CHAPTER XIX

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Sec.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....

Sec.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.

Sec.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 destroy _me_. 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, and _I've_ destroyed _them_!"

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....

Sec.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.

Sec.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.

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