by the powerful, it is interpreted by their paid servants and administered by their slaves. It is a game devised by the crafty powerful to cheat the simple weak. The last five years have proved that to me, and I'm ashamed that it took me so long to learn. Betty----"

He did not dare to think of Betty. He thought rather of the open country, of the smell of the earth on which he had been lying twenty-four hours ago, and the coolness and freedom of the white clouds against that sky of blue....

Forbes was saying something about his grandfather and the Business. Luke got up.

"There's no use your wasting your breath," he declared. "Nothing that you could say would change me--no, nothing that even Betty could say! But I'll do this: I'll never be away from the factory again when I ought to be there; I'll stand by you till we've beaten these strikers or till they've ruined us."

He walked out of the room and closed the door before Forbes could answer him, and he walked into Betty's arms.

Sec.3. "Luke," she whispered, "what was the matter this morning? Won't you tell me, dear?"

He felt the blood mount hotly to his head. Her hair was sweet to his nostrils.

"Don't," he said sharply.

"But, Luke----"

He drew her hands from his neck. He imprisoned her wrists in his grasp.

"I don't quite know what's the matter--yet," he said. "It's all come too suddenly. But, Betty--O, Betty, I don't believe I'm the man for you!"

She asked him what he meant, and he could not tell her. She pressed him, and he could only repeat his conviction.

"Do you mean"--she drew her hands away--"that you like some other girl better?"

He laughed rudely.

"No," he said, "not that."

"But you don't care for me?" She recovered all her dignity. "If you don't care for me, why aren't you brave enough to say so?"

The afternoon sun fell through the hall-window and showed her to him very fair.

"Betty," he said slowly, "there are only two kinds of marriages you understand: there is the Church, but I don't believe any more in any church; and there's the Law, but the Law can't make a marriage for me."

At least the immediate purport of the words she understood. Her face burned red and then became white and still.

"You mean----" she began. Her hands clenched. "Oh!" she cried.

She tried to pass him.

Passion left him, but a great sorrow took its place as his master. He wanted to justify himself; he even so wanted to repair the hurt done her that he would have shut his eyes to the new light. He seized her hand.

"Betty!"

She wrenched her hand.

"Let me go! I want to go to father! Let me go!"

"But, Betty, wait--listen----"

She freed her hand.

"I shan't tell him. Don't be afraid. He has enough to worry him. Only don't let me ever see you again!"

Sec.4. All that night Luke walked the streets. It was breakfast-time when he returned to the Arapahoe. His letters and the morning papers were lying on the floor of his sitting-room where they had fallen when the bell-boy dropped them through the slit in the door.

He read the letters first. There were not many, for his correspondence had of late declined to almost nothing. The only things of interest were a note from Porcellis, announcing that he would soon return to New York and a letter from Luke's mother, saying that she had written Betty to pay her a visit: "It is only right that your fiancee should do this," wrote Mrs. Huber, "and that I should have an early chance of knowing the girl that is to be my son's wife."

Luke wondered how Betty would reply to the invitation. As he was thinking of this, his eye caught the heaviest headlines on the first page of the newspaper: during the night, a body of strikers at the Forbes factory had marched to the main entrance and battered down the door in an endeavor to drag out the Breil men who slept there as guards by night and worked there by day; the Breil men resisted; there was a general battle with at least two deaths; the attacking party were repulsed, but the police, summoned by a riot-call, gained what appeared to be no more than a preliminary skirmish, for the entire neighborhood was in arms and more bloodshed was expected to-day.

Luke dropped the paper with an oath. He was more hungry than before for a part in this fight--in any fight. If Religion was a coward, he would make one more appeal to Government, to force. He called Albany on the long-distance telephone. He kept on calling until he had brought the Governor to the other end of the wire, and then he was astonished to hear that the proper civil authorities in New York had already asked for troops.

"It is always best," he was told, "not to drag local men into an affair of this sort, if it can be helped; so I'm having the Adjutant General send down a company from Poughkeepsie. That ought to be enough for the present, and they ought to get there by noon."

Luke muttered his thanks and rang off.

"I know why that was done," he said to himself: "They think they'll make more trouble for us with the militia here than without it. Well, we'll see."

He stripped off his clothes, went to the bathroom, and began to run the water for a cold plunge. He was talking to himself.

"The worst of the crowd's dead," he said. "That was Forbes's way of putting it. There he had a glimpse. Started down to rock-bottom. But he didn't arrive. I felt that way till only a little while ago. But I see I was wrong. I thought this was a one-man show; I believed in a sort of personal Devil. I wish I'd been right. It would have been all so simple, if I'd been right in that. But I wasn't. It isn't the men; it's the system. The man didn't make the system; the system made the man."

He was wonderfully clear about that now. All his fight against evil had been directed toward one man, and the man was dead and the evil remained. He could almost pity that man in russet brown. That man who had sat at the fountain of forces reaching up and down through all the life of the world, seemed to originate the forces and use them for his own malign purpose; but now--and herein lay one of the reasons for Luke's present wonder at life--he perceived certainly that the man had been only a little better treated by the forces than the forces treated all the rest of mankind, was their creation and their slave just as wholly as the most obscure victim. Industrial evolution, working through the collective ignorance of the race, had devised the Great Evil. Here was a web that no spider wove, a web that killed spiders as well as flies, lived on with a life of its own, grew and spread of itself. So long as the web existed, there would always be a spider. The Web remained. It was the Web that must be broken.

Yet he wanted to fight. He would fight. The Gospel of Negation had given him its light; it had yet to teach him to see.

Sec.5. Other forces vitally affecting Luke were at work that day, at first far distant from the factory. They were forces that had affected him imperfectly heretofore, but that now were set in motion in a manner no longer to be diverted.

Ex-Judge Stein was summoned from his office almost at the moment of his appearance there. His motor-car took him into Wall Street, to a certain skyscraper, into which he went and was taken as far as the twentieth floor.

He entered an unmarked door and passed an attendant who bowed to him respectfully. He passed another attendant. A third, at sight of him, got up and went through a second door, leaving the Judge to wait in dignified repose. Then the last attendant reappeared and nodded, and the Judge passed the second door.

He remained inside for an hour. When he came out his mien was undisturbed, but his strong and kindly face was even graver than usual. He almost forgot to return the farewells of the attendants as he left them. He rang twice for the elevator, although the elevator was not long delayed.

"The office," he said to his chauffeur as he climbed again into the car.

Sec.6. Returned at his own quarters at half-past ten, he sent immediately for Irwin, to whom he talked for perhaps forty-five minutes. He spoke with a sad inevitability.

"No more excuses, no more extensions of time, no more delays," he concluded--"and no more failures."

The twinkle left Irwin's eyes.

"I understand," he said.

He could not fail to understand. His superior had been once and for all explicit. Judge Stein, during his service to the public on the bench, had never been called upon to pronounce a sentence of death, but, had he been so called upon, he would have spoken much as he now spoke to Irwin.

Sec.7. "I hate to have to tell you this," said Irwin to Quirk at noon in the latter's shabby law-office, "but if that job isn't done before to-morrow morning, those affidavits charging you with jury-fixing are going to be turned over to the District-Attorney, and the people that have them are now in a position to make Leighton act on them, too."

Irwin also had become specific. The plump Mr. Quirk lost his habitual smile.

"It's a rotten business," he said.

"It is," Irwin agreed; "but your arrest would be a worse one--for you."

"We may have to go the limit," said Quirk.

"Then," said Irwin, "you'd better go it. That's no affair of mine."

Sec.8. "This time," said Quirk, "you've got till to-night to make up your mind."

He was talking to Police-Lieutenant Donovan. It was just after lunch-time.

"What about?" asked Donovan.

"Whether you want to bluff us again or lose your job."

"We never did bluff you."

"Well, then: whether you want to get those letters or get fired. Not _try_ to get them: _get_ them. It's get them or get out." All the kindliness and good-fellowship was missing from Quirk's voice. "It's one thing or the other. We got evidence to fire you on. You knew we had, last time I talked to you. Well, they were easy on you then, Hughie. This time they mean business."

Donovan looked at Quirk.

"Suppose somebody gets hurt?" he said.

Quirk shrugged his shoulders.

Sec.9. When Guth came in late in the afternoon, Donovan said:

"I got a warrant in my desk for you, Guth. A friend o' mine swore it out. If I don't stop him, it means a criminal trial where you won't have the chance of a goat. You know what it's for: that little girl up in Fifty-second Street. The only way I can get him to hold off's for you to get Reddy Rawn to do what you'd ought t' got him to do long ago. If somebody gets hurt, it ain't our fault."

Sec.10. At eight p.m. in the shadowy alley near Forty-third Street and Third Avenue, Patrolman Guth's twisted mouth was menacing the darkness.

"He's down at the Forbes factory now," said Guth. "There's sure to be a fight there to-night, an' anybody can get in. It's a cinch."

The darkness did not reply.

"Anyhow, you got to," said Guth. "The old man's crazy mad. He says it's the chair for yours if you fall down this time. Crab Rotello's got worse. He can't live the night, an' the old man says he's goin' to have you railroaded soon as Crab cashes in, if you don't do what he says. He means it, too, Reddy."

Out of the darkness came the answer:

"I'll maybe have to croak this guy."

"That's up to you," said Guth. "It'll look like some strikers done it. It's his own fault for bein' a fool. What in hell do you care, anyway? We'll look out for you."

"All right," said the darkness.

"Mind you," Guth repeated, "no more stallin' this time. If you don't get the goods, an' get 'em to-night, you're a dead boy, Reddy."

There was an instant of silence. Then the darkness spoke again:

"It won't be me's the dead one."

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