The Spider's Web
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Title: The Spider's Web
Creator: Reginald Wright Kauffman
Illustrator: Jean de Paleologue
Release date: June 2, 2014 [eBook #45866]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45866
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPIDER'S WEB ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: BETTY STOOD AT THE WINDOW IN THE FULL LIGHT OF THE
STREET-LAMP]
THE SPIDER'S WEB
BY
REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
Author of "The House of Bondage," etc., etc.
Illustrated by
JEAN PALEOLOGUE
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
Published October, 1913
To
EVERETT HARRE
_Gratefully_
That's the shout, the shout we shall utter
When, with rifles and spades,
We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter
On the barricades!
--FRANCIS ADAMS.
Thou orb of many orbs!
Thou seething principle! Thou well-kept, latent germ!
Thou center!
Around the idea of thee the strange sad war revolving,
With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
(With yet unknown results to come, for thrice a thousand
years)....
--WHITMAN.
While three men hold together,
The kingdoms are less by three.
--SWINBURNE.
*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*
"Betty," he said, "do you understand what your father is asking me to
do?" . . . (Outside cover) (missing from book)
Betty stood at the window in the full light of the street-lamp . . . . .
. . . . _Frontispiece_
He found it necessary to be emphatic
The mob was using the coal from the dismantled wagon
*EXPLANATION*
In order to warn off trespassers, I have begun my novel with four
chapters that an expert bookmaker--indeed, my own book-maker--has
pronounced dull: I knew that only those to whom the book belonged would
persevere. By the same token, being aware that the story which is
prefaced by an apology is ended with suspicion, I preface this story
with an apology: I want to apologize to my friends for using them and to
my enemies for not giving them what they have expected; I want to create
in the minds of the former the suspicion that I am darker than I have
been painted, and in the minds of the latter the suspicion that I am not
a whited sepulcher but a blackened altar.
In 1909 I projected, vaguely it is true, a cycle of four novels, each to
be independent of the others in plot and character, but all carrying
forward a definite view of life. As, however, the announcement of a
cycle is the surest means of alienating readers, not to mention
publishers, I held my tongue about the general plan and concerned
myself, in public, only with its separate parts. These were "The House
of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," "Running Sands" and "The
Spider's Web."
Privately, the first question demanding answer was that of method. In
what I had to say I believed burningly, as I still believe deeply, and
the great thing with me was not to say it in the manner that most people
would call Art, but to say it in the manner that would convert as many
readers as possible to my way of thinking. I did not want to produce
the effect of a work of Art; I wanted to produce conviction of truth.
On the one hand, I must avoid even the appearance of a personal interest
in my characters, because that would divert my readers into the charge
of sentimentality; and on the other, I must not hesitate to marshal my
events in their largest force, even though the reviewers called this
melodrama.
Here is a choice that is sure to come sooner or later to every writer of
fiction: the choice between what he has considered Art for Art's sake
and what he considers art for Man's sake. He has kept in mind the day
when his books will be judged solely by their own merits, when the
causes with which he sympathizes have been defeated and forgotten or
established and beyond the need of sympathy; when new evils demand new
remedies and old wounds are healed. He knows, as few of his
contemporary readers can know, that then he will be heavily handicapped
by all that is immediate or local in what he writes; that by nothing
save adherence to the eternal standards of Art can he endure. He may be
certain, in his own mind, that any true art is the expression, in the
manner best calculated to secure a desired effect, of the ideas
essential to the effect, but he will be equally sure that the world will
not so consider. If he sets any propaganda above Art, the future will
forget his work, the present meet it with prejudice, probably with
opposition; and against all this he has to set only his own faith in the
righteousness of the thing he has to say.
I made my choice and began my cycle with that one of my four novels
which I knew would receive the readiest hearing. In "The House of
Bondage" I wanted to put before my readers the theory that the
superimposing of one human being's will, or the will of any group of
human beings, upon any other's is the Great Crime. For the purposes of
illustration, I chose for attack the chief present means of such
imposition or compulsion, the pressure of our economic system, and
depicted its effects in forcing women into prostitution. The result was
amazing: the book sold and, they tell me, is still selling in my own and
several other countries and tongues; it either originated or promoted a
series of sociological crusades and legislative investigations
concerning themselves with the symptoms and neglecting the disease, and
by no persons was it so heartily welcomed as by those who are themselves
the instruments of compulsion. I began to think that the instruments
were becoming conscious and that I might not be so unpopular after all.
I was never more mistaken. In "The Sentence of Silence" I proceeded to
show other effects of the same evil compulsion: the effects of our
failure to instruct our children in sex-hygiene; of imposing upon our
heirs the moral code that our economic system has imposed upon us, and
of imposing upon our daughters an abstinence from which we absolve our
sons. In its circulation, this book left its publishers nothing to
complain of; but its reception was of a sort vastly different from that
of its predecessor. Parents that were loath to see other people's
daughters forced into prostitution were shocked at a proposal to educate
their own sons against the practice of seduction; husbands that lived in
secret polygamy were aghast at the idea of instructing their wives in
any code save that which they preached, but did not follow; and men that
took any woman's body they could get were horrified at the notion of any
woman sharing their liberty.
The remarkable book-reviewer of the generally sane Philadelphia
"Inquirer" upbraided me because, after I had dragged my central
character, Dan Barnes, through the sewers of debauchery and venereal
disease, I did not "save" him by marrying him to a "pure" woman!
Came the third novel, "Running Sands," and came a louder protest. I had
here tried to take a step further my argument against compulsion and to
show that, if I had been right before, then compulsion by matrimony--the
marriage of the old to the young and the knowing to the ignorant, rape
within wedlock and forcing of wives to become mothers against their
will--was wrong. Here again the people read and the instruments of
compulsion condemned me. Those persons who, without a wry face among
them, swallow the funny but futile jokes of another type of fiction were
so whole-hearted in their curses of my book that I was inclined to
believe their present bitterness enhanced by their recollection of how
they had once praised me.
Now I have written "The Spider's Web," the last of my four, and I have
read that it is expected to be to its predecessors what Landor said the
fourth George was to his. For a good pair of eyes at the conventional
point of view, it is all this and more; but then there are no good eyes
at the conventional point of view, and so I fear that, without help, the
condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running Sands" may find
this novel innocent: there is only one "bad" woman among its
speaking-roles, and she appears but three brief times. In order that my
condemners may not miss what they want to find in me, I shall tell them
in a simpler form than the dramatic what I have done.
I have made Luke Huber a man that comes to see the sin of compulsion
exerting itself against humanity in all the powers that conduct modern
society; in the ownership of men and things; in our entire system of
production and distribution, and in the creatures and ministers of that
system: Government, Politics, Law, and what passes by the name of
Religion.
Such a mind as Huber's comes to Dora Marsden's conclusion: "Life is no
two days the same: the same measure never fits twice exactly; hence the
futility of state-making, law-making, moral-making, when all that is of
importance is life-augmenting, and that is the individual's affair." He
sees that only Labor creates wealth, and that nothing should be robbed
of a fraction of what it creates. He sees that actually government is
"not the president, congress and the courts, not any body or power
created by the Constitution, but always a combination of important
business interests,"[#] not even any individual, and that even if it
were completely constitutional it would still be compulsion--that to
"consent" to be governed is to consent to be compelled.
[#] Charles Edward Russell.
He would argue of politics:
"We Americans pretend to hate kings, and so we devise a republic;
finding the rule of one man bad, we believe we can better it by
multiplying it by ninety millions; finding an ounce has evil effects, we
take a ton. We simply change the tyranny of one for the tyranny of
many. Even if the will of our fifteen million voters ruled us as they
tell us it does, then each one of the fifteen million would be giving
all the 14,999,999 others the right to interfere with him in return for
his one fifteen-millionth right to take a hand in interfering with them.
For that fraction of power over others, he would be giving away all his
power over himself."
Huber would say of religion and law:
"Both are tools in the hands of compulsion. Both try to belittle divine
humanity, the first making Man a pygmy before God and the second making
Man a pygmy before a few men. There can be no crime against God, since
God, or the force that created the world, is omnipotent; no crime
against law, since law is an instrument of the great crime. The law a
deterrent? It isn't. The statistics prove that, so far as statistics
can prove anything. But you prove it yourself. Why do you try to
refrain from conscious wrong? Not because you're afraid of the law in
heaven or on earth--you're not a coward. You simply want to do the
decent thing because it _is_ the decent thing. The desire to do the
decent thing: that's all the religion and law there is to-day among even
the people that make laws and religions for the purpose of ruling other
people by them. The rulers sin only because their system has dimmed
their judgment of the decent thing, and so they go on maintaining their
law and their religion. The ruled will want to do the decent thing just
as soon as they become responsible creatures through the abolition of
these compulsions, exactly as the rulers, though dulled by keeping up
their system, wanted to do it as soon as they became responsible
creatures by growing above the dictates of these compulsions."
Other men, other religions. For some faith; for some denial. Huber's
religion was the Gospel of Negation.
He came to this by conversion, which means the sudden revelation by the
sub-conscious self to the conscious self of the meanings that the
sub-conscious self has long been drawing from the conscious self's
experiences. The outward phenomena of such conversions--"being saved,"
"receiving grace," "being regenerated," "experiencing religion"--are
perfectly familiar to all persons that have attended evangelical
churches, know the work of the Salvation Army, or have read Harold
Begbie's "Broken Earthenware." The psychology of the force causing them
has been elaborately, but not always scientifically, treated in William
James's stimulating volume, "Some Varieties of Religious Experience."
The force itself can, and often does, change the entire life of a man
from evil to good. The men so changed that we most hear of are changed
by an affirmation of faith, because they are men whose only spiritual
experience has been in connection with accepted religions and because
their change is generally first exhibited in the public meeting-place of
the followers of some such religion; but there are other men similarly
changed by a denial of faith, because they have had spiritual
experiences distinct from any accepted religion, and of them we hear
little, because their change is generally wrought in the solitude in
which they have had those spiritual experiences which are unconnected
with accepted religion.
Huber was a man of the latter sort. Being of that sort, he says the
last word that follows logically from an acceptance of "The House of
Bondage."
About the manner of this last word I should, perhaps, say something
more. I have not, I confess with shame, read M. Fabre's book on the
habits of the spider, but I have read other books and studied the spider
in my own garden; and the more I learned of web and spider the more I
realize how Huber would see their simulacra in our civilization and
learn at last that there the web outlived many spiders. That is how I
got my title, and that is why I have tried to construct my chapters with
a certain rough resemblance to the female diadem-spider's web. At the
end, both the web and Huber win: the former because it catches its fly
and goes on catching other and larger flies; the latter because his soul
has found itself.
The method of procuring data requires a fuller explanation. The writer
who endeavors to present actual conditions in fictional form has
constantly to choose between truth and facts, and if his readers accept
his facts, they are inclined to doubt his imagination. In all of these
four books, I have been careful to present only types, but I have tried
to endow each type with character, and each character has assumed a
living personality in my own mind. I have used no person and no event
that was isolated; but, having individualized my types and chosen my
typical events, I have felt free to employ the latter in whatever way
seemed to me best fitted to enforce my argument, and at liberty to
imagine what the former would think and do under the stress of the
latter. I have heard of a dozen women in real life designated as the
originals of Mary Denbigh, three wives selected as Muriel Stainton, and
one man--myself--named as Dan Barnes. The discoverers of these
prototypes only flattered my powers of detection and portraiture at the
expense of my imagination and good taste.
I intended to present, and I have presented, simply certain types
produced by our civilization and working in the media of our economic
system. I spent considerable time in New York last winter to procure
certain data; I found the data, selected what was typical as I saw it,
and made my story. "The Spider's Web," whether well done or ill, has
been done by my own imagination.
Help I have had and eagerly sought. An historian always cites his
authorities and acknowledges his assistants; I could never see why a
novelist should be less honest or less courteous, since every realist
must delegate some of his research-work, and even the writer of that
fiction farthest from life must take something from the fancy of his
acquaintances. I know, and I shall not soon forget, how much "The House
of Bondage" owes to the encouragement given my work by its publishers.
During the latter part of the actual writing of "The Spider's Web," it
was impossible for either my wife or me to be in New York, and I taxed
the generous patience of many a friend by inquiries. I exacted tribute
from Max Eastman's editorials in "The Masses," Walter Lippmann's papers
in "The Forum," and C. P. Connolly's in "Everybody's Magazine" as
expressing three current phases of American opinion; I even seized a
picture from Mary Macdonald Brown's accounts of New York and secured
from an editorial in "The Nation" my reference to the past of the Astor
House. Moliere took his own where he found it; I have taken other men's
at my need. To all of these my score is long; to those few and fine
newspaper and magazine critics and reviewers who have seen my purpose
and helped it--who, when they have differed or blamed, blamed or
differed honestly--to them, from whom I have learned so much, my
obligation is still greater.
No opinions that are worth while are unalterable; only the insincere
have fixed convictions: my cycle of four books expresses an attitude
toward life that I may some day very well change. This series
completed, I am left with my conscience free and my brain at liberty to
turn toward work that I may try to design only by the more lasting
standards of Art, but no change of belief or work will make me regret
having expressed what I believed. I am thoroughly aware of how, if they
understood it, the condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running
Sands" would condemn this book. I am equally aware of how many persons
that are my comrades, friends, and well-wishers will alter their
relations toward me when they have read "The Spider's Web"; but, though
I shall be sorry to lose these, I shall not be sorry for the reason of
their loss. Horace Traubel, who puts most things well, has put this
well:
"I have tried to stay in the house of comfort,
to sleep in my bed of ease,
But something not outside of me, something inside of me says:
This will not do....
I have tried the easy way: it was hard:
Now I will try the hard way: I guess it will be easier."
REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.
POSCHIAVO, SWITZERLAND,
8th September, 1913.
*CHARACTERS*
A MAN,
the head of a group of men virtually controlling industrial,
financial, and political America.
GEORGE J. HALLETT, one of his associates.
L. BERGEN RIVINGTON, another.
*Politicians*.
THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY.
HON. G. W. HUBER, U. S. Congressman, from
Doncaster County, Pennsylvania,
HON. JESSE KINZER, his successor.
SENATOR SCUDDER, the MAN'S lieutenant in the
Albany legislature,
HON. JARED SPARKS, his lieutenant in the Connecticut
legislature.
BRINLEY, commander of his lobby at
Washington.
KILGOUR, City Chamberlain of New York.
TIM HENEY, Leader of Tammany Hall.
SEELEY, an anti-Tammany Democratic
leader.
ELLISON, another.
THE POLICE-COMMISSIONER OF NEW YORK CITY.
GEORGE KAINDIAC, a U. S. Post-Office Inspector.
VENABLE, ) leaders of the Municipal
NELSON, ) Reform League.
YEATES, )
JARVIE, a Municipal Reform League
"worker."
*Lawyers*.
BROUWER LEIGHTON, District-Attorney of New
York. A Republican.
LARRY O'MARA, a member of his staff,
UHLER, another member of Leighton's
staff.
EX-JUDGE MARCUS F. STEIN, of the firm of Stein, Falconridge,
Falconridge & Perry,
corporation-lawyers.
IRWIN, a member of Stein's staff.
ANSON QUIRK, an underworld lawyer.
LUKE HUBER, a young lawyer.
*Businessmen*.
ROBERT M. DOHAN, president of the M. & N. R. R.
HENRY G. McKAY, his successor.
B. FRANK OSSERMAN, president of the East County
National Bank.
WALLACE K. FORBES, head of the firm of R. H.
Forbes & Son, manufacturers
of ready-made clothing,
ALEXANDER TITUS, financial-inquiry agent.
JAMES T. ROLLINS, the MAN'S secretary.
ATWOOD, his chief broker.
SIMPSON, his almoner.
CONOVER, one of his confidential clerks.
HERBERT CROY, manager of the Ruysdael estate.
WHITAKER, superintendent of the Forbes
factory.
THE DESK-CLERK, in the Arapahoe Apartment house.
CHARLEY, a clerk in the M. R. L. offices,
REV. PINKNEY NICHOLSON, rector of Church of St. Athanasius.
*Miscellaneous Persons*.
THE MAN'S NIECE.
CORNELIUS RUYSDAEL, a wealthy New Yorker of
good family.
MRS. RUYSDAEL, his wife.
TOMMY HALLETT, son of George J.
JOHN JAY PORCELLIS, a young man of leisure.
BETTY FORBES, daughter of Wallace K. Forbes.
MRS. HUBER, mother of Luke and wife of
G. W. Huber.
JANE HUBER, her daughter.
JAMES, the Forbes chauffeur.
MISS WESTON, a telephone operator.
BREIL, a strike-breaker.
AN I.W.W. ORGANIZER.
*Policeman*.
HUGH DONOVAN, a police-lieutenant
MITCHELL, )
ANDERSON, ) patrolmen.
GUTH, )
*Militiamen*.
CAPTAIN ANTONIO FACCIOLATI, of the New York N. G.
TERRY, first-lieutenant under Facciolati.
SCHMIDT, a sergeant.
*Citizens of the Underworld*.
A BUM.
GACE, an assassin.
A DISORDERLY WOMAN.
A WOMAN-RIOTER.
A DRUNKEN WOMAN.
REDDY RAWN, leader of an East Side "gang."
REDDY'S "GIRL."
THE KID, one of his associates,
CRAB ROTELLO. head of a rival gang.
ZANTZINGER, a gunman.
BUTCH DELLITT, another gunman.
*Other Persons*.
Women of the street, the brothel, the world.
Clothing-factory workers.
A mob.
Waiters in saloons.
Clerks and foremen in the Forbes factory.
Stenographers and typists.
Gamblers.
Other gangmen.
Other policemen.
Various minor Republican, Democratic, Reform, and Progressive
politicians.
Newspaper-reporters.
Some newspaper-editors.
A corps of strike-breakers.
Scabs.
Soldiers of the New York National Guard.
*THE SPIDER'S WEB*
*CHAPTER I*
Sec.1. Early that morning, Luke Huber stood before the Pennsylvania
Railroad Station at Americus and fancied himself a latter-day crusader
setting out to reconquer from the infidels the modern Holy City of God.
He had graduated from the Harvard Law-School in the previous June. Now
the Republican brother-in-law of one of his classmates, having been
elected District-Attorney of corruptly Democratic New York, offered a
place on his staff to Luke as soon as Huber should meet successfully the
necessary formalities. This new public-prosecutor was to "clean up" the
largest city in the country, and Luke, as his assistant, was to aid in
restoring to the metropolis the ideals of the framers of the
Constitution.
A slim young man, with a smooth face too rugged to be handsome, and gray
eyes too keen to be always dreaming, Huber stood erect, the wide collar
of his woolen overcoat turned up, for the spring lingered that year in
the valleys of Virginia, and the brim of his Alpine hat pulled over his
nose. He disregarded the group of boys waiting for the "up-train" that
would bring the Philadelphia morning newspapers to his native
Pennsylvania town, disregarded the grimy station-buildings, and looked
toward the river, where the morning mists were lifting and the cold
sunshine was creeping through to light the Susquehanna hills. He was one
of those fortunate and few human beings who are born without the
original sin of superstition, but what he saw seemed to him almost a
favorable omen. He had come down early, because he disliked to prolong
the good-bys of his mother and sister, and because he felt that even the
walk to the station was an important advance in the quest which he was
so eager to begin. When he arrived beside the railway tracks and
allowed his father, the Congressman, to see to the checking of the
baggage--a concession that Luke made to his parent's desire for some
part in the great adventure--the entire river was hidden from view by a
thick dun curtain: one could see nothing beyond the point by the shore
where the black arms of a derrick, at the Americus Sand Company's works,
were silhouetted against that curtain and stretched over a tremendous
mound of sand, as if they were the arms of some gigantic skeleton
pronouncing the benediction at a Black Mass. But now, though the fog
really rose, it appeared to Luke to be torn from above, and as the sun
mounted over distant Turkey Hill and gradually gilded the pines on the
surrounding summits, it seemed to advance up the bed of the stream,
slowly descending of its own force along the dark hillsides, until, all
at once, the river was a rushing stream of gold. Luke found himself
thinking of the veil of the Temple, and how it was rent in twain from
the top to the bottom.
His father, who was taller than Luke, but broad out of all proportion to
his height, came puffing back from the baggage-room. He held the checks
for Luke's luggage and a slip of pink paper.
"Here are your checks," he said, "and here's your pass. I forgot to
give it to you. It came last night."
Luke took the proffered paper.
"I thought," he began, "that the Interstate Commerce Commission
didn't----"
The Congressman interrupted with a deep chuckle.
"Oh, that's all right," he said. "Don't let your conscience worry you
about that. This is for a continuous ride to a terminus of the road."
"I see," said Luke; but what he saw was that his father, whom he loved
too much to hurt uselessly, had, out of kindness, strained a legal
definition. His father, he reflected, was not a man to abuse privilege
in large matters, and would be only hurt by a refusal in the present
trivial affair. Luke put the pass in the cuff of his overcoat and
silently decided to pay his fare to the conductor. The elder man, big
as he was, stamped his feet on the concrete pavement and complained of
the chill in the April air; the younger was too happy to notice the
cold.
"Train's five minutes late," remarked the Congressman as, through a
cautiously unbuttoned overcoat, he drew and snapped open a heavy watch.
"Is your time correct?" asked Luke.
"Hasn't varied three seconds a week in ten years," his father assured
him.
Neither was thinking of what was being said. The younger man was so
full of the high work ahead of him that he had already forgotten his
mother's ill-concealed tears at parting; the elder, granted political
favors rather because of his personal popularity and pliant good-nature
than for any ability at the game of vote-keeping, possessed at least the
chief virtue of the politician: he was a man of few words, and the more
truly he felt the less he spoke.
The "up-train" arrived (it was the "down-train" that Luke must take),
and the Congressman was besieged by the newsboys, who knelt about him,
striking their rolls of newspapers on the pavement the quicker to burst
the wrappers in which the journals were closely confined.
"_Press_, Mr. Huber?"
"_North American_ or _Record_?"
"_Ledger_?"
The boys bobbed up, flourishing their wares.
"Aw, I know what he wants," said an older lad, elbowing the rest.
"Here's yer _Inquirer_, Mr. Congressman."
Luke's father smiled: he had never outgrown his liking for homage from
whatever quarter; but he bought a paper from each boy, giving each a
five-cent piece and telling him to keep the change.
"You might as well take the lot," he said to Luke. "You'll want
something to read on the train." He was handing all the papers to Luke,
when his eyes were caught by a large headline on the first page of one
of them. "Hello!" he commented, his lips immediately pursing themselves
as if to whistle. As Luke took its fellows, the Congressman folded this
paper with the sudden skill of the confirmed newspaper-reader, who can
handle a journal in the open air as neatly as a trained yachtsman can
reef a top-sail before an undesirable wind. "I see the Big Man's been
giving some more testimony to that committee of the legislature up at
Albany."
For the past few weeks, Luke had been too busy preparing for his
bar-examinations to keep track of current events.
"Who's the Big Man?" he asked.
The elder Huber raised his thick brows.
"You know," said he, and he mentioned the name of one of the richest men
in America; not a man that had made his wealth even through the building
of a great industry, but one that had, by "editing" money and
combinations of money much in that manner in which a news-desk
copy-reader edits the reporters' "copy," made himself a member of the
triumvirate--rumor said made the triumvirate and made himself its
head--which had for years controlled alike the labor and capital of the
country.
"What's he been saying?" asked Luke.
"He's been answering questions about campaign contributions."
"To the Democrats?"
"Well, no." The Congressman was reluctant. "It seems it was to the
Republicans."
Luke colored.
"Of course," he said, "I always knew those fellows had no real political
convictions, and of course any party is bound to have some bad lots
among its small fry, but I do wish our National Committee would kick out
of the ranks the men that take money from such people."
The father did not like this. Luke had been a great deal away from him,
first at boarding-school and then at college and the law-school, so that
the two had not seen much of each other for many years; but since the
younger had come home this last time, he had given frequent expression
to sentiments of the present sort, and the Congressman, although he
disliked argument as keenly as most Congressmen, felt that now it was
his duty to protest.
"My boy," he said, "you won't go far if you go about talking that way.
This contribution went to the fund that elected your District-Attorney
Leighton."
"I don't believe it!"
"That's the testimony."
"I don't believe it. This man's swearing to that so as to hurt the
party in New York."
"This man?" Luke's father repeated the phrase interrogatively. His
usual taciturnity fell from him. "Why do you say that? How do you know
it? Why should he want to hurt the party? As a matter of fact, what do
you know about 'this man,' anyhow? Nothing but a lot of unfounded
gossip printed in papers that want him to come over to their side. Why
shouldn't he help our party? I do know something about him. I've never
met him, but I know the whole story of his career--know it
intimately--and I tell you that his is the greatest intellect in America
to-day, and he has used his intellect, and the wealth it got him, to
help--not only once, but again and again--to help and to save--yes,
save, the party and the prosperity of the nation. I tell you----"
He did not tell any more. The down-train had been rumbling over the
last span of the river-bridge when he began talking; and now it rolled
before the station.
Luke took his suitcase in one hand and extended the other in farewell.
Unexpectedly he felt a lump in his throat.
"Good-by," he said.
His father gripped the hand. His habitual inarticulateness redescended
upon him. "You've--I know you're all right, Luke. Don't forget to
write once a week: your mother worries."
"I won't forget."
They stood, hands clasped.
Close by, the "train-crier" was calling in a high, nasal voice:
"Train for Mountwille, Doncaster, Downington, Philadelphy, _and_ Noo
York! First stop Mountwille!"
"And, Luke----"
"Yes, father?"
"Don't make charges when you don't know facts."
"Perhaps I have a weakness that way," Luke smiled.
His smile conjured another.
"That's right; now you're showing the proper spirit." With his free
hand, the elder man patted the younger's shoulder. "Stick to your books
and stick to Leighton. Gratitude is the best virtue--and the rarest."
Luke nodded.
"Now, get aboard," concluded his counselor. "Got your pass?--and the
checks?--I'll be running over occasionally, I dare say.--And let me know
if I can do anything for you."
Luke clambered into the smoking-car. He took a seat on the side near
the station and waved his hand to his father as the engine began to
snort. He paid his fare to the conductor, and, when Americus was well
behind him, he opened the window, tore the pink pass into a dozen small
pieces and let the clean April breeze carry them away.
At Doncaster he changed to the Pullman car that was there attached to
the train; he again carefully chose his seat, this time selecting one on
the side from which he could the better enjoy his first view of New
York. He had always liked this view when it came to him on his returns
to Boston after his vacations; it wakened in him the dreams of the day
which should light him into the city, there to work for its salvation
and the nation's. His youthful dreams were still with him, and, since
the moment when the sun had rent the Susquehanna mists, he was looking
forward to that sight of the southernmost walls of New York towering
like the ramparts of a mighty fortress above the crowded waters of the
Jersey City ferry. Then, indeed, with the battle yet to be fought, he
would feel as the crusaders must have felt at their first sight of
Jerusalem.
But Luke's train was late, and by the time that it reached the point
from which the city should have been visible, the mists had again
descended. They had deepened. All that Luke, with straining eyes,
could see were a few spectral turrets, distorted and ugly in the
thickened atmosphere, swaying overhead upon waves of yellow fog.
Sec.2. Jack Porcellis, with his mother's motor, met Luke. They were
driven to the apartment-house in Thirty-ninth Street where, upon Jack's
advice, Huber had written to engage two small rooms and bath. It was
Jack Porcellis (his real name was John Jay Porcellis) who had
District-Attorney Leighton for a brother-in-law and had induced that
official to give Luke a place on the staff of the public prosecutor.
Porcellis was considerably taller than Huber and very considerably
thinner. He was a quiet member of an old Knickerbocker family, who was
at home in every sort of society, had gone to law-school as an
intellectual diversion and now spent most of his time traveling, always
well within his income, through whatever lands chanced to attract his
continually changing fancy.
"I hope you'll be comfortable here," he said, when they had been lifted
to the fifth floor of the house, which was dry and hot from the steam
radiators and smelled as all steam-heated houses smell. The elevator-boy
was unlocking the door to Luke's apartments while Porcellis spoke. He
stood aside as the two men entered.
"I think I'll make out very well," said Luke. He handed the boy a tip
and dismissed him. "It's not so big as our rooms in Ware Hall, but then
there were two of us there."
The quarters were indeed small. The parlor was almost diminutive, and
the bedroom, which opened from it, was an alcove; the front window gave
upon the busy street, with a bit of Broadway to the right, and the
bathroom, in American fashion, was as large as the parlor.
"I did the best I could for you," Porcellis explained: he failed to
account for his friend's tone by the fact that Luke was fresh from the
spaciousness of a small town.
Huber softened.
"I didn't mean to criticise, Jack. I'm sure this will do splendidly.
After all, I'm in New York for hard work."
"I know you are." Porcellis smiled faintly. "You were never anywhere
for anything else. Well, you'll probably get over that before you've
quite spoiled yourself for everything. It's a way New York has."
Huber was tolerant. "Is it? You see, I don't know the town very well."
"Who does? However, I'll show you what I can before I sail--I'm going
to Russia next week, you know--and by way of a beginning I've brought
you a ready-made engagement for to-night. We'll dine at my club, and
see the Follies, and after that--well, I've got you a card to Mrs.
Ruysdael's dance."
"This doesn't sound like preparation for work," chuckled Luke; "but,
thank you--and who is Mrs. Ruysdael?"
"Who is Mrs. Ruysdael?" Porcellis repeated. He was stroking the spot
where his blond mustache had been a year ago, but where, because
mustaches had since become unfashionable, it no longer grew. "Why, the
Mrs. Ruysdael, of course: Mrs. Cornelius Ruysdael."
When he heard it in full, Luke remembered the name. Of Mrs. Ruysdael he
knew only that she was a woman of fashion; but her husband was
everywhere known as the worthy representative of a Dutch New York name
long eminent in the country's history. The family had been rich for
several generations, but they had proved themselves surprisingly able to
wear the cloak of wealth with dignity.
"I remember now," said Luke. "They're said to be among the heaviest
real-estate owners in New York, aren't they?"
Porcellis laughed.
"Well, yes, they are," he conceded: "but none of us ever think of that.
I doubt if even they do. They leave their estate to their agents to
manage, and we leave the story of it to the yellow press to talk about."
"I never knew there was any story connected with it."
"No? Well, for my part, I don't believe there is. Some labor-agitator
searched the records and tried to prove they made their first fortune
buying condemned muskets from the British garrisons just before the
Revolution and selling them as good arms to the Continental Congress.
He said they invested the profits in New York land as soon as prices
fell after the Declaration of Independence was signed."
"Was it true?" asked Luke.
Porcellis shrugged.
"It was all a long time ago, at any rate," he said, "and the Ruysdaels
are very nice people now: you would never guess they were worth more
than a million. Besides, Charley--that's my Wall Street cousin--says
they've somehow funded their landholdings with one of Old Nap's
concerns. I don't know. I don't pretend to understand finance."
Luke felt extremely ignorant.
"Old Nap?" he wondered. "Who's he?"
In reply, Porcellis mentioned the name of the man of whom Luke's father
had spoken so highly that morning at the railway station in Americus.
Huber pushed forward a chair.
"Sit down," he said, "and have a cigarette. I want to ask you one
question more. You've been all over the map. You've got the
cosmopolitan point of view. What do you think of this man?"
"I think," said Porcellis, accepting both the chair and the cigarette,
"that it doesn't make any difference what I think of him." He lit the
cigarette. "But I'm quite sure," he presently added, "he is the sort of
man nobody can help thinking _something_, about. Why do you ask?"
"Because----" Luke was not certain why he did ask. He could not
politely inquire of Porcellis whether he believed that his
brother-in-law had accepted, to aid his election, money from a power
that could not but be interested in the official actions of a
District-Attorney of New York. "Because," he compromised, "my father
was speaking to me about him only this morning."
"So were a lot of other fathers. So are a lot of other fathers every
morning. That's greatness. What I think is that Old Napoleon is the
greatest man this country has ever produced."
"You think so well of him as that!" Luke was amazed.
"I didn't say I thought he was good," Porcellis defined; "I said I
thought he was great. Greatness hasn't anything to do with good or bad,
or only accidentally. The greatest national figure a country produces
is the figure that most intensely and--well, and powerfully--expresses
that country. That's why Shakespeare was the greatest man produced by
Elizabethan England."
"Oh--Shakespeare!" laughed Luke.
"Why not?" asked Porcellis. "Shakespeare lived in a country and time of
expanding intellectual conceptions, and he expressed them the way I've
said. We live in a country and time of tremendous financial combination
and expansion; we're not working in the material of intellectual
conceptions, except as we conceive finance intellectually; we're working
with figures and dollar-marks and differentials and compound interest
and dividends as complicated as an astronomer's calculations. Well,
this little old man in Wall Street can see those figures before they
happen; he can make them come to life out of nothing--make them happen,
give them life just the way Shakespeare gave life to another sort of
ideas. These ideas are the ideas of our country; they are our country.
Here is a genius that most fully and powerfully, most intensely and
perfectly expresses them, and so I say he is the American Shakespeare."
Luke writhed in his chair opposite Porcellis. He could withhold the
question no longer.
"Then"--he almost blurted it out at last--"those campaign
contributions----"
But Porcellis was scandal-proof.
"Those!" he said lightly. "You'll have to ask Brouwer Leighton about
them."
Sec.3. After they left the theater, the two young men were driven,
again in the motor belonging to Mrs. Porcellis, up the noisy river of
yellow light that was Broadway, where their vehicle joined a long
procession, until they reached a cross-street in the early Fifties.
Then their car darted from the parade and plunged through a dark
thoroughfare to Fifth Avenue. They drew up before a house where Luke
could at first see little save that from its doorway, high above the
pavement, a long and narrow tent of white canvas striped with red ran to
the curb. Several other motors were ahead of theirs, so theirs had to
wait its turn.
"Is this the place?" asked Luke.
Porcellis nodded.
"It does look rather like a barn from the outside," he said, guessing
his companion's thought and agreeing with it. "That's a Ruysdael way:
they maintain the old tradition of severe exteriors; they don't believe
in flaunting their wealth in the face of the public; they believe in
keeping the best for their friends."
Luke leaned shamelessly forward. Whenever he had gone to dances
heretofore, the houses of his hostesses had shown lights in every window
and dispensed a glow of festivity to the streets; but this house,
essentially forbidding, stood dark and silent, its windows masked.
Except for the faint illumination of a street-lamp that sputtered bluely
at the corner, the only scintillations visible were two thin lines of
radiance, one along the pavement, at the bottom of the entrance-tent,
and a corresponding one above, between the walls of the tent and the
loose overhang of its roof: these and a glowing spot at the end of the
tent upon the curb where, between rows of ragged night figures watching
the scene, dismounting guests appeared and disappeared--white
shirt-fronts, and opera-cloaks, and the glint of jewels--like pictures
in dissolving views.
With each arrival, motors swung away from the entrance, turned to the
other side of the street, and proceeded to the farther corner there to
await their recall, while their drivers gossiped in the darkness or
drank beer at a convenient bar. Thus, with starts and stops like those
of an American railway train leaving a station, the Porcellis car slowly
approached the canvas mouth.
When that mouth yawned directly before them, Luke and Porcellis, the
door of their automobile held open by a servant in livery, descended
into the tent. A string of incandescent lamps had been hung in this
corridor--it was the light from these lamps which crept from above and
below the walls--and a thick carpet covered the pavement. Along it they
walked to the house-steps, where two turbaned East Indians stood ready
to relieve them of their hats and top-coats and show them to a room
prepared for incoming men-guests.
"Now," said Porcellis, "you see what I was talking about."
A greater contrast between the outside and the inside of the Ruysdael
house it would, indeed, have been hard to find. The reception hall was
of white marble and of a height generally seen only in public buildings.
Pillars held the distant ceiling; the staircase rose in a pentagonal
tower, a copy, Porcellis explained, of that in the Francis First wing of
the Chateau of Blois; the light, although its sources were hidden, was
almost blinding to eyes fresh from the darkness of the street; there was
music heard lightly from a distance, and the air was faint with the
scent of American Beauty roses.
Porcellis and Luke went up the carved staircase in the tower, which was
open at each landing so as to command a view of the hall, and were
directed to the men's room, where three valets were in attendance.
Against the walls of this room were several dressing-tables, each with a
strong lamp before it and each covered with toilet articles.
"I'm not sure," said Luke, in a whisper that was both amazed and amused,
"whether I'm in a belle's boudoir or a musical comedy star's
dressing-room."
"It's a judicious combination," said Porcellis in a conversational tone
that disregarded the fluttering attendants. He picked up a gold-backed
buffer and polished his always coruscating finger-nails.
Luke contented himself with a touch to his hair, which had a way of
standing upright, and a tug at his tie, which was forever straining
toward independence.
"What's this?" he asked as he lifted a glass case. He removed its lid
and sniffed at the contents. "It looks like rouge," he added.
"It is," said Porcellis.
"But I thought this room was for men," said Luke.
Porcellis drew down the corners of his sensitive mouth.
"It is," he said again.
They went toward the ballroom.
A man-servant with those brief side-whiskers which, twenty years before,
were used to proclaim the millionaire, stood splendidly against the
crush about the doorway. He bent to each newcomer and secured a name,
which, turning his head, but not moving his body, he then shouted, from
an impassive face, into the ballroom.
Porcellis nodded to him familiarly
"Good-evening, James," he said.
"Good-evening, Mr. Porcellis. And the other gentleman, sir?"
"Mr. Huber," said Porcellis with careful distinctness.
The servant turned his head toward the crowd in the room behind him.
"Mr. Porcellis!" he cried, and then, as if it were an afterthought: "Mr.
Urer!"
"It's all right," Porcellis hurriedly reassured Luke. "Nobody pays the
slightest attention to him, anyhow."
Nobody did. As they shouldered their way forward, the huge apartment
that they now entered was like what Luke thought the rooms of state at
Versailles must be, and the great hall in the Brussels Palace of
Justice. All about the walls, and especially about the large entrance,
was a press of men and women, standing still, or moving slowly from
group to group through an invisible, but palpable, cloud formed by a
mixture of the odor of withering flowers, Parisian scents, and human
sweat. A band of music, concealed in a far-away balcony, blared
rag-time, but distinct from its impudence, there rose from all these
people the noise of shoe-leather dragged over parquette flooring, the
composite of laughter in many keys and the perplexed buzz of small-talk.
The moving figures of the women, over whom countless aigrettes quivered,
had a kaleidoscopic effect, curiously unreal: an effect of flashing
colors--crimson, ivory, blues, greens, and pinks--splashing against
white breasts and backs, falling away from dazzling shoulders, the waves
mounting in oily satin, feline velvet, or clinging peau de cygnes, and
breaking in the foam of lace and the flying spray of diamonds. Here
even the ordinary black-and-white of the men became black-and-gray or
black-and-lavender, with gems for waistcoat buttons. On the
dancing-floor many couples, hugging each other so tightly that their
bodies touched from chest to center, swayed to the sensuous music of a
one-step, the leaders' high collars wilting, the fingers of their right
hands spread wide along the women's upper vertebras, their partners
looking into their intent faces from narrowed eyes.
The picture was too bright, too varied, for the unaccustomed mind to
seize it: Luke turned to Porcellis:
"And Mrs. Ruysdael?"
He was expecting his hostess to meet her guests at the door of the
ballroom.
Porcellis, however, did not wholly understand.
"Oh, she's about somewhere, I dare say," he responded--"though she
doesn't care for late hours and sometimes leaves after the third dance.
Come on. I'll introduce you to some worth-while people."
He introduced Luke to a great many people, for he seemed to know them
all. There was the British Ambassador and a German baron, a string of
dowagers with marriageable daughters (Luke danced with each daughter and
liked her), an artist, a scientist, and a bibliophile, and several
debutantes that were not marriageable at all, but were quite frankly
determined to marry.
As is the way when a name runs in one's brain, three out of five of the
people that Luke talked to sooner or later mentioned the man that the
elder Huber had spoken of that morning and that Porcellis had later so
highly extolled. The Ambassador said that this man had, by lending or
withholding tremendous sums, preserved the peace of nations; the artist
praised him as the only true patron of art in America; the scientist
told how the same man had established and equipped a now world-famous
institution for the study and cure of a world-plague; the bibliophile
envied his first editions and medieval manuscripts.
Leading his prettiest partner across the floor, Luke's glance, in spite
of his will, rested on a diamond pendant that hung from a thread of gold
about her neck and fell above her beautiful bust. She was a girl with
the face of one of those Italian peasant girls that the early painters
loved to paint as Madonnas, and Huber felt that his regard must be an
insult.
The girl, however, took the pendant between a white thumb and forefinger
and looked from it to him with pleased eyes.
"You like it?" she asked.
"I think it's wonderful," said he.
"It is pretty," she replied. "My uncle gave it to me on my last
birthday. It used to be in a heathen god's crown in some Chinese or
Hindu temple or other."
"The god ought to be pleased to lose it to you," said Luke, "even if it
didn't come to you directly."
"Oh, but it did come to me directly," she laughed prettily. "That's
half the charm of it. Uncle sent right over there and got it for me."
When Luke found Porcellis again, he asked him about this.
"Who's that girl with the broad, low forehead," he inquired, "and the
expression of a stained-glass saint?"
"You're aiming high," said Porcellis; "that's one of the richest girls
in New York."
"Who's her uncle?"
"Ah, she's been talking of him, has she? Well, I don't blame her. Her
uncle is the man I call the American Shakespeare. She'll get a lot of
his money, too, for he has no children of his own."
"Is he here himself?"
"Not he. He doesn't care for this sort of thing. That
football-playerish sort of fellow that the niece introduced you
to--that's young Hallett she's dancing with now--he's the son of George
J. And there's George J. himself!"
Luke remembered that George J. Hallett was one of the financiers whose
name was most frequently associated with the donor of diamonds and
benefactor of medical research.
"And," continued Porcellis, "do you see that stoutish, nervous pale man
over there talking to the British Ambassador? Oh, don't be alarmed:
they're probably not talking about anything more important than how they
hate dances. Well, that's the third member of the triumvirate: that's
L. Bergen Rivington."
Luke went home in the early dawn, feeling that these were pleasant
people, however they came by their money, and that he had certainly
judged the one that was not there long before he knew much about him.
Sec.4. Leighton was out of town--he, too, was before the legislature's
investigating committee at Albany--and the bar-examination was not to be
held for a week or more, so that Luke had the next few days to devote to
himself. The use that he put them to was an endeavor to learn what he
could of the city of which he had seen so little before he came to live
there. He saw what, considered of itself, was a great deal, but what,
considered as a part of New York, was minute; and at many turns, the
number of which surprised him--for long as he had known of the man's
power, he never before looked for its effects--he came across traces of
that financier who more and more seemed to him to be the controlling
force in America.
He was shown a great college, handsomely housed, splendidly equipped, in
which the higher education was provided free to every graduate of the
public schools that chose to take advantage of it, and this, he was
told, had been given to New York by the great "money editor." He was
taken through a cancer hospital, where mesothorium, which cost about
$52,000 a grain, and radium at $64,000, had been bought and were kept
and used without charge in the treatment of poor patients--where
physicians and surgeons of international repute were engaged to spend
all their time searching for a true cure and final prevention--and this
institution had been largely endowed by the same man, whose first wife,
it appeared, had died of cancer. There were homes for destitute widows,
pure-milk depots, orphan asylums, all assisted by this man or his
associates.
"Do you know him?" Luke asked Porcellis one evening as they sat at
dinner in the latter's club. They had been talking of many things, but
Luke found this one conspicuously interesting.
"No," said Porcellis. "He doesn't go out much. I saw him once. I was
being shown through his library--it's a marvelous place, full of
treasure-trove that would make a scholar think he was in heaven--and the
librarian pointed him out to me: he was sitting in the alcove that held
the First Folios, and he was reading the current 'World Almanac.'"
They both laughed.
"Still," protested Luke, "he seems more Jovian than ever to me. I don't
know whether he's a good Jove or a bad one, but I don't see how he can
really be bad when he does so much good."
Porcellis was still intolerant of the ethical question. He pointed out
that nobody of weight ever knew or cared whether Shakespeare's life was
moral or whether the effect of his work was immoral. What had happened
in regard to the American was that, because he had at last been secured
to come to a public hearing, people were beginning to realize that he
was a living man and not a force of nature. For a quarter of a century
he had been the greatest individual power in the United States, and for
all that time he had remained hidden. He had been doing daily
tremendous things, things that were epic in their sweep and yet affected
every man, woman, and child included in the census--and nobody knew of
them, no paper printed a word about them, until he had passed them out
of his own hands and into those of his lieutenants, not until, indeed,
his lieutenants had sent them so far from hand to hand that none could
tell precisely when and where they had started.
"The man's a genius," said Porcellis, "and like all geniuses he's just
what we all are when his genius isn't at work. What he feels is just
what we'd feel if we were in his place."
"Still," argued Luke, "the influence of such a man is too great; it's
dangerous. It oughtn't to be allowed in politics."
"There you go again!" sighed Porcellis. "Allow? How are you going to
allow or disallow a force? It simply is. This man can give the big
politicians certain large advantages if they pass laws that suit him.
The big politicians can give the little politicians certain lesser
advantages if they furnish the votes. The lesser politicians can get
the votes if they let the police charge the criminals for protection in
crime. Each man seizes his opportunity, and that's all there is about
it."
"You think so?" said Luke. "I can't believe it. I can't believe it
would be necessary if the right laws were passed and enforced. Wait
till your brother-in-law gets the District-Attorney's office cleaned out
and in working order. Then you'll see I'm right."
Sec.5. At ten o'clock on the following Sunday night, Luke, on a lonely
walk through the East Side, noticed that, whereas the front rooms of the
saloons were darkened, the back rooms were all alight. The doors to
these back rooms were forever swinging to the entrance and exit of
unmistakable customers, many of whom came out bearing foaming jugs of
beer under the indifferent noses of policemen at the corners. Luke
chose a saloon in Essex Street and entered it.
The room was small, but crowded. The walls, which were papered in
green, bore a few framed prints in high colors, advertisements of
various brands of beer and whisky. All about were small tables at which
blowsy women and men in stained clothes were drinking.
Luke hesitated. Nobody had questioned his entrance, there was no guard
and no password: the door hung free; but now his startled eye could not
see a vacant table, and he knew that he must appear an alien to this
place.
Presently a nearby woman smiled at him. She looked to be about fifty
years old. There was a mangy peacock feather in her straw hat, which
was set a-slant of dank black hair touched with gray.
"Hello, sweetheart," she said. "Come over here a minute." Her smile
was toothless.
"Shut up, Mame," somebody else commanded. "You're drunk."
Luke looked at the man that had spoken. He was sitting alone at a table
the length of the room away. He had a puffed face, red from liquor and
blue from an unshaven beard; his coat, once black, had turned green; he
wore no collar, and a part of the rim of his greasy derby-hat was torn
away.
"Shut up," he repeated. "You're drunk."
"Thank Gawd," the woman assented. Her acknowledgment of the accusation
was fervent; she returned her attention to the glass of whisky that
stood on the table before her.
"You can sit here, if you want to," said the man, addressing Luke, and
nodding at a chair beside him.
Luke crossed the room and took the chair. The other people in the room
were indifferent to his entrance with the same indifference that the
guests of Mrs. Ruysdael had shown. The woman that had invited him did
not look his way; even the man that had invited him remained for some
time silent. Luke ordered a glass of beer from an aproned waiter, who
came with a tray full of whisky glasses in one hand, and five foaming
beer-mugs in the fingers and thumb of the other.
"Will you have a drink with me?" Luke inquired of the derelict beside
him.
"Sure," said he, and Luke noticed that, though he did not cough, his
voice was hoarse.
They gave their orders.
"And perhaps your friend would have one?" Luke suggested.
The man raised his rheumy eyes.
"What friend?"
"The--the one that spoke to me when I came in."
"Who? That skirt? I never saw her before in my life."
Their drinks came, and the men drank for a while in silence.
"What's _your_ graft?" asked the man presently.
"I'm a lawyer," said Luke. He was first proud of the answer and then
ashamed of himself for being proud of it.
The man looked at him dreamily through watering eyes.
"Quit yer kiddin'," he presently remarked.
"I'm not kidding."
"You're a lawyer?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm a bum," said the man. He tilted up his bristled chin; his
seamed throat swelled; sounds that, because they were not speech, Luke
took to be song, came from his throat. He sang:
"The Spring has came, I'm just out o' jail;
I haven't any money an' I haven't any bail!
_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!
Halleyloolyah, bum again!
Halleyloolyah, give----"
He stopped abruptly. "I'm sorry for _you_," he said.
"Why?" asked Luke. He thought the sentiment of that song as horrible as
the creature that sang it.
"Because you're all tied up with everything. But me--there ain't
nothin' _can_ tie me. You fellers is in jail all the time an' don't
know it; I'm only in jail when you fellers can ketch me and put me
there."
Luke realized that he had found a philosopher who, however mistaken in
his deductions, had seen quite as much of the world as Jack Porcellis.
He attempted the vernacular.
"Is this a bums' joint?" he inquired.
The philosopher sneered.
"Naw," he said. "It's a bum joint, but it ain't a bums' joint. Too
much class for me. This bunch"--he included the entire company with a
wide gesture--"is all in the same jail with you. If they wasn't here,
you'd be where I am."
"I suppose they do give us lawyers cases," Luke granted; "but they seem
to get around the laws pretty frequently: they're wide open to-night."
"Sure they are. See that?" The other man indicated the waiter, who was
disappearing into the dark vestibule with two drinks on his tray.
"Them's for the cop on this beat, an' a vice-squad cop 'at's with him.
I'm wise. I seen Tony (that's the boss o' this joint) slip them a
fifty-dollar bill last Sunday--protection money."
"But some day," urged Luke, who was trying to plumb the dark pool that
was this man's mind, "the Mayor or the District-Attorney will get proof
of that sort of thing--some day when the Mayor and the District-Attorney
are honest men----"
"Don't make me laugh," the derelict interrupted: "me lip's cracked. The
Mayor and the District-Attorney's got to get elected, whoever they are,
don't they?"
Luke supposed so.
"Well, then. Tony an' his kind gets the votes. They can't elect without
the Tony kind says so. It's a fair trade. An' the Mayors an' the
District-Attorneys ain't got no easy thing of it, neither. Votes costs
money. They've got to get the money from the money-guys, the candidates
do, an' then they've got to let the money-guys kill as many people as
they wants to on their railroads without sendin' them to jail for
it.--Have another?"
Luke consented to another drink.
"This one's on me," said the other man, and he paid for the order. "No,
sir," he went on, as they were finishing their second drink together,
"there's only two sorts o' men that ain't tied up. One sort's me that
knows things an' ain't afraid to starve (there's lots of me); the other
sort's the guys at the top that does the tyin', an' there's only a few
of them, with the King as the boss-knotter."
"The King?" repeated Luke. "Who's he?"
But he had guessed the answer before the derelict gave it: the answer
was the man that Porcellis considered the greatest American.....
All the way to his apartments in Thirty-ninth Street that night, Luke's
feet were pounding to the wretched derelict's wretched hymn:
"_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!
Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
*CHAPTER II*
On a morning of that same April in a large rear room on the twentieth
floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, three men were seated around a large
mahogany table. They were talking business. Each man had his own
offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and quietly met in
this, the inner office of one, because most of the businesses of each
were closely connected, at several points, with the business interests
of all.
There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance of the 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 downtown 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 a
half-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 in height, not noticeably either above or below it, and inclined
to bulkiness. They had pale faces and close mouths and quiet eyes,
which looked out upon the world from under bushy brows with glances that
gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the little pouches of loose
skin below their lower lids. Each man wore a flower in the lapel of his
dark coat; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was
black; that of another was touched with gray; the man at the head of the
table was clean-shaven.
The man at the head of the table was, for the most of the time, even
less remarkable than his companions. He was somewhat shorter and
heavier; his abdomen swelled so that his shoulders were somewhat farther
from the table than were those of his associates; his bushy eyebrows
were somewhat more bushy; his pale face somewhat paler; his calm eyes
somewhat sharper, yet more calm;--and his lips, in addition to closing
tightly, were so heavy that the compression of the mouth must have
resulted from a habit acquired only by a strong and long effort of the
will. He sat with his great hands flat upon the surface of the table,
his thick fingers extended, his elbows raised at right angles to his
torso and pointing ceilingward. His chest heaved visibly, but his
breathing was inaudible. His eyes were everywhere. He spoke rarely,
but when he did speak it was as if he darted over the table, seized
something, and returned: he was startlingly brief and sudden, and was
instantly back again in his quiet watchfulness, apparently heavy,
unruffled, slow.
He had come to work that morning with his usual promptness--the moment
of his coming never changed--and in his usual temper. He had threaded
the maze of corridors with a springing step. In the mahogany-paneled
room with its heavy table and arm-chairs, and its one decoration, a rare
engraving of George Washington, hung between the two windows that gave
the place its only chance for sunlight, he found on his desk, in a
corner, a clean blotter, a fresh pen, a small pad of cheap paper for
memoranda, and nothing else. He pressed one of a row of worn buttons in
the side of the desk. He was ringing for his private secretary.
The secretary, who patently tried to look as much like his master as
possible, and succeeded, entered, a sheaf of open letters in his hand,
and noiselessly closed the door behind him.
"Good-morning," said his master. His voice was quite low; it was thin
and cool, but his words fell quickly.
"Good-morning," said the secretary.
"What's in the mail?"
"Not much, sir. Only about twenty things that need your personal
attention."
"_About_ twenty!" The master's words seemed to leap from him and
assault the secretary, but his face was set like a plaster-cast of calm
and his tone was even. "Do you mean nineteen or twenty-one?"
The secretary was too used to this manner of speech to be alarmed by it.
"Twenty-two," he said. He handed the letters to his master.
That one ran them over with a quick hand and a quicker eye. In terse,
sharp sentences, he directed his secretary how to reply to them, the
latter taking rapid stenographic notes of the commands.
"You have turned the begging communications over to Simpson to
investigate?" the employer inquired.
"Yes, sir."
"And the requests for contributions?"
"Yes, sir. There was one for a new hospital at Akron. The rubber
people have given five thousand, and----"
"Tell Simpson to write that I'll give ten thousand if the town raises
ten thousand more."
"Very well, sir."
"Has Mr. Brinley telephoned from Washington?"
"Yes, sir. He says he is to take breakfast at the White House
to-morrow."
"What's that? He was told to arrange it for to-day."
"He was; but he said he'd got word from the----"
"Never mind. To-morrow will do, if he only keeps his word this time.
Wire him: 'Right; but positively no more postponements.' Use the code
signature and send from somewhere uptown,--Anything from Albany?"
"Yes. Senator Scudder says to tell you that bill will be reported
to-day and rushed through before evening."
"Have Conover go up to the Astor and get Scudder on the 'phone and say
that the bill must be passed before noon recess. The Governor will sign
it immediately."
"Yes, sir."
"And Conover is not to mention names."
"Of course not, sir."
"Anything else?"
"No--except somebody has been trying to get you on the long-distance
wire from Hartford."
"That's Sparks.--Run over to the corner pay-station and call up the
legislative building at Hartford. Get Sparks on the 'phone. Be sure
it's the right man you're talking to. Tell him that the New York
gentleman he wanted to speak to--just that: the New York gentleman he
wanted to speak to--is out of town, but has telegraphed you to say to
him it is all right for him to go ahead. Got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Read it."
The secretary read from his notes.
"Now," said the business man, "get Mr. Rivington and Mr. Hallett on your
own 'phone and ask them if they can find it convenient to come around
here to see me for a half-hour. Tell me what they say, and then give me
Atwood and the other brokers in the regular order."
"Yes, sir."
"And, Rollins----"
"Yes, sir?"
"When Mr. Hallett and Mr. Rivington arrive, we are not to be disturbed."
The secretary went; the brokers were given their orders, and then came
L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett, the two men with whom this
third man was now consulting.
"About the Manhattan and Niagara----" began Rivington. He had a way of
moving his hands nervously when he spoke, and he rarely completed a
sentence.
Hallett, who was the man in a white waistcoat, stopped chewing his cigar
to ask:
"What are they kickin' about? We own seventy-five per cent. of the
preferred and sixty of the common."
"And it is too much, I think," said Rivington. "We need it only to keep
from unsettling the N. Y. & N. J. interests, because---- Fifty-five of
the preferred and fifty-two of the common, perhaps, but seventy-five and
sixty----"
"And, now," chimed Hallett, "this little fellow--what's his name?--the
president. Oh, yes: Dohan, that's it--starts out to launch a new
stock-issue to bridge the river five miles from town and come into New
York, an' all without as much as sayin' 'If you please' to us! We ought
to wreck his damned picayune road for him; that's what we ought to do."
The two continued their indignant comments. Every little while they
paused to give the crouching man at the head of the table a chance to
speak, and more often they looked at him to see whether he wanted to
speak; but, though his eyes were always alert to meet theirs, he did
not, for some time, utter a word.
"Of course," said Rivington, "we are not directors of the road, but
still----"
"Oh, hell!" grunted Hallett disgustedly. "Didn't you just say between
us we owned all the stock worth ownin'? We ought to unload and smash
'em."
"You may be right. I am inclined to think----"
"Right? Of course I'm right. I'm not goin' to be bullied by a handful
of dummies when I can sell them up as if I was a sheriff closing down on
a crossroads grocery store!"
"They certainly are impudent and----"
"They're beggars on horseback! Wastin' our money like this!"
"They have---- We should tell the legislature----"
"Gentlemen,"--it was the clear, crisp voice of the man at the head of
the table that interrupted; he spoke in a tone somewhat different from
that in which he habitually addressed his clerks and his brokers, but he
spoke as suddenly and with all the authority that he used toward
them--"if the M. & N. comes into New York, it will not take one-half of
one per cent. of the profits away from our other roads. For all but its
last thirty-two miles, the new line taps territory new to us, and the
new stock will have paid for itself, and have paid a profit too, in five
years."
Rivington and Hallett looked at each other. The latter took his cigar
between his fingers and folded his arms.
"What do we care?" he asked, but his tone had lost the assertiveness
that had marked it a moment earlier. The man at the head of the table
did not answer this question directly. He proceeded:
"Except for ourselves, most of the old stockholders are poor people.
They need the money, and the old holders are to have the first chance at
the new issue. In five years, then, the minor stockholders will have
realized a profit on their investment; so shall we. At that time we
could unload without hurting anybody but the officials that have defied
us. Always supposing," he added, "that the management observe a proper
economy."
Hallett's eyes burned.
"You're right," he said. "We can win both ways if we do that. The road
will be bankrupt, and we can buy it in."
The man at the head of the table did not smile. He only said:
"You have always been very naive, Hallett; but I did think you would
have seen this point sooner."
Rivington at length cut in:
"But the cost of getting the bill through the legislature----"
"The bill will pass this morning," said the man at the head of the
table. "The Governor will sign it immediately."
His certainty silenced them for a moment; but Rivington, whom the
outside world pictured as a pirate, was still timid.
"Yes," he said, "but the expense of the city ordinance----"
"Oh, we'll take care of that," grinned Hallett.
"And the cost of construction----"
"I said," repeated the man at the head of the table: "'Always supposing
the management observe a proper economy.'"
He settled back in his chair. He seemed to consider the subject closed,
and so, presently, did his companions. Within five minutes they had
left him, and he was ringing for Rollins.
"Rollins," he said, "take this letter."
The secretary seated himself at the far end of the table.
His employer walked to a window and looked out. His hands were clasped
behind him now, and he did not turn his head as he rapidly dictated:
"Robert M. Dohan. (Send it to his house address, Rollins, and mark it
'Confidential.') I understand that the bill of which you have spoken to
me will be passed and become a law to-day. I have just seen Messrs.
Hallett and Rivington and have secured their agreement to the plan
outlined in my personal conversation with you last week. In view of the
favors that you have done me in the past, I think it fair to tell you,
for your own use only, (Underline that, Rollins), that my friends have
decided that they and I ought to do what you thought they might decide,
viz.: unload at the end of five years. Considering your contemplated
resignation next year, this will not affect you, except favorably in
case you care to manipulate your own holdings in accordance with this
news.
"(Paragraph) I note what you say about the estimate submitted by the
construction-department; also the letter of the steel-rail manufacturers
which you inclosed, in which they say that the grade I suggested might
not wear well. I think their use of the word 'dangerous' is absurdly
exaggerated. We have used this grade on several of our roads and feel
sure from long experience that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear
for five years as well as the best.
"(Paragraph) My desire, and the desire of my associates, is to protect
the interests of the stockholders. With that in mind, I should state,
what you have probably already gathered, that we feel that the new line
must be built and operated with all possible economy. ---- Very truly
yours."
The secretary closed his book.
"Is that all?" he asked.
Without turning, his employer nodded, and Rollins left the room.
In the corner by the desk, a stock-ticker was clicking out yards of tape
into a high wicker basket. The man that had just given the M. &. N.
Railway permission to enter New York started to walk to the ticker; but
he paused again, at the second window, to look down on the thoroughfare
and buildings below him. From that height the streets of the city
seemed to be threads leading in every direction; they seemed to radiate
from the building in which the watcher stood. On the threads black dots
that were hurrying men and women seemed to quiver like entangled flies.
*CHAPTER III*
Sec.1. The legislature's committee made its report--the legislature was
heavily Republican that year--declaring that no wrong had been done, and
Luke accepted this verdict as a proof and triumph of right. He passed
his examinations and, shortly after Porcellis sailed for Russia, became
a member of the staff of the District-Attorney, who was to "clean up"
New York.
District-Attorney Leighton was a pleasant man, still young at forty, who
had a plausible and engaging manner supported by that bluff and
downright good-humor which passes current as the legal tender of
honesty. He had been in politics, and on the losing side, since his
twenty-first year, and during all that time he was fighting toward the
office which he had ultimately attained. Even his relatives, who were
people of so high a position that they regarded voting as something
beneath their caste and would rather be pillaged than lay hands upon the
pillagers, had kept him at a distance and were a little ashamed of their
pride in his success now that he had secured it. With a few other men,
all his elders, he had found his party a ruined fortress and rebuilt it,
stone by stone, now seeing the work of months plundered in a day, now
resisting his assailants by their own sort of arms, until the
stronghold, still far from impregnable or potent to command the entire
city, could at least dominate that spot beneath its guns on which he had
been able to take up his present position.
Under him Luke went cheerfully to work. He was at first disappointed
because his tasks were minor tasks and seemed to possess only the most
distant connection with the great crusade; but he was, in those times,
as modest as he was ardent, and he realized that he was still in his
novitiate. He tried petty offenders whose crimes were so insignificant
that he frequently found it hard to consider them crimes at all, and he
was often too sorry for the accused to be glad when he convicted them.
The first time he won a sentence, which was by no means the first time
he tried a case, he passed a sleepless night, because he feared that the
defendant's plea might have been the true one. It was long thereafter
before he could exult in a conviction that carried with it a term in
prison, even when he was certain of the condemned man's guilt.
The other members of the staff, more experienced in criminal practice,
showed no compunctions. They were a rather jolly lot of men, ranging in
age from twenty-five to thirty, with a cynical tolerance of life and a
tendency to regard their work as a game that everybody played solely for
the sake of winning it, with the opposing lawyers as the rival players
and with the accused as insensate pawns. Luke forgave them only because
of their unanimous and unbounded loyalty to their high-purposing chief.
"I got that case," declared one of these young men, a Larry O'Mara, when
he came through Luke's little office one afternoon after the court had
risen.
"What case?" Luke inquired.
"That one I had against Burroughs--and old Laurie was sitting, too. The
jury was only out ten minutes."
O'Mara was pink with triumph.
"What was the charge?" asked Luke.
"Larceny. It was hard work to make out; but the fellow's past record
did for him. I got that in while Burroughs was asleep at the switch.
When he did object, Laurie ruled against me, but the jury'd heard it all
right. Laurie's the strictest man on the bench, and Burroughs is about
the cleverest criminal lawyer in town."
Luke blushed for this victor:
"Was the man guilty?"
O'Mara's eyes were first wondering and then amused.
"They all are," he said. "If he didn't do this he did something else we
didn't know about--lots else. They're all guilty."
Luke supposed they were, but he could not understand his associates'
desire to secure convictions for the convictions' sake.
The innocent did not always suffer, nor yet the guilty. Luke was not
directly attached to the homicide bureau, the name applied to that
branch of the staff regularly employed to investigate and try cases of
suspected murder. Nevertheless, Leighton believed in giving his men
some chance at many branches of practice, because he wanted them to be
what he called "all-round criminal practitioners" when the time should
come for them to leave his service, and so Luke was once or twice called
into a capital trial. On one such occasion he was helping young Uhler.
Leighton himself had tried a striker named Gace on the charge of
shooting and killing a detective during a strike-riot, and Gace, greatly
to the District-Attorney's chagrin, was acquitted. Some slight evidence
adduced at the Gace trial seemed to point to another striker, Reardon,
and, though there was small hope of convicting Reardon, popular clamor
forced Leighton to plead for a true bill against him and bring him to
trial.
"I won't touch it any more, though," laughed Leighton. "Uhler, you'll
have to take it, and you might as well have Huber with you. We're bound
to lose, and so I'm going to give my assistants a chance to bear the
discredit. That's what you boys are here for."
Smarting under his chief's prophecy, Uhler, one of the youngest of the
staff, went into court and fought hard, which was doubtless the
intention behind Leighton's words. His enthusiasm was strong and
contagious. He convinced himself of Reardon's guilt, and he ended by
convincing Luke. The proceedings, indeed, went largely in the State's
favor until, shortly after the defense had opened its case, the man
Gace, who had previously been acquitted, was called to the stand to
testify to some minor detail. His examination was about to be completed
when he quite calmly volunteered the statement that it was he who had
done the killing.
"Cross-examine," said the defending lawyer and, covering amazement, sat
down.
Uhler looked helplessly at Luke. Luke, now enough of a lawyer to
believe that this was no more than a clever ruse to secure an unjust
acquittal, sprang to his feet and shook an angry finger under the nose
of the witness murderer, whose confession, had it been expected, would
have been prevented.
"So," he cried, "not satisfied with cheating justice in your own case,
you come back here to taunt it, do you?"
"Oh, I don't know as I'm taunting anything," replied the witness. He
was a big man with the frame of a blacksmith and the eyes of a
ruminating cow.
"Then," thundered Luke, "you really mean to tell this court that you
actually killed that man?"
The faintest shadow of a smile brushed the murderer's lips.
"They buried him, didn't they?" he inquired.
That answer lost Luke's case.
Sec.2. Luke's enthusiasm long resisted these miscarriages of justice
and the undeniably slow progress of his chief to secure indictments
against the Democratic politicians whose drastic punishment Leighton had
promised in his ante-election speeches. It resisted even the
callousness of the participants in the legal game, and the discovery
that the best minds at the Bar, of course seeking the most lucrative
field for their practice, were in the position of advisers to the great
financiers, their incomes, which far exceeded those of their more active
fellows, being composed almost entirely of the annual retaining fees and
"tips" for speculation. It required more and more resistance, but Luke
continued to hug tightly the faith that the wrongs of the world could be
set right through honest laws administered by honest men.
As he loved his work, so also he came to love the scene of it. The
vortex of the city fascinated him. Broadway, one color by day and
another by night, one spot of color uptown, a second at its middle, and
a third below the street that lies across New York like a gorged but
devouring anaconda; the dark passages full of tenements; the quiet
pavements bordered by prosperous dwellings; the roar of every sort of
business and the crackle of all sorts of pleasure; the joy and suffering
eternally intermingled, yet so intermingled that he could not tell which
caused the other, or whether they were independent; the whole tremendous
whirlpool whirled him, a straw among uncounted straws, now on its
surface and now sucked below beyond all plummets' soundings, and
intoxicated him by its dizzy revolutions.
He knew Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central Park. Because he
felt it his duty, he learned the outsides of the houses in the Italian
quarter, the French quarter, the Syrian quarter. He walked the Bowery
and thought that he understood it. From that artery of America, he
turned a corner and found himself in China, in crooked streets heavy
with the smells of the East, among shops whose signs bore Oriental
characters, among crowds of impassive yellow faces--men and only
men--where there was no sound of English speech. Once, passing the door
of a slum mission, he saw a crowd of half-human things, their heads sunk
upon their chests, listlessly droning a popular hymn around a puffing
harmonium: on one side of the mission was a saloon and on the other a
shop that displayed the legend:
+----------------+
| BLACK EYES |
| PAINTED HERE |
+----------------+
With some of his friends--for he made many friends both in the office
and out of it, and Mrs. Ruysdael and her husband, whom he finally met,
were exceedingly kind to him--he went on a tour of those cafes that
called themselves Bohemian. That night he descended from restaurants
where one drank champagne and heard songs by vaudeville performers who
thus earned more money than at the theaters which they had deserted, to
seats in shoddy beer-halls where there was dancing by women too old or
too unskilled to continue upon the stage; and on the way home from
"Little Hungary," a place in which a dull company drank strange wines to
the music of a good band, the motor that conveyed his party crept under
smoking naphtha lamps through a jumble of push-carts converted into
bargain counters, and past the overcrowded squalor of the quarter of the
Russian Jews.
Poverty hurt him, or the sight of poverty. Somewhere he read that one
per cent. of the families in the United States owned more than the other
ninety-nine per cent., but he explained this by the theory that the one
per cent. had created the wealth that they owned. He was told that
there were four million paupers in the country; but he ascribed their
condition to their failure to take advantage of a republic's free
opportunities. Somebody said that, during the past winter, seventy
thousand New York children had gone hungry to the public schools; Luke
was sure that the schools would soon supply their pupils with free
meals. From a report of the New Jersey Department of Charities that
came into his hands, he learned that, in New Jersey, one person in every
two hundred and six of the population was a ward of the State; but his
reflection was only that New Jersey must be badly governed. His heart
ached over what he saw; but his intellect satisfactorily explained all
hearsay evidence. He could go out to Ellis Island and, listening to its
thousands of immigrants prattle their hopes in forty-three languages and
dialects, could share their hopes. Evil administrators had hurt the
country by overturning the purpose of its founders; the remedy lay in a
return to first principles.
Already in men of the Leighton type and in their works, he saw signs of
the revival. He had more than one occasion to visit the Children's
Court. Its quarters near Third Avenue were cramped, but it was soon to
be fittingly housed, and already here especially adapted magistrates,
acting as judge, jury, and parent, conducted in kindly, quiet, and
colloquial fashion the cases of fourteen thousand children in one year.
These, all of them under the age of sixteen, were no longer herded with
mature criminals that completed their education in vice, though their
offenses ranged from mere waywardness to burglary. Their judges were
patient and sympathetic men. One was the president of a society called
the Big Brothers, the duty of whose members was to act in fraternally
helpful fashion to boys less fortunate than they themselves had been;
and some of the women probation officers of this court belonged to a
similar organization known as the Big Sisters. There were twenty-six
probation officers, some men and some women, and into their care were
given all the little offenders for whom the court entertained any hope
of reformation.
Luke concluded that the public schools, because of bettered conditions,
were turning out fewer candidates for the Children's Court than ever
before. He saw with high hope the Washington Irving High School for
Girls, the result of an agitation begun by pupils. Here was a building
eight stories high, and Luke, with the American love for size and
numbers, wrote enthusiastically home to his sister that it was the
largest school in the world.
"It cost half a million dollars," he told her; "it has a hundred and
sixty rooms and it holds six thousand pupils. Think of that! Six
thousand,--not your pasty-faced, moping diggers either, but all noisy,
laughing, healthy girls. The equipment is wonderful--just wonderful:
you girls from the old Americus High School would think you were in
Heaven if you came here. There are two big restaurants, chemical and
physical laboratories, a conservatory, a zoological garden and a
roof-garden, and laundries. There's a regular theater--stage, scenery,
and all that--a store, a bank, a housekeeping department, and an
employment bureau. They have an orchestra, and they dance. There are
nurseries with real babies in them--babies that can cry--and there is a
five-room model house, a hospital, and a section where they train
nurses. They use all these things really to _teach_, and this is in
addition to languages and the usual unpractical stuff. They teach
librarians' work, shorthand, typewriting, bookbinding,
costume-designing, and dressmaking. Why, Jane, the girls are taught to
make their own clothes. Every girl is expected to make her own
graduation dress, and only a few of the dresses cost more than a dollar
apiece. I'll bet you wouldn't like that part of it!"
Even his social life served subtly to confirm him, during this period,
in the opinions he had brought to it. He mistrusted combinations of
capital, because he thought they tended to restrain honest trade, but he
believed such combinations could properly and effectively be curbed by
legislation, and he had a fine respect for such of his acquaintances as
had made their own money by building up their own industries. He
doubted certain men in whose hands lay the administration of government,
but he was sure that the cure for this was the election of honorable
men. He brought to New York, and long retained, what he called a
muscular Christianity (he had read Kingsley), and, under its control, he
sought a remedy for the world's evils that he could synthesize with, a
respect for authority and an acceptance of the dogma that the individual
man is nothing and the omnipotent Deity everything.
He used often to be invited to dinners at the Ruysdaels' when there was
no other guest, because Ruysdael liked this earnest lad and enjoyed long
evening talks with him. On one such occasion, his host, little, sallow,
with almond eyes that gave him a strangely Japanese appearance, fell to
talking of these questions while the two men sat over a glass of
port--for Ruysdael liked the old-fashioned English custom of
after-dinner port--in the candle-lit, oak-paneled dining-room.
"I can't understand," said Ruysdael, "the shortsightedness of these
really honest men who call property a crime."
"They call it that," said Luke, "because it's the result of profit."
"Yes, but what's profit?"
"Selling dear what you buy cheap, I suppose."
"Yes, that's one way of putting it, but it's really wages. It's the
wages that the employer draws for his executive ability: he must be paid
for his work if his employees are paid for theirs. It's the fair return
that he gets for the risk he's run in starting his business, and it's
his reward for his years of saving up his money till he had enough to
start that business."
Luke agreed.
"Of course," said he, "we don't want the man that's done these things to
use his power so as to prevent other men from doing them, but we haven't
any right to take from him what he's earned or to stop him from going on
earning it."
In much Ruysdael's manner, Luke's father, during Luke's visits to his
home in Americus, would talk of government. Government, by which he
meant the particular form of government adopted by the United States,
was one of the few topics that could move the Congressman from his
characteristic reticence. He scorned the tyranny of Russia and the
English make-shift of a constitutional monarchy. In the United States
the people could rule; the means were provided; if they failed now and
then, it was for a brief time only. To Mr. Huber the majority was as
infallible in matters of government as, in matters of faith, the Pope is
to a devout Catholic, and the hope of the majority lay in that party
which had freed the negro from slavery and saved the country from
disruption.
To these ideals Luke was true. He saw the rottenness of Tammany rule in
New York and knew it for a symptom of the disease that made a national
danger of the entire rank and file of the Democrats; he saw the
integrity of Leighton, and accepted it as a true token of Republican
virtue. He wanted the government restored to its pristine simplicity,
wealth curbed of its newly developed predatory instincts, religion
restored to its place in the daily thought and conduct of man.
Sec.3. Leighton's announced intention to "clean up" New York was
proving, nevertheless, a slow process. He had great difficulty in
obtaining evidence against the Democratic politicians whose scalps he
had promised to hang to the belt of the public. Grand Juries had a way
of including enough partisans of these politicians to prevent the
finding of true bills. When true bills were found, petty juries
generally contained enough Democrats to persuade the other jurors to
acquit or to hold out for a disagreement. Even when convictions were
secured, the appeals had to be argued before appellate courts composed
of men that owed their positions to friends of the appellants.
"It's rotten luck," said Leighton, "but I believe they've got us
scotched. We've tried seven cases, four of them twice and two three
times; we've had our hands full with appeals, and the only one of the
lot that we've sent to jail is a peanut politician from Second Avenue
who doesn't control ten votes."
"Yes," said O'Mara, "and they let _him_ go because they believed he was
getting ready to go back on them next election."
"We've got to begin lower down," concluded Leighton, "and work up."
He began immediately. He found that, in violation of the law, cocaine
was sold at scores of places on the East Side, and that the use of the
drug was spreading alarmingly. Against these retailers he proceeded
with all the vigor he had shown in his larger and less productive
efforts. Evidence to convict the sources of supply was hard to get,
since those sources were high in Tammany politics, but small sellers and
street peddlers were rushed to jail with such commendable speed that the
trade soon seemed abolished.
Luke appeared in some of these cases, and won most that he appeared in.
He had been feeling the chill of disappointment, but this gave him fresh
courage. One day, when Uhler was on vacation and Luke was taking the
work of the absent man, he thought he saw the chance to approach "the
people higher up," which they had all been waiting for.
A gang-leader named Zantzinger had been dancing with his wife at a ball
on the second floor of a house in Avenue A. As he waltzed past the door
leading to the back stairs, a friend looked in and called Zantzinger
aside.
"Excuse me a minute," said the gangster to his wife.
He left her and went to his friend.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Butch Dellitt's down there," warned his friend, nodding toward the
door. "His crowd's after you 'cause they say you piped off Dutch's
brother-in-law's poolroom to the fly cops. He says he's goin' to croak
you."
"Where is he?"
"He'll be 'round front when you come out."
"Where is he now?"
"Down back."
"Down these stairs?"
The friend nodded.
Zantzinger walked to his wife.
"I've got a little business below," he explained. "Wait here: I'll be
right back."
He opened the door and descended the stairs. As he went, he drew his
revolver. Dellitt was standing in the doorway, with his back to the
stairs, smoking a cigarette. Without warning, Zantzinger shot him
through the head. Then he returned to the ballroom, apologized to his
wife for leaving her so hurriedly, and resumed his interrupted dance.
This was the story that came to the homicide bureau. Luke took it at
once to Leighton.
"And this man Zantzinger," he reminded the District-Attorney, "is the
right-hand man of the Tammany leader in that ward."
"Who saw him?" asked Leighton.
"Three men on the street."
"Got their names?"
"We can get them."
"Is the coroner on the case?"
Luke thought he was.
Leighton shrugged.
"Then that'll be the end of it," he said.
Luke could not credit this.
"Oh, yes," said Leighton wearily, "I mean it. By the time he's done with
the case, he'll see to it nobody knows anything. Why, man alive, that
coroner's the cousin of the ward leader."
"But you'll try?" urged Luke. "You'll fight?"
Leighton swung back in his swivel-chair. He put his feet on his desk
and clasped his hands behind his head.
"No," he said, "I won't. What's the use? I'm getting tired of trying
to do things with all the people taking no interest and a Democratic
Mayor and Police Commissioner fighting against me." He spoke like a man
at last driven to declare something he has long striven to conceal. "If
ever I want to be re-elected," he continued, "this office has got to be
more careful about taking up cases that are lost to begin with."
Sec.4. Luke fought hard with the ugly doubt this incident raised. He
tried to convince himself that Leighton had spoken only in a moment of
passing weariness and discouragement; but he daily found this endeavor
more difficult. What suddenly turned his mind to other things was the
news that an aunt, his father's widowed sister who lived in
Philadelphia, had died, leaving him a hundred thousand dollars.
*CHAPTER IV*
Sec.1. Luke had never expected to be possessed of so much money. His
father's income was comfortable, but it was well understood that the
family lived somewhat beyond it, and that what might be left at the
Congressman's death would go to his widow for life and, after that, to
Luke's sister Jane. The Philadelphia aunt had inherited her fortune from
her husband, and her affection for her relatives was generally supposed
to be slight. Luke, consequently, found himself in a position for which
he was totally unprepared.
"I suppose," he said to Ruysdael, to whom he went for advice, "that I
ought to invest it."
"You ought to lose no time," counseled Ruysdael. "A hundred thousand
dollars is too much for a young man to have at his call in New York.
It's not enough to spend, and it's too much to gamble with in the
bucket-shops."
Ruysdael thought he knew a safe investment.
"There's a man named Forbes," he said--"Wallace K. Forbes, who came to
the offices of our estate the other day when I happened to be there. He
wanted to borrow just the amount you name, and my agent says it's a good
thing; but we happened to have a bigger one on hand. His concern's an
old one, one of the oldest American firms in its line; this man's the
third generation of his family to be in it, so it's well-established and
has the good old-fashioned element of family pride behind it. Nowadays,
you don't find many men regard their businesses the way an English
landed gentleman used to regard his estates and his family honor; but
Forbes seems to be an exception."
"What is the business?" asked Luke.
"Ready-made clothing, and well made, too, I'm told."
"Still, he does need money."
"Yes, but you couldn't get in if he didn't need it. He only wants it to
complete some improvements he's begun. He's perfectly well-grounded,
but I suppose he has to keep up with the progress of the trade. Of
course, that very element of family pride might disincline him to give
an outsider any hold on the business, but if you want me to, I'll have
Croy--that's the man that runs our estate for us--look into the
situation and sound Forbes."
Luke, after some satisfactory inquiries in other quarters, acquiesced in
this proposal. All the reports were good, and that of Herbert Croy, the
shriveled Ruysdael lawyer, was especially rosy. Forbes expressed his
willingness to meet Luke, and Luke called at the offices of the R. H.
Forbes & Son's factory in Brooklyn.
The present head of the firm was a grave man with a direct and
unassuming manner. His aquiline nose gave his face the air of strength,
and his mustache and the hair about his temples being slightly touched
with gray, he seemed sober and conservative. He sat at a plain roll-top
desk, in a room simply furnished, and he lost no time in coming at once
to business.
"Would you like to walk through the place?" he inquired, when he had
told Luke much of what Ruysdael had already said.
"I suppose I ought to," smiled Luke; "though of course I don't know
enough about the business to appreciate what you show me."
Forbes smiled sadly.
"You are no different, then," he said, "from most modern investors, or,
for the matter of that, most owners of businesses either. In these
times the average president of a company thinks he earns his salary by
manipulating its stock; he seldom knows anything about the work that
makes the stock marketable. Our firm isn't like that."
Under Forbes's care, Luke was accordingly taken through the factory,
with which, he noted, the office of the chief administrative was in
close touch. He was shown the room where the cloth manufacturers
brought their products; the scales to weigh the material; the
windmill-like machine that spread the offered fabric on its wide arms
and, turning at the will of the expert buyers, displayed its burden
before the examiners in a strong north light; the long boards on which,
having been re-rolled, the cloth, once its quality had been thus
determined, was again uncoiled, an ingenious contrivance attached to the
uncoiling-wheel stamping its measurements at every fifth revolution.
"We have to be careful," Forbes explained. "Business isn't so honest as
it once was, and if the cloth-makers could gain an inch in ten yards,
they'd do it."
The factory, which closed the end of a street, was built about four
sides of a small square, and the center of this square was occupied by a
large room with overhead ventilation and lighting, the glass fluted and
sloping as the ribs of a Venetian blind may be made to slope, so that,
in summer, the sun's rays would be tempered to the workers under it.
Here, at the tables nearest the entrance, men were employed at designing
patterns of cardboard and working, amid busy calculations, with rulers
and T-squares, like so many architects' draughtsmen. From them the
completed patterns were taken to other tables at which they met the
cloth accepted in the first room, other workmen tracing the designs in
chalk upon pieces of the cloth. The problem of these second workers,
Forbes explained, was to arrange the designs in such a way that almost
no shred of cloth was wasted. Luke observed that they solved it with
astonishing skill; and, as each piece was completed, a ticket was
roughly sewn on it with written directions for its further progress and
blanks to be filled in by the signature of each worker responsible for
its future steps.
Then came what to Luke was the most wonderful part of the work.
Nineteen pieces of unmarked cloth to be made into suits of the same
style as that on which the chalk pattern had been outlined, were laid
under that piece and the whole bundle given to a man at a large table.
Through a slit in the center of this table, a knife of incredible
strength and keenness plunged rapidly up and down. The man in charge
forced the bundle against the knife, deftly pushing it forward, so that
the blade followed the lines drawn upon the top piece, and in three
minutes a score of suits of clothes were cut into their various parts
and were being sorted and ticketed and signed for waiting boys to carry
them to the sewing-machines.
"Those patterns look like the parts of a jig-saw puzzle," said Luke,
"and that knife looks like a cross between a jig-saw and the
guillotine."
"It cuts twenty suits at a time," said Forbes gravely, "and the bottom
one doesn't vary the thirtieth of an inch from the one on top."
"Twenty suits!" Luke wanted to rub his eyes.
"Yes; but the inventor is still at work on the knife. We hope soon to
get one that will do three dozen."
At each corner of the building was an elevator and a stairway, the
latter walled in so to serve as a fire-escape. Forbes took Luke up one
of these stairways, a broad and easy flight of which the corners at each
landing were protected by curved wainscoting to prevent jamming in case
of panic.
The three floors above ground contained the rooms in which the sewing
was done and one room known as the matching-room. All seemed well
lighted and well aired and well protected by the overhead pipes of an
automatic sprinkling-plant.
In the matching-room girls especially trained to the task selected, from
vast quantities of samples, the fitting shades of thread and buttons
best adapted to the different bundles of cut fabric brought by elevators
from the cutting department below. Beside them were four other girls,
who worked at a contrivance in which, when covered buttons were
required, an uncovered button, a piece of tin and a bit of cloth were
inserted, a lever pulled and the three factors withdrawn ready clamped
together and complete for use. From here, after the tickets had been
signed, and the necessary further directions added to them, the cloth
was sent on to the sewing-rooms.
Luke found those sewing-rooms crowded with machines of possibilities
that he had heretofore never dreamed machines could realize; machines
horrible because they seemed half-human, and diabolically intelligent;
machines that not only moved up and down in the manner of the old
foot-pumped sewing-machine in the second floor back of his home in
Americus, but twirled and danced over the cloth pressed under them by
women feeding them as a frightened keeper in a menagerie might feed an
angry beast. They were all of them run by steam or gasoline, and Forbes
told Luke that they were all made by one trust, which owned all the
patents. There were different machines for every kind of sewing, for
every loop that could be required of the thread: machines for hemming;
machines for the cord-stitch, the lock-stitch, the chain-stitch, and the
damask-stitch; machines for sewing the cloth together, for sewing the
lining, for sewing the trouser-seams; and there was one machine, the
needle of which moved in dizzy zigzag, for sewing, on a sort of
herring-bone design, the stiffening material into coats.
Next Luke was shown a room in which, on benches a foot from the floor,
beside tables six inches high, sat rows of intent little girls, their
arms flying like flails as they stitched the shoulders into the coats,
and still another row in which still other girls, their arms flying in a
similar manner, sewed buttons on coats, waistcoats, and trousers--the
only two processes that invention was as yet unable wholly to deliver
over to machinery. Lastly, there was a half-floor given to what at
first looked like linotype machines, and at these sat brawny women who
passed over the coat-shoulders long flat-irons, each heated by flexible
tubes attached to it and reminiscent, for Luke, of those terrible
instruments that, immediately revolving, grind the heart and lungs out
of a patient's teeth.
Forbes exhibited it all with a quiet pride. He said there was no work
sent out of the factory, and so no "sweating"; the factory was a union
shop; there had never been but one strike, and that one was speedily
adjusted by arbitration.
Luke was impressed. He secured favorable reports from a financial
agency and from a firm of expert accountants. Then he invested his
fortune in R. H. Forbes & Son.
Sec.2. About this time, the United States Senate happened to be
investigating itself and unavoidably stumbled upon a witness whose
testimony filled all the newspapers for several weeks and remained a
matter of public comment for quite two months. Perhaps because he had
fallen out with his employers, this witness insisted upon telling how he
had for ten years been hired by a combination of the ruling corporations
to influence national legislation. Five hundred letters and telegrams
substantiated his assertions; he gave dates and mentioned places; the
names of popular idols fell from his lips with infinite carelessness,
and the idols broke as their names fell.
Speaking in unimpassioned detail, the informer showed how his activities
had covered the entire country and included the chiefs of both the large
parties with a splendid catholicity. He had bought the services of
labor leaders to end strikes, had broken up unions by purchasing
information from their members, and had ended one dispute by having
himself appointed a member of its arbitration board. He had operated in
congressional campaigns throughout the Union, and he told how he had
bought the defeat at the polls of members of Congress that sought
re-election after having opposed the corporate interests at Washington,
and how he had spent thousands of the trusts' dollars in electing
candidates who, personally or through their bosses, promised that they
would support a high tariff and prevent the passage of laws too kindly
to the working class. He had hired congressional clerks and pages, the
former to betray what advance information came to them, the latter to
pick up valuable gossip. He had the secretaries of Congressmen on his
salary-roll when he could not buy or defeat their masters or when,
having bought those masters, he feared treachery. He had secured the
appointment of those legislators in his pay to important committees, and
he had, he said, planned and secured the establishment of a national
tariff commission for the benefit of the powers he served. Those powers
were headed by the man that Jack Porcellis likened to Shakespeare and
that the derelict in the Essex Street saloon called the King.
Luke, who of course had nothing to do with the management of the Forbes
company, nevertheless occasionally passed an evening at the quiet
Brooklyn home of its president, who was a widower living alone with his
only child, Betty, a pretty, high-colored, brown-eyed girl, as yet
unformed and only twenty-two years old. As a rule, these two men sat in
the parlor, a room that retained the character of Forbes's grandfather,
and talked of everything and nothing, the girl rarely intruding upon
them. It was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide of the
Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.
"I don't know what to make of them," sighed Luke. "It seems as if the
fellows at the head of our party were no better than the fellows at the
head of the other."
"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are
blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity
to."
"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected.
He still believed in the power of a party's individual members. "We've
simply been too easy-going in the past."
Forbes thought this would avail nothing.
"The parties themselves are rotten," he declared, "and the deeper a man
gets into them, no matter how well he starts out, the more certain he is
to be infected. You see how even the good measures are fraudulently put
through. Then here's our own state with a Governor we all believed
in--a Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man. He comes out for a
fine thing like direct primaries. Well, the other day an Assemblyman I
know went to him and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted
passed. What happened? The Governor said: 'Will you vote for the
direct primary law?' The Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against
that law. He said he'd vote against it, and he tells me the Governor
told him in that case the other bill wouldn't be signed. No, the thing
we need in this country is a brand-new party run by honest business men
on sound business principles."
Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but the next day the
papers contained further news of the senatorial investigation, which
lent weight to Forbes's opinion. A witness, after testimony further
entangling that great financier whose power seemed to pervade the
country's entire industrial system, described an alleged forgery in the
books of a railway known to be controlled by Porcellis's hero and eager
to evade the anti-trust laws. According to this witness, a "double
entry" of $2,000,000, representing securities that the road assumed in
taking over two other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance
sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of the ledger, and left
as a credit balance on the other side.
"They took all the securities of the acquired roads," he swore, "and
used them as securities for a bond-issue. They got that money and used
it to finance two other outside transactions that they sold out at a
tremendous profit."
He named as participants in this three Senators high in the councils of
Luke's party.
"Of course they're a bad lot," Leighton cheerfully admitted when the
District-Attorney's staff gossiped about the latest revelation, "and the
party is no better right here in New York than it is in any other state.
But you can't repair an organization by smashing it. What we need is
reform within the party. The party must reform itself. And that's what
I'm trying to bring about."
He did, indeed, give out interviews to this effect, and gathered a
considerable following. A little convention was called at Saratoga
where, fired by fresh faith, Luke made his first political speech,
holding up Leighton as the Erasmus of Republicanism. It was an
unfortunate simile, for the opposition press lost no time in lampooning
the District-Attorney as Erasmus at his weakest; but the movement grew,
and Luke, in common with his fellow-believers, began to see light in the
political darkness.
He still possessed the beautiful power of dreaming, and when, by night,
coming from a theater or leaving the house of Mrs. Ruysdael or one of
her friends, he turned into Broadway and saw the myriad lights of its
cafes mount heavenward and mix with and illuminate the pillars of smoke
and steam rising from its chimneys, he could detect in their wreaths the
faces of grinning devils raised by the pestilential life below, laughing
at it, dipping enormous white claws to stir it, and then hissing skyward
as if to proclaim, because of what New York was, their defiance of God.
Once or twice, to escape from them, he walked as far downtown as Wall
Street and loitered through the silent night, where the three churches
stood on the modern battleground of mad finance to remind of its history
the city with the shortest memory in Christendom. Mentally, he
converted that portion of the town to what it once had been. He saw it
the home of a modest aristocracy in simple houses along shaded streets,
a center of good taste, of culture, of social well-being.
The old Astor House, now fallen into shabby desuetude, he pictured as it
was when state banquets were given there, and when it was the one place
in which the distinguished visitor would stop. Close by the spot where
the Woolworth Building to-day houses eighteen thousand persons, the
Astor House had moved Horace Greeley to admiration because six hundred
and forty-seven persons slept under its roof. There Clay had received
the news of his nomination in 1844, and Webster the word of his defeat
at the hands of the Whig convention in 1852. That hotel had been
familiar to Pierce, Van Buren, Buchanan, and Taylor, to Seward, Choate,
and Douglas. Edward, Prince of Wales, had given it an almost royal
atmosphere, and recollections of Lincoln still hung about its tarnished
walls.
Would the old spirit come back again? Could it return? Luke was sure
that it could and would. He was sure that Leighton, and the honest men
associated with him, had begun a movement that must end by restoring the
nation's lost ideals. Government would govern, honest property would be
protected, religion would again open man's eyes to his own littleness
and the omnipotence of the Deity. There would be legislation that would
be the end of industrial combinations, of the crushing of the small
manufacturer and the grinding of the faces of the poor. No more national
banks would be merged, none would engage in promoting or underwriting;
interlocking directorates would cease, and the concentration of credit,
the Money Trust, would forever after be an impossibility. It was so
easy. It needed but an awakened conscience in the majority of the
voters and a few conscientious men to lead.
Sec.3. Luke's father died within three years after the young man
entered upon his duties under Brouwer Leighton. The elder Huber had
embarked his small fortune in an adventure that, as events soon proved,
was opposed to one of the interests of the great financier whom he had
once so much admired: those interests ruined the adventure and, more
from grief because of this than from any specific malady, the
Congressman fell in the fight. He died proud of his son--a pride that
Mrs. Huber and Jane zealously shared--and he left the family in Luke's
care.
The young man, who had loved his father in spite of all the differences
between them, and long felt the loss, met this situation without
complaint. Neither the mother nor the sister wanted to go to New York,
and, as Luke managed to live within his meager salary, he was able to
continue for them the home in Americus upon the income from his now
well-paying investment in R. H. Forbes & Son. Jane, indeed, soon
engaged herself and was married to a Doncaster lawyer who secured an
election to the late Mr. Huber's seat in Congress, so that Luke's
expenses in Americus were light.
He began to fall in love with Betty Forbes. The women of the Ruysdael
set did not fail to attract him, but he never considered them as within
his means, and so speedily placed them outside of his desires. Forbes's
daughter, on the other hand, was the feminine counterpart of her father,
and, as she grew, she developed many of his qualities, being quiet,
determined, unobtrusive, and womanly in the sense in which men like
Forbes used that word before Woman began to give it a new significance.
Accepting the world in the garb in which Forbes thought it well to
present it to her, she owned only the finest standards of her type, and
there was no meanness in her. Physically, she had that rarity in young
women: height combined with grace. Her hair, as Luke saw it, was like
so much sunshine, her eyes were clear and brown, and the radiance of her
coloring not even a man that was not her lover could deny. Luke, for
his part, thought her far too good for him. He told himself she was all
that the people of the Ruysdael set should be and were not: she made
important and shameful the casual relations he had had with women of the
half-world and that in their occurrence--less frequent than is usual in
the lives of young men--had seemed trivial and matter-of-fact; and
therefore he determined to win her, so soon as he could make a place for
himself through the pursuit of his ideals.
Sec.4. That pursuit grew daily more difficult. The candle of his faith
in Leighton, though it continued to burn steadily, burned less fiercely
than of old. The movement for reform within the party spread, but it
spread almost too rapidly; it came to include certain politicians who
were now for the first time in their careers evincing a desire for the
organization's betterment, and that only after the organization had
failed to re-elect them to office. These men, in one or two instances,
came into control, and it was soon necessary to reform the reformers.
Sometimes Leighton appeared disheartened, and Luke began to acquire a
weary and well-nigh uninterested manner in dealing with his part of the
crusade.
"Look here," he once said to his chief, "that fellow you got a pardon
for last week has been in to see me."
"Yes?" said Leighton. His feet were cocked on his desk and, in his
favorite attitude, he was leaning back in his chair with his fingers
clasped in his crisp, black hair. His face was not the face that Luke
had known when he first came to New York.
"Well," continued the assistant, "he came in just after I got back from
the Ludlow Street Jail. That place is full of nobody but husbands who
won't pay alimony, but the keepers act as valets and barbers and do
light housekeeping for the prisoners."
"It's the civil prison. We can't help it."
"Couldn't you swing things so a Grand Jury would report on it?"
"What's the use? And what has Ludlow Street got to do with Auburn,
where our pardoned friend has been?"
"Only this: the rich men in Ludlow Street are living as if they were in
a hotel, but at Auburn, this fellow says, they've got a cell with
pointed nails in the floor so a prisoner sent to it for bad behavior
can't sit down or sleep. They've---- Oh, I can't go into it all now;
but the women are treated as bad as the men; the thing must be worse
than the Black Hole of Calcutta, and all the while the State's paying
for the warden's horses and carriages."
Leighton showed some interest, but later, when Luke returned to the
subject, he said there was nothing to be done: the political situation
would not just then permit it.
Came the unmasking of one of the new partisans of reform. This man, a
Simon Kaindiac, was an inspector in the New York post-office. Federal
detectives arrested him and showed him to have made a fortune by
extortion from swindling concerns that were using the United States
mails to entrap their victims.
"I know, I know!" cried Leighton peevishly when Uhler brought him the
news in Luke's presence. "But how am I to blame for that? All the
papers will be at me for it. As if I were responsible for the business
morals of every man that happened to think as I do about the political
ethics of the party!" He turned to Luke. "What's on _your_ mind,
Huber?"
Luke said that what was on his mind was this: the office had that
morning received the report of investigators who pointed out that, since
the success of the cocaine raids, heroin had taken the place of the
proscribed drug.
"Well," said Leighton, "I'm sorry, but the laws governing the sale of
heroin aren't the same as those governing the sale of cocaine, and,
until they are, you'll find you can't successfully prosecute under
them."
"We might get at the thing another way," Luke protested. His growing
love for Betty had given him new views on some old subjects. "They say
the girls in the houses----"
Leighton swung his feet to the floor. His tired face worked irritably.
"Now, don't begin on them," he commanded. "They're the police's affair,
anyhow. They've always existed and always will. They simply adapt
themselves to whatever form of society happens to exist. No really
effective method of regulation, let alone suppression, has ever been
devised or ever will be. Gee whiz, young man, do you know what you'll
get up against if you tackle this subject? For four thousand years the
high-brows have been trying to make it unpopular, and they haven't
succeeded yet."
It was much the same when Luke and O'Mara came across the trail of
corruption among the police. They found one man who would make affidavit
to the fact that patrolmen had paid him to instigate burglaries in order
that the patrolmen might make arrests and win promotion. This man had
friends among the keepers of illegal resorts who would swear to paying
tribute to police captains. He introduced the two lawyers to a
collector who said that $2,400,000 were yearly paid in this way, that he
himself was the go-between for a police lieutenant, securing from fifty
to five hundred dollars a month each from those who bought protection.
No discretion seemed to be used, and he showed checks to corroborate his
story.
"Do you think you could do anything on such evidence?" sneered Leighton.
"You couldn't send a yellow dog to jail on it. This fellow confesses
he's a crook himself. Start an agitation to force the Police
Commissioner to resign as unfit? Not much! If he resigned, 'unfit'
would mean 'guilty.' His crowd's in the saddle, and if you want to
unhorse him, you've got to unhorse them."
He walked up and down the floor.
"The trouble with us is we don't fight the devil with fire," he said;
"and the trouble with the whole system is too many laws. There are too
many lawyers at Albany and Washington; they know all about law and
nothing about Man, so when the public conscience turns over and whines
in its sleep, these fellows think they can cure it of what ails it by
passing a few more laws. They pass a law against dance-halls, and they
breed brothels. That's the way it goes all down the line. They pass a
lot of such laws and then say: 'Now, let the District-Attorney do the
rest.' I wish they had my job for one day! People have got to
understand that other people don't indulge their tastes out of mere love
of law-breaking."
He took another turn of the room.
"And if we're going to whip political gangs," he said, "we must have a
political gang of our own, and one better than the one we happen to be
fighting. There's Tim Heney over on the East Side. He may be as crooked
as God makes them, but when people give him votes, he gives them coal in
winter and picnics in summer. He goes to their funerals and their
weddings, and he knows more about what the people of this country want
than Thomas Jefferson would have known if he'd lived to be a hundred.
And what's more, he can do what none of your statesmen ever can do: he
can keep them quiet. Do you wonder? Think what he does for them. Do
you wonder they stick to him?"
Sec.5. Luke began to believe that Forbes was right: There was need of a
new party. Daily his lethargy increased; daily he lived more in his
love for Betty and in the dreams that emerged less and less upon the
plane of his actual life.
His contact with the bar did not raise either it or the bench in his
estimation. In a file of documents at his office, the legacy of a
former administration, he came across vouchers for sums aggregating
$3,000 paid by a local railway to witnesses who had sworn against a
lawyer indicted for subornation of perjury in pressing a damage-case
against the company, and among these was one for $500 paid to the
referee that signed the report. He heard of a rural courthouse that by
night became a gambling-house conducted by court officers; there was a
judge on the Pacific Slope who sold a patent, the idea for which he
stole from the plaintiff in a patent case in his own court; the
District-Attorney of Doncaster County, in Pennsylvania, told Luke that
only the statute of limitations saved from jail three associate judges
of that county who had accepted bribes in the granting of liquor
licenses, and that a judge in a nearby county had accepted $3,500 toward
his campaign fund from brewing companies whose retailers must apply to
him for licenses. It seemed that of two of the most prominent judges of
the higher court in New York, one was chosen directly through the
efforts of Tim Heney, and the other was the brother of the principal
member of a trust which had cases in his court. A judge of a Federal
Court was forced from the bench because of his financial interests in a
company with which he had to deal in his judicial capacity, and a New
Jersey judge, a friend of Leighton, was said to be hearing suits to
which a certain railway was a party and then, during vacations,
appearing in a neighboring county court as a lawyer retained by the same
company.
The follies of the law appeared to be more numerous than its faults.
One judicial decision enjoined members of a labor union from the
peaceable persuasion from work of individuals not under agreement to
work for the corporation in the mills of which a strike was in progress.
A Philadelphia jurist denied the right of free speech to aliens. In
Illinois, Smith appealed from a conviction for swindling Brown, and the
Supreme Court upheld him because the indictment, which read that Smith
"did unlawfully and feloniously obtain from Brown his money," was
indefinite and misleading: the learned court held that the pronoun "his"
might refer to either party, and that the Grand Jury might simply have
been indicating its belief that Brown obtained his own money unlawfully.
Worse miscarriages of justice were, of course, common, even in
Leighton's office, and sentences were often out of all proportion to the
crimes that incurred them. The editor of a radical paper in Paterson
was given an indeterminate term in prison of not less than one year and
not more than fifteen years for criticising the Paterson police. The
larger the scope of a swindler's transactions, the better his chances of
immunity. One minor case long remained in Luke's memory. A clerk in a
trust company disappeared with $25,000, and a fugitive bill of
indictment was returned against him; the runaway opened negotiations
with his former employers by means of advertisements in the Paris
newspapers and then used his wife as an intermediary until the trust
company promised to have the District-Attorney submit the indictment for
a verdict of not guilty if the clerk would return with the $15,000 still
in his hands; the careful fugitive hid $7,500 in Germany, and returned
with the rest; he refused to tell the hiding-place until he was safe;
the company found the District-Attorney willing to follow its
suggestion; the verdict of Not Guilty was accordingly recorded, and the
clerk, free from further harm, made over to the company the remaining
$7,500 that he had left in Europe as an anchor to windward.
There was probably no more laxity among lawyers than among men of other
professions, but to Luke's mind it seemed imperative that traders in
justice should be especially just. He came across countless cases of
pettifogging among shyster practitioners, and nearly as many suspicious
actions in the ranks of their cleverer and, therefore, more successful
and eminent brethren.
Ever seeking remedies, he once drew up a list of such as he found. He
wanted more publicity and freedom of criticism; measures to curb the
bench's power to declare laws unconstitutional, to force it to give
fuller reasons in support of its decisions; he wanted devices to end
"the law's delays," simplified procedure and judges who were closer to
the people and farther from the corporations; he thought the courts of
appeal ought to be forced to decide every question in every case
appealed to them; and he advocated but one appeal in civil actions
together with the right of recall both in regard to judges and to their
decisions.
Sec.6. He had come to a point where he doubted, not it is true
Leighton's intentions, but his ability to achieve them. Those were the
days when the Progressive Party was being formed, and Luke for some time
considered it as a hopeful sign. Forbes enlisted in the ranks of the
new organization and championed it wherever he went, not least among the
workers in his factory. Luke had joined a club of young men who had for
the most part inherited their money and were unanimous for the new
movement; it was time, they said, that politics should be taken out of
the hands of the muckers, and they came near to convincing Luke until,
in a moment of enthusiasm, he happened upon secrets which showed him
that the men in power in this party were not different from the men that
had spoiled Leighton's plan for the purification of the Republican Party
from within. From a source he could not doubt, he heard that even George
Hallett had talked of offering his support "because these old crowds are
too greedy; they're chargin' us too much; it's got to be highway robbery
that big business has to submit to, and I'm tired of it."
For some time Luke lost faith in the possibility of any cure. There was
talk of a movement to fuse the reform voters of all parties, but it left
him cold. He had been a successful prosecutor, and his name was familiar
to newspaper readers; his advocacy of Leighton had won him a prominence,
even a certain following, among the public; but the irony of life was
too much for him; he had, at this period, an eye too appreciative of the
odds against him. He saw Betty two or three times a week, took her
motoring and to the theaters, but he refrained from showing her that he
loved her, because he saw no chance of offering her himself as a man
worth while. The lethargy of his manner became more marked. He began
to bear the outward tokens of one that does not care. To this he had
come after four years in New York.
*CHAPTER V*
Sec.1. The hideous North Bridge disaster occurred on a spring morning
during the last year of Leighton's first term in office. The
District-Attorney, whose habitual disparagement of his post did not dull
his desire to retain it, was busy planning for re-election, and the work
of his staff, labor how they would, was congested. The assistants were
straining to make a record of convictions with which their chief might
go before the electors in the autumn, and were giving to participation
in political councils every half-hour that they dared spare from their
legal tasks; they were hard driven and worn to the nerves; yet the news
of the wreck of the Manhattan & Niagara Railway, immediately within the
city's limits, burst through doors that had been opened only to men with
power or appointments and swept, even from the collective mind of the
corps, the bulking thought of jury lists and ballots.
The Manhattan and Niagara had entered New York only a few years before,
with a line that tapped fresh territory. Along this line real-estate
operators forthwith plotted ten or a dozen towns, and white-and-yellow
suburbs leaped up like mushrooms. They were peopled by clerks and small
businessmen that came into the city over the M. & N. every morning and
returned home by the same route each evening.
From the opening of the new line, complaints had been common: it was
said that the service was inadequate, that the cars and other
rolling-stock were largely second-hand material purchased from the older
New York & New Jersey Railroad; that the rails were the cheapest
obtainable, the ties bought from an abandoned branch line near Buffalo.
One serious wreck had preceded that at the North Bridge, but had not
been followed by the improvements the company had promised. The patrons
had protested with all the vigor Americans exhibit when they feel that a
public-service corporation is cheating them, and had stopped as far on
the discreet side of action as protesting Americans usually stop: the M.
& N.'s parsimony became grist for the mill of the humorous weeklies and
produced no further reaction. This morning, a train crowded with men
going to their offices plunged through a bridge crossing an uptown
street: a hundred passengers were wounded and twenty-five killed.
The earliest editions of the evening papers shrieked the news, and
special editions rushed from the presses. In most of them the M. & N.
had taken care to be a heavy advertiser, but here was an event so
clearly due to the railway's known policy that no paper could belittle
the culpability of the management: the bridge had been recently examined
and pronounced safe by state inspectors, yet all reports agreed that it
was constructed of the very lightest material, and the earliest evidence
showed that a rail had flattened and thrown the train. To persons
having a fair knowledge of current finance, it was known that the M. &
N. was controlled by the group of capitalists who were actively at the
management of the nominally rival N. Y. & N. J.
Luke sent his office-boy to buy him the first edition that he heard
called beneath his window. It placed the dead at a hundred and the
injured at thrice that figure, and when Huber's eyes caught the obscure
paragraph that hinted at the real ownership of the road, his cheeks, now
so generally pale, reddened, and the hand that held the paper trembled.
Something of his old indignation and purpose woke in him. He ordered
the boy to bring him a copy of each fresh edition as it appeared on the
street, and though the lists of victims shrank to their true number, the
outstanding fact of the owners' guilt remained.
Leighton passed through Luke's room on his return from luncheon. His
face was drawn with the long worry of his campaign; he had been eating
with two politicians and shaping plans while he bolted food.
"Begins to look as if we can get the indorsement of the anti-Tammany
Democrats," he said as he hurried by. "I've just had a talk with Seeley
and Ellison. They're coming here at three o'clock."
Luke held up his paper.
"This is an awful thing," he said.
"What?" asked Leighton. He passed beside Luke's desk. "Oh, the North
Bridge wreck? Yes, isn't it? When Ellison and Seeley come, don't let
anybody butt in on me."
"You know who are really the responsible crowd in the M. & N.?" Luke
persisted. His manner was the sleepy manner that had grown upon him for
the past twelvemonth, but his eyes were keen.
"Yes," said Leighton absently. He ran his fingers through his always
disordered hair. "Yes I know, but we couldn't prove it." He looked at
his watch. "Don't forget," he concluded, "you're to head off anybody
that comes after three o'clock, and if you're busy, then turn them over
to one of the other fellows."
Sec.2. At half-past four Luke's office-boy announced James T. Rollins.
Luke looked up heavily from the latest edition of the _Evening World_.
"Who's James T. Rollins?" he inquired.
The boy did not know. "But he looks like he owned the Stock Exchange,"
he said. "Wanted the Boss: I told him he was busy."
Luke wearily laid aside his paper.
"Very well, bring him in."
The boy went out and straightway reopened the door to admit the visitor.
Dressed in a russet brown, Rollins was short and stout; his eyebrows
were bushy, and he made an effort to keep his thick lips drawn in a firm
line. He so much resembled the pictures of the man just then predominant
in Luke's mind that the assistant District-Attorney was startled.
"Mr. Rollins?"
The visitor tried to speak, but seemed to be unable to accomplish
articulation. He nodded. He stood erect in the attitude of one
accustomed to receive orders, and his right hand tapped his stiff hat
against his thigh.
Luke indicated a chair beside his desk.
"Sit down."
Rollins complied. He sat far forward in the chair, as if expecting to
be ordered out of it at the next moment. Both hands now clutched the
brim of his hat, which he held between his fat, outspread knees.
"You wanted to see Mr. Leighton?" inquired Luke.
Rollins coughed.
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry." Luke was accustomed to callers of the hesitant sort: he
wished that this one would go and leave him alone with the new idea that
was growing in his brain; but Leighton, like the good politician that he
was, had always given strict orders that every caller should be well
received. "I'm afraid Mr. Leighton's very busy now. He has some most
important business in hand."
Rollins made an effort toward dignity; his words succeeded, but his
manner of uttering them failed:
"My business is important, too."
"And immediate?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then perhaps I can attend to it for you."
Rollins shook his head.
"I've got to see the District-Attorney."
"But I am his assistant."
"Yes, sir, I know. But this is confidential."
Luke began to lose patience.
"Well," he said, "as I told you, I'm sorry, but you can't see him."
In spite of Leighton's orders and his own customary obedience to them,
Luke's voice had become sharp. It was just then only the sharpness of
an underling; but, because Rollins himself was an underling, the visitor
resented it, and this resentment gave him the courage he wanted. He
stood up, and he bore himself with an erectness which had a fresh
character.
"It's him that will be sorry," he said. "I came here to give him
information that'd re-elect him."
Notwithstanding the man's new attitude, Luke thought he scented the
crank. All sorts of cranks infested the District-Attorney's office, and
every sort was certain it could purge the city or re-elect Leighton.
Luke lost his temper. He spoke with the drawl with which he commonly
spoke, but his tone was bitter. His tongue laid hold of the uppermost
thought in his head.
"I suppose," he said, "you've come here to place the blame for the North
Bridge wreck?"
The breath caught in Rollins's throat.
"How did you know?" he demanded.
It was not a crank that asked that question: it was a sane man badly
startled. Luke recognized the distinction and instantly resolved to
push the advantage he had fortuitously gained. He rose, smiling slowly.
"You've told me you knew I was one of the assistant district-attorneys
of New York," he drawled. "I would advise you to act on the knowledge,
Mr. Rollins, and not to lose any time about it."
"I----" began Rollins; but bluster came to the aid of his timidity.
"No," he said, "I've got to see Mr. Leighton."
Luke had no idea who his visitor was or what information he might
possess, but he was now certain that worth-while information was in
Rollins's possession. Without further fencing, the lawyer, therefore,
resorted to an old stratagem that he had learned when he first entered
the District-Attorney's office: on the bare chance that the evidence
might be documentary and within reach, he took a quick stride towards
Rollins, raising his right hand as if to seize him. At once the right
hand of Rollins shot upward and stopped protectingly over his breast.
"Now then," said Luke, "hand me those papers that you've got in your
breast-pocket."
"No," said Rollins; "no; they're for Mr. Leighton."
"Hand them over.'"
"They're mine."
"If you don't hand them over," said Luke lazily, "I shall take them."
"You've got no right to!"
"You'd better save yourself trouble, Mr. Rollins."
"I won't!"
From under his lazy lids, Luke saw that the man was only frightened.
With a flash of inspiration, the lawyer guessed something of the truth.
This fellow was probably a clerk in the M. & N. offices.
"You won't be arrested for robbing the office-files, if that's what
you're scared about," he said; "and you won't be told on and
discharged."
Rollins was visibly relieved.
"You give me your word, Mr. Huber?"
"I do. Come on now: let's see what you've got."
"And--I'm not a rich man, Mr. Huber."
Luke's face showed his disgust.
"I shan't pay you a cent," he said; "but I daresay Leighton won't mind
paying. Only even he won't buy a pig in a poke. Give me those papers.
If they're worth anything, I'll take you into the District-Attorney's
room right away--or, if there's somebody in there, I'll have him out
here."
Rollins realized that Luke meant what he said. He believed, moreover,
that his inquisitor was merely cautious.
"All right," he agreed, though with some reluctance. "This is a letter
from my employer to a man that always had to return such letters after
he's read them. The other letter is the letter from the rail
manufacturers that's referred to in the first one. I got them both
by----"
"I can guess how," said Luke.
He put out his hand and into it Rollins placed two sheets of paper, that
were headed on top simply by an embossed Wall Street address and dated
almost five years before.
Luke read:
"_Confidential_.
"MR. ROBERT M. DOHAN,
"Delaware Avenue,
"Buffalo, N. Y.
"DEAR MR. DOHAN:
"I understand that the bill of which you have spoken to me will be
passed and become a law to-day. I have just seen Messrs. Hallett and
Rivington and have secured their agreement to the plan outlined in my
personal conversation with you last week. In view of the favors that
you have done me in the past, I think it fair to tell you, _for your own
use only_, that my friends have decided that they and I ought to do what
you thought they might decide, viz.: unload at the end of five years.
Considering your contemplated resignation next year, this will not
affect you, except favorably in case you care to manipulate your own
holdings in accordance with this news.
"I note what you say about the estimate submitted by the
construction-department; also the letter of the steel-rail manufacturers
which you inclosed, in which they say that the grade I suggested might
not wear well. I think their use of the word 'dangerous' is absurdly
exaggerated. We have used this grade on several of our roads and feel
sure from long experience that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear
for five years as well as the best.
"My desire and the desire of my associates is to protect the interests
of the stockholders. With that in mind, I should state, what you have
probably already gathered, that we feel that the new line must be built
and operated with all possible economy."
The signature was the signature that Luke expected.
"Those rails," said Rollins, "weren't replaced. Dohan resigned, and
these letters have been in our office ever since. The crowd was
planning to unload in November."
"Yes," said Luke dryly. His face was immobile and his voice calm, but
his heart seemed to beat against his ribs, demanding freedom. "Come on
in here to Mr. Leighton's office."
Sec.3. He had forgotten Seeley and Ellison, but they were already gone,
and Leighton was alone. Apparently the conference had been satisfactory,
for the District-Attorney's face was a little less careworn.
"Mr. Leighton," said Luke, closing the door, "this man"--he indicated
Rollins by a lazy movement of his hand--"is a secretary in the employ of
the person to whom these letters belong--or belonged." He held out the
letters that Rollins had given him.
Leighton's face clouded.
"Office business? I thought I told you I had some personal matters to
think over."
Luke choked an impulse of resentment.
"If you'll look at these letters," he said, "I believe you'll find they
apply to--both sorts of duties."
Leighton took the papers with a gesture of annoyance, but when he saw
the signature to the more important of them, his eyes shone, and he
looked up quickly.
"Where did you get these?" He flung the question at Rollins.
The informer had been standing behind Luke, as if seeking his shelter.
His breath came heavily.
"I found them in the office-files," he mumbled.
"He stole them," said Luke quietly.
"Oh, Mr. Huber, if you're going to talk like that----"
"He stole them," Luke pursued--"or so he says. The only question in my
mind is: are they genuine?"
Rollins showed signs of resenting this suggestion more keenly than the
declaration that he was a thief. Leighton, however, interrupted: he was
squinting at the letter that Luke had read in full.
"No," he said, "this is real enough. I know the signature."
"You know it?" Luke was surprised.
"Yes, yes." Leighton read the letter through; then turned upon Rollins
with a resumption of his cross-examining manner. "How much d'you want
for these?"
Rollins beat his hat upon his thigh.
"Well," he said, "they ought to be worth a good deal to you, Mr.
Leighton."
"I'll give you five hundred dollars."
"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins was deprecating. "Five hundred dollars!"
"What do you want, then? Speak up."
"Five thousand would be nearer value, Mr. Leighton."
Luke turned away. This was the part of the business that he loathed.
"I'll give you two thousand and not a cent more," said Leighton.
Rollins thought himself now in a commanding position.
"I can't consider that," he said with the nearest approach to firmness
he had yet shown.
"All right," said Leighton. "Huber!" He handed the letters to Luke.
"Put these in your safe while I telephone this fellow's employer."
"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins bounded forward. His fat face worked with rage,
disappointment, and fear. "You wouldn't do that. This is robbery.
It's blackmail! For God's sake, Mr. Leighton----"
"Two thousand dollars," said Leighton.
"But think a minute, Mr. Leighton! I've been in my job for seven
years--worked up to it from office-boy. I could any time have sold tips
along the street for twice that money, and yet this is the first time
I've ever--ever----"
"Ever double-crossed your boss. Well, why'd you do it?"
"I don't know. It was because this wreck is so awful."
"And what else?"
"Nothing else."
Leighton thrust a forefinger into the informer's face.
"_What else?_"
Rollins jumped back.
"Well, he--he didn't raise my pay. I've got a big family, and there's a
mortgage on my little house in Roseville, and a man in my position has
to live well, or people'd talk."
Leighton relaxed. He swung back in his chair and cocked his feet on the
desk.
"I'll make it two thousand five hundred for your family's sake. That's
my last word."
Luke, who had again turned his back on the hagglers, the letters safely
buttoned in an inside pocket of his coat, wondered how his chief could
afford such an outlay.
"Is that really the best you can do?" whined Rollins.
"It is the best I _will_ do," said Leighton. Without lowering his feet,
he pulled toward him the telephone, which was attached to his desk by an
arm that could be lengthened or shortened at the user's will. "Now,
then, your boss has gone home long ago; but I can get him at his house;
do you want to lose your job or make this money?"
Rollins surrendered.
"I guess I'll have to take your price," he said. "But it's almost a
charity I'm doing."
"Right!" Leighton released the telephone, quickly swung his legs from
the desk and sat straight.
"And you'll promise nobody'll ever know where you got these letters?"
"Certainly."
Rollins looked toward Luke's significant back.
"And Mr. Huber, too?"
Luke turned.
"I've already promised you that," he said.
Leighton smiled faintly as he said to Luke:
"I guess you don't happen to have two thousand five hundred in loose
change about you, do you, Huber?"
"No," said Luke. He saw nothing humorous anywhere in the situation.
"Well, this is no affair for checks, and my bank's uptown," Leighton
continued. "I don't suppose," he said to Rollins, "you would care to
give credit, my dear sir?"
Rollins could smile, if Luke could not. He shook his head.
"My bank," said Luke, anxious to end the scene, "is just around the
corner. It's closed, but the clerks will still be there. They know me.
I can get them to let me in the side door, and I know they'll do me a
favor. I've got just about that much on deposit." He looked at
Leighton. "Shall I take Rollins along?"
"Rollins? Yes." Leighton's good-humor seemed to have returned to stay.
"Then hurry back here--alone. I'll want to talk this thing over with
you."
Sec.4. Luke paid and dismissed Rollins. Returning, he found Leighton
walking rapidly up and down his office.
"Shut the door," said the District-Attorney. His face was flushed; he
spoke quickly.
Luke shut the door.
Leighton came forward and brought his hand down on Luke's shoulder with
a resounding smack.
"Do you know what this means?" he cried. His mouth was wide with
laughter; the whole man exulted. "This re-elects me! Nothing can keep
us out now, Huber--not a thing on God's green footstool. All we've got
to do is use these letters and then sit back and fold our arms and
attend to office business. Politics? These two pieces of paper will
play all the politics we need, and more besides. I could shout, Huber;
I could sing a regular Song of Deborah. What about Mr. Timothy Heney,
_now_? And his Tammany? Gone the way of Sisera, my boy. Tim Heney!
'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he
fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead!'"
Luke's old enthusiasm was rekindled. He thought that he had been
misjudging Leighton. Of course the man had been discouraged: he had
never before been able to seize an efficient weapon with which to
shatter the forces of wrong; even at this time it was only reasonable
that his first thought should be of his immediate political opponents;
but the weapon was put into his hand at last, the blow would be given
against both Tammany and Wall Street; it would be the blow that Luke had
hoped for when he read the first accounts of the North Bridge wreck.
"There must be a special Grand Jury to investigate the disaster," said
Luke, his words falling over one another much as Leighton's had done.
"We must keep the letters dark till it's in session, and then produce
them. We can give them to the papers right afterward. It will be jail
for the lot of them. Big as they are, it'll be that. It'll be the end
of the whole crowd!"
Leighton drew away. His face changed. His entire attitude altered.
"What are you talking about?" he asked dryly.
"Why"--Luke was amazed--"about these letters, of course."
"Well, do you think I'm green enough to waste them on a jury? Not
much!"
Luke began to comprehend. He felt unsteady. He was standing close to
Leighton's desk, and he put out a hand and gripped the edge of its top
shelf.
"Not give them to the jury?" But perhaps he was wrong. Of course he
was wrong. "Oh, I see," he said; "maybe it's better not to risk any
more lives by waiting. You're going to force this crowd to put down a
decent road-bed? Only if you do that---- Well, it's fine of you, but
you'll not be any better off politically."
Leighton turned his swivel-chair and sat down in it. His manner became
that of an employer trying to be calm and to instill reason into an
annoying employee.
"Young man," said he, "just you listen to me for about two minutes.
Those fellows do control this road, but they didn't operate it. In
spite of Rollins's blessed letters, you can't absolutely say they
operate it. But what they do operate, when they want to, are the
politics of this city, and if they tell Tammany, yes, or me, to hold off
and let an election go the way they want it, why, hold off Tammany or
anybody else has to. Nobody could win if they said 'No.' Now,
then"--Leighton punctuated his words with the rise and fall of an index
finger--"they're not actually morally responsible for the conduct of the
M. & N., but they'll know the publication of these letters would make
the public think they were. They'll know the publication would wreck
the road they're still interested in, smash all their other stocks and
depreciate all their other interests, start a panic that might swamp
even them, and maybe begin a public row that would send them close to
jail, on general principles, legal evidence or no legal evidence. To
stop that, they'd be willing to have me elected, which they weren't yet
quite certain about being to-day. I'll go to them quietly, and then
I'll surrender these letters, when they've kept their part of the
bargain I'll make. And don't you worry about loss of life. That
engineer was probably green or drunk, or the signal man got rattled.
You'll see the coroner's jury says so. But, anyhow, once I'm safely
re-elected, I'll take care the M. & N. is better regulated than it has
been. There's no use in a row: a little moral suasion will do the
trick."
He tossed back, and clasped his hands behind his head.
The explanation had been too long: it was long enough to allow Luke to
master the shock of what it implied. He saw his last illusions
concerning Leighton fall under the impact of Leighton's own words. He
was aghast. He was ashamed of his master; he was ashamed of himself for
ever having served such a master. But he was not crushed. As his chief
proceeded, Luke's soul rose through indignation to red revolt. By the
time that Leighton ceased speaking, Luke, except for two spots of
crimson on his cheeks, was captain of his rage. He leaned against the
desk-side indolently, his eyelids lowered, and when he replied it was
with an indifferent drawl.
"It doesn't much matter whether the engineer was drunk or the signal man
rattled," he said: "the rail flattened, and the bridge fell. The rail
was drunk and the bridge was rattled."
Leighton shook himself peevishly.
"You're trying to be humorous," he said.
"No; oh, no," said Luke gently. "What I'm getting at is, it seems to me
the men who directly controlled this road were directly responsible for
its operation. I mean that the men who authorized that letter, and
insisted on the policy it lays down, are guilty. It strikes me they
ought to be either reformed or punished."
"Oh, hell!" said Leighton. Heretofore, Luke had always appeared to be
on his side, so that the District-Attorney did not know the meaning of
his assistant's outward calm. "Those letters aren't legal evidence
enough."
"I think they are, Leighton. Besides, I think there are times when
moral evidence goes ahead of legal evidence, and ought to--and I think
this is one of those times."
"Well," said Leighton, "I don't. So that ends it."
"Of course," Luke calmly pursued, "if you could make these fellows
re-lay the road, it might be worth while to do no more than scare them,
at least if you don't consider the political ethics and consider only
the immediate protection of life."
"I told you I'd take care of the regulation of the road as soon as I was
re-elected."
"Ye-es. But could you?"
"Certainly I could."
"I should say that once they'd got their letters back, _you'd_ be in
_their_ power."
Leighton got to his feet. He was angry. He faced Luke, who did not
shift his lazy pose.
"Look here," he said, "we've been friends, and you've done good work for
me, especially this afternoon----"
"Thanks," said Luke.
"But it looks as if the time had come when you'd better understand who's
the head of this office."
"You are," Luke assured his chief; and then added: "I'm glad to say."
"Well, then, Huber, I've got to tell you that if you don't act
accordingly, we must part company."
Luke raised his listless eyes.
"You've quite made up your mind to do this thing, Leighton?"
"Let you go? Not if you'll only be reasonable."
"I mean this thing about the letters."
"Yes."
"You're going to make use of these fellows' money-power in politics?"
"It's already in politics. It always has been."
"But you are going to try to use it for yourself?"
"Yes, I am. It's my own business."
"Is it? That money is blood-money, Leighton."
"You're a fool!"
"I know I am. But it's you that I'm worried about. You're quite
determined?"
"_Absolutely._"
Luke shrugged his shoulders. He began to move slowly toward the door.
"Here!" said Leighton sharply. "Where're you going?"
Luke scarcely looked at him.
"I'm going to write my resignation."
Leighton was startled, but he tried not to show it.
"Very well," he said, "write it. But don't be too fast: you may hand
over those letters first."
"Letters?" Luke seemed never to have heard the word before. "What
letters?"
"Why do you try so hard to be an ass, Huber?" The District-Attorney
extended his hand for the papers that he had given Luke during the
interview with Rollins. "Drop all this resignation rot--_My_ letters,
of course."
Luke's face met Leighton's fairly.
"The only letters I have about me," he said with quiet distinctness,
"are two that are my property. I bought them with the last two thousand
five hundred dollars of my own money."
As the words came home to him, Leighton's face grew purple. His brows
met in a knot. At his temples two veins pulsed visibly.
"What's that?" he cried with a straining throat. "What's that? You----
Give them here this minute; they're mine! They're mine. They're mine!
You know damned well they're mine!"
He had not counted on this. The unexpected disappointment tossed him
from the summit of the hopes to which, that afternoon, he had been so
unexpectedly lifted. He made a blind dash at Huber.
Luke's two hands caught both of Leighton's wrists. By the exertion of a
superior strength that scarcely showed itself, the assistant forced down
the master's arms and held them at his flanks.
"They are my letters," said Luke.
"Let go!" Leighton wrenched at the imprisoning grip; but he wrenched
without effect. "Let me go!"
"Certainly," said Luke. He freed the panting man. "I merely wanted to
protect myself and show you it wouldn't help you to use force."
Leighton, his face still contorted, tried another tone.
"It isn't fair of you, Huber. I'm sorry I went at you that way; but you
know well enough those letters belong to me."
"They belong," said Luke, "to the man that can make the better use of
them."
"What use can _you_ make?"
"A better one than you say you will."
"They were brought here for me."
"By a thief."
"Well, you're not going to restore them to their owner, are you?"
"Perhaps."
"What?" Leighton laughed cynically. "So _that's_ what your moral tone's
for, is it?"
"Perhaps."
"Oh, come on, Huber, I didn't mean that. Anyhow, you know, I only asked
you to lend me the money."
"The letters," said Luke again, "belong to the man that can make the
better use of them."
"I'll do the right thing by you, Huber, if you give them back to me."
"Thank you. The real owner of the letters can do more--when I'm for
sale."
Leighton bent forward and began to whisper.
"I'll tell you what I'll do for you politically," he began. "I'll----"
"No thank you," said Luke.
"Well, then,"--Leighton, his face now white from fear of loss, appeared
to capitulate-"give them back and I'll use them the way you want them
used."
The two men's eyes probed one another.
"I don't believe you," said Luke.
It was final, and it drove Leighton back to his purple rage.
"I'll ruin you!" he threatened. "And they'll ruin you. Go ahead and
resign. Resign? You can't. You're fired! Do you hear that? You're
fired! Now go and try to do something. You can't do a thing but sell
those letters to the people they were stolen from. If you try that,
I'll show you up, and if you try anything else with those people,
they'll bury you so deep nobody ever can dig down far enough to find
you. Do you know who you're up against when you buck that crowd? They
won't let you walk the same earth with them! Go on. You'll be killed,
and I'll be damned glad of it. Fight them, will you? You might as well
draw a gun on God Almighty! Now, then, get out of here. Get out, or
I'll have you kicked out!"
*CHAPTER VI*
To his office on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper--that
office with the mahogany table at its center and the engraving of George
Washington between two windows--the master came at his usual time on the
morning of the day following the North Bridge wreck. He was dressed
neatly, as always, in a suit of russet brown. Breathing visibly, but
noiselessly, he passed the resting ticker and walked to one of the
windows overlooking the labyrinth. His near-sighted, beady eyes peered
toward the web of streets below, on the cross-threads of which the black
dots that were hurrying men and women bobbed like struggling flies.
The master rang for his secretary.
"Rollins," he said, "what's in the----" He stopped. He had not looked
up, yet he asked: "What's the matter with you this morning?"
"Nothing," said Rollins. "I----" He coughed behind his hand. "I
didn't sleep well last night."
"Take more exercise," said his master. "What's in the mail?"
"Thirty letters that need your personal attention, sir."
Nimbly the master ran them through his short and stumpy fingers, the
tips of which were delicately rounded. He dictated his terse
instructions. With the daily routine again in motion, Rollins recaught
his employer's calm.
"Simpson has the begging letters?"
"Yes, sir."
"I guess," said the master in his most commonplace tone, "there were
more than the usual number of anonymous threats."
"Only ten or twelve more."
"Burn them."
"Yes, sir. I always do."
"And, Rollins, draw up a letter to the cancer hospital and tell the
management I have decided to give them a special ward for fibroid tumor
cases. Their lawyers may consult with Judge Stein; I gave him the
details last evening. Bring me the letter for revision."
"Yes, sir."
The master proceeded through his customary schedule.
"Rollins," he said, when it was at last completed and the secretary had
been recalled. "Mr. Hallett and Mr. Rivington will be here"--he
consulted his watch--"in five minutes. We are on no account to be
disturbed."
Hallett and Rivington came in, five minutes later. Hallett looked angry,
and Rivington frightened. Though the hour was early, Hallett's white
waistcoat, fresh every morning, showed wrinkles, and its wearer chewed
hard at an unlighted cigar; there was a deep perpendicular line over his
short, thick nose. Rivington, immaculate, pulled at his slightly gray
mustache.
"Good-morning," said their host. His voice was as nearly cheerful as it
was ever. "Sit down."
They took their places at the table, where there was a pad of scribbling
paper and a freshly sharpened pencil before each. Their host sat at the
head of the table, his hands flat upon the table-top, their fingers
extended, his elbows pointing ceilingward.
Rivington began at the midst of what worried him.
"It's a terrible thing!" he groaned. "Think of it; twenty-five
people--and the women too!"
Hallett's comment was almost a bark.
"As soon as the coroner's jury lets 'em down easy," he said, "we've got
to see that everybody's fired, from the division-superintendent to the
president of the road; that's what we've got to do. There's one kind of
carelessness that's not much better than murder."
"Twenty-five people!" repeated Rivington. The numbers seemed to
hypnotize him; he made a futile gesture. "And the morning papers----
Their tone---- I don't like it."
The man at the head of the table watched them both, but said nothing.
"Oh, the newspapers never worry me," said Hallett. "We can stop all but
one or two, and nobody cares what they say, anyhow. They've been
talkin' for years. They've got to fill their columns."
"Then there's the Board meeting," said Rivington. "Next Thursday---- I
don't see---- Really I don't."
"The Board of Directors of the M. & N.'s all right," Hallett reassured
him.
"Perhaps. But then, too, there is this new reform element in town.
Talk of a fusion movement: a fourth candidate for District-Attorney----
They will be only too eager to get hold of something, and this terrible
accident---- It will give them just what they want."
"They can't elect."
"I am not so sure. The people--they aren't what they used to be.
Something--I don't know what--has taken possession of them."
Hallett bobbed assent to that.
"Yes," he said, "nowadays as soon as a man gets a vote he stops minding
his own business. But we've still got our grip on the wires."
"They may break." Rivington's fingers returned to their tugging at his
mustache. "The wires, I mean. It's ugly. Twenty-five dead and a
hundred hurt----"
"_We_ didn't hurt 'em."
Rivington looked toward the man at the head of the table, but he sat
crouched and silent.
"No," said Rivington; "but----" His sentence ended in a helpless waving
of the hand.
"Then what are you worryin' about?" Hallett challenged. "We were only
tryin' to keep up dividends. We had to choose between a little risk and
protecting the stockholders. Lots of the stockholders are widows and
orphans. Besides, it wasn't a real risk; it was a recognized,
legitimate business risk. Lots of other roads do it right along. Our
own roads do."
"That bridge----" said Rivington.
"The state inspectors passed it a month ago. And they passed the rails,
too. It's all up to them."
In his turn, Hallett glanced at the man at the head of the table. He
saw the man's hairy hands, fat and white against the mahogany, begin to
move as they always began to move before he made a verbal attack upon
conversation; but the man did not speak.
"I know," Rivington was saying, "but with the four candidates for the
district-attorneyship all looking for vote-getting material----"
"Buy 'em," said Hallett.
"Four?"
"Who's the fourth?"
"They haven't chosen him yet; but----"
"Buy 'em," repeated Hallett.
"Out of the four there might be one we couldn't----"
"Anybody can buy anybody. There are more ways than one. Anyhow, we're
not even directors."
"We own the road. Practically----"
"Nobody knows that."
"It seems to me----"
"They don't!" Hallett spat to the floor a bit of tobacco that, bitten
from the end of his cigar, had clung to his lips. "They only think they
do. It'd be the hardest thing in the world to prove that was ever
tried."
"Would it?" Rivington questioned. "I really believe----"
The quick, cold voice of the third man flashed across their talk. It
was as if he leaped at them.
"We may own the road," he said; "but we don't operate it. Not one of us
has officially any administrative power in the matter of its operation.
You gentlemen have forgotten that." He smiled: his teeth were pointed.
"Still," said Rivington, "if the fusion movement----"
He stopped there, not because of his habit of speaking in tangents, but
because the door opened, and an old man timidly paused at its threshold.
The master of the office turned his head slowly.
"Simpson?" he said.
"Yes, sir," said the man at the door.
"What does this mean? Where's Rollins?"
"He was using my room to compose that letter about the hospital, and so
I took his place."
"Didn't he tell you we were not to be disturbed?"
"Yes, sir; but this man"--Simpson held out an envelope--"got by
everybody. He told me you would see him at once if you only received
his message."
The man at the head of the table reached for the envelope. He read a
card that it had contained.
"Show him in," he said.
He waited until Simpson had left to obey. Then, without wasting a
glance on his associates, he explained:
"This is the card of a man called Luke Huber, Assistant
District-Attorney. He's written on it: 'Five minutes in regard to the
North Bridge wreck and your letters about it.'"
"Letters?" said Hallett. "What letters?"
As he replied, the strong jaw of the man at the head of the table worked
as if he were chewing.
"That's what I mean to find out."
"Here? Now?" Rivington gasped.
The man addressed nodded. When a nod could save words, he saved words.
"Is that the careful thing?" asked Hallett.
"I'll bet his card's a bluff and he never expected to get in at all."
"That is precisely why I am having him in."
"Mr. Huber," announced Simpson.
Huber was still a young man. He was so young, and his youth was so
ostentatious, that he immediately courted the rebuke once administered
to Pitt. Moreover, he seemed to lack energy. He was thin; his face,
though pleasant, was white. The lids dropped wearily over eyes that
were at first veiled from the three men who looked up, but did not rise
at his entrance. His mouth, the lips of which were only a pale pink,
might have appeared firm, but would certainly have given the impression
of being tired of firmness, and, when he bowed gravely to his host, his
bristling head inclined itself so slowly and so slightly that the effort
of the inclination, whether mental or physical, was insultingly
apparent.
There was no form of presentation. Instead, there was a pause that only
Huber seemed not to notice. Rivington drummed on the table with his
long fingers. Hallett chewed his cigar. The other man smiled so
enigmatically that it was impossible to say whether he intended to
welcome or was amused by his friends' discomfiture.
"Bring a chair for Mr. Huber."
Simpson did as he was bid.
Luke deposited a carefully brushed hat on the table. Then he sank into
the proffered chair opposite the leader of the trio and extended his
long legs under the mahogany. His feet touched Rivington's, and
Rivington jumped.
"Well?" asked the man at the head of the table.
Huber did not raise his heavy lids.
"I am glad I found you three together," he said slowly in a low and
extremely gentle voice, "because you are the three men that control the
railroad."
Hallett grinned a broad grin. This young fellow talked as if there were
but one railroad in which the group was interested.
"What railroad?" he asked.
Luke slowly drew in his legs. He regarded the figure of the Persian rug
that happened to be between the points of his patent-leather boots.
"The railroad," said he, "that I suppose you have been talking most
about this morning."
"The Manhattan & Niagara?" blurted Rivington.
"We're not directors of that road," said Hallett hurriedly.
"No," agreed Rivington.
"No," said Luke, quite as heartily, "you aren't directors, but you
direct it."
"We don't," snapped Rivington.
The man at the head of the table raised a soothing hand. He was still
smiling.
"Come, come," he said, with an air of good-nature that his friends had
seldom seen him assume during business hours. "We're all gentlemen, I'm
sure. Anything that Mr. Huber wants to say to us in confidence----"
Huber interrupted.
"I never talk in confidence," said he; "and I don't want anybody to say
anything to me that he would be ashamed to say in public."
His eyes were still hidden, and he still spoke slowly and gently; but
the mere import of his words brought up short even the leader of the
trio before him. That one's manner changed. He was curt.
"We are busy men, Mr. Huber," he said. "There are not many people in New
York that we would have allowed to take up our time this morning. What
do you want?"
Luke studied the figure on the rug.
"I want you three," he said in a tone not to be quickened, "to tear up
every mile of rails on the M. & N. and replace those pieces of
scrap-iron with rails of a grade fit to bear the traffic they have to
carry."
Rivington's drumming fingers closed into his palms. Hallett let out an
ugly laugh. Only the man at the head of the table, again changing his
manner, equaled Luke in tranquillity.
"Really, Mr. Huber," he said pleasantly, "without admitting for a moment
that we have the power to do what you suggest, don't you think your
request is a rather large one?" He had the air of indulgently
correcting a mistaken child.
The young man, gazing at the rug, shook his round head.
"No," he said, "not so large for you as its alternative."
"And that? It is----"
Rivington had put the question, but it was toward the man at the head of
the table that Luke as he shot out his sudden reply, raised his eyes.
"Jail," said Luke.
"Do you mean to threaten us?" cried Rivington angrily.
Hallett laughed.
The man at the head of the table only smiled.
"Not at all," said Luke. "I am merely stating a fact. In coming here,
the only thing I hesitated about was whether it would be better for the
people to have safe transportation immediately guaranteed or to have you
three in jail."
"You seem to forget, young man," said Hallett, "who it was elected the
man that made you assistant district-attorney."
Luke gave him the briefest of glances.
"It was because I found out who elected him that I resigned the job," he
answered. "I have just been offered the Municipal League's nomination
for District-Attorney. When _I_ am elected, it will be by the people."
"That will be about 2000 A.D.," sneered Hallett.
Luke shrugged his thin shoulders and returned his gaze toward the leader
of the trio.
"A bridge falls on one of your roads in this county," he said. "It
kills twenty-five people and wounds a hundred--all passengers in one of
your trains. You will say the state inspectors declared the bridge O.K.
Maybe they did, though they ought to go to the electric chair for it.
That doesn't matter. What I can prove by thirty witnesses is that the
train left the bridge before the bridge fell. A rail flattened and
threw the train. Instead of sending you men to jail--and only because I
think this is better for the safety of the public--I will give you one
month to begin laying decent rails on this road--actually get _bona
fide_ work under way. If you don't do that, I'll make public the whole
truth, get you indicted, go into court as a witness and produce two
letters, one forwarded to you and the other signed by you. The first of
these is a letter to the president of the road written by the steel
manufacturers; it warns him that the cheap rails he's ordered are
dangerous: that letter he sent to you. The second is a letter from you
to the president of the road in which you say you want the poor-grade
rails used because you don't want to increase the running expenses, and
you order a general keeping-down of the road's expenses because of a
plan for you three to unload your stock along about this December."
Luke rose. He relapsed into the weary young man of ten minutes before.
"You have one month," he said.
He picked up his hat, rubbed it with a caressing hand, and left the
room.
The three that he left stared at one another. Then both Hallett and
Rivington looked at their leader.
"It's an infamous--it must be an infamous lie!" cried Rivington.
"Letters like that--men don't write them!"
Without moving a muscle of his face, the man at the head of the table
looked at Rivington.
"All men say they don't," he corrected, "and all men do."
"What?" asked Hallett. "You're joking, and this fellow can't ever make
it good. It's a bluff."
"Gentlemen," said the man at the head of the table, "it's the truth."
*CHAPTER VII*
Sec.1. When Luke, on the afternoon preceding his Wall Street interview,
had walked out of Leighton's office and the city's employ, it was with
no certain plan for further action. His years of experience as an
assistant prosecutor had demonstrated to him that something was
drastically wrong with the modern administration of justice and practice
of the law; his life in New York had shown him the evil influence of the
money-power that seemed to be set in motion by the author of the Rollins
letter and certainly corrupted the entire body of the nation, and his
political work had discovered to him what he came to consider the
inherent rottenness of the organized political parties. The effect of
all this was made acute by the horror at the North Bridge wreck and the
culmination of his mistrust in Leighton. Luke's sole immediate
sensation was that of a man who finds himself in a bog: he did not think
of draining the bog for the benefit of future pedestrians; he thought
only of extricating himself from the mire.
That night at his club, however, he began to consider the larger aspects
of the case. He was in the writing-room, intent on composing for the
next evening's papers a statement of his reasons for parting company
with Leighton. In formulating these, he found his charges to be
precisely the charges recently formulated by the group of municipal
reformers who were clamoring for a fusion of the best elements of all
parties to elect, by honest methods, honest men that would purge New
York of its civic shame. He recalled how this Municipal Reform League,
growing steadily, had worried Leighton, and how its promoters prophesied
that, if successful in the place of its origin, it might well spread
throughout the country. When he first heard of it, Luke had been too
deep in the affairs of his chief to be warmed by it; but to-night his
vision was cleared.
He telephoned to two of the League's leaders. They came to his club and
talked with him until long past midnight, themselves telephoning
inquiries and instructions to friends and lieutenants, and summoning
other leaders to join them.
Luke told them much. He betrayed no secrets of his recent employer, but
he could honorably tell enough to make it clear to them that their
belief in the necessity of reform was correct, enough to have weight
with the voters should he speak to them in the new cause. His public
record, it appeared, had long impressed the reformers; the firmness
underlying his slow habit of talk, and the determination imperfectly
covered by his lazy manner, impressed them now. He moved and fired
them.
The Rollins letter he did not mention. He was more than once tempted,
but he had resolved upon provisional silence before ever he sent for
these leaders. He weighed carefully the merits of the courses open to
him and decided that, large as would be the benefit of a public airing
of his charges, and excellent as might prove the salutary example of a
prison term for America's chief financiers, the airing might be lessened
by those financiers' subtle influences upon popular opinion, the prison
term might be escaped through similar influences, and all good results
would in any case be long delayed. On the other hand, it was evident to
him, in his present frame of mind, that the immediate safety of the M. &
N.'s patrons was paramount, and that this safety could probably be
secured by threatening those morally responsible for it. Such a threat,
with a rigid time-limit, he therefore elected to administer.
The first result of his conference with the reformers was unexpected.
At eight o'clock next morning, three of their most prominent men, who
had not been with him on the night before, came to his apartments at the
Arapahoe in Thirty-ninth Street. They had been in all-night
consultation, and they told him that their organization had determined
to put a full ticket in the field at the coming municipal election, but
to center efforts in a struggle for the district-attorneyship: they had
chosen him for their candidate.
Luke, in dressing-gown and pajamas, his unbrushed hair more than ever
erect, looked from one of his callers to the other. There was Venable,
a man of small but independent means, who had grown gray in the long war
for civic betterment, meeting defeat at the polls and, what is harder to
bear, disappointment in elected candidates, and again and again emerging
to hope and fight on; Nelson, a successful wholesale druggist, whose
business seemed divorced from politics, and whose hobby was the
improvement of political conditions; and Yeates, a young man of family
and fortune who belonged to Luke's club. Luke was flattered and
confident, but did not show it.
"Do you really think I can do it?" he asked slowly. "Do you think I am
the best man for the job?"
Each of the committee assured him he was. They said he had given a good
account of himself as assistant district-attorney, won influential
friends in his daily life, and secured, through his political
speech-making for Leighton, a strong following among the voters.
"Of course," persisted Luke, "it's unnecessary to ask men of your
standing that there shan't be anything but clean politics in our
campaign."
Venable tossed his head proudly.
"My record is a guarantee of that," he said.
"No undue influence?" asked Luke. "No outside interests coming in to
boss us or affect us in any way?"
"Rot!" said Yeates.
"And I am to have an absolutely free hand?"
They assured him of that.
Luke's lowered lids hid his eyes, but his eyes gleamed. Here, at last,
was his Great Chance. Here was what he had lived and hoped for. He
wanted to shout his war-cry, to go out and fight at once. Would he be
worthy? The wing of that doubt brushed the farthest edges of his
conscience, but he was young, and he did not heed it. He thought of all
that he could do with this opportunity; and he thought, too, of Betty
Forbes.
He had not seen much of Betty for some weeks. The lethargy that the slow
process of his recent disillusionment flung over him, had left him
despairing of her, kept her beyond his reach. But now he saw the
way--saw that the way to win his ideals of honorable victory was also
the way to win her.
He asked again a hundred questions, some that he had asked of his other
counselors the night before and more that he had not: questions about
purpose, ways-and-means, finances, organization, headquarters, district
leaders, probable support, the temper of the public mind. To all of
them he received sanguine answers.
"And your other candidates?" asked Luke. "The Mayor? Comptroller?
President of the Board of Aldermen and the Borough Presidents?"
They gave him the names of known and honest men.
Luke stood up, but his air was the languid air that had become part of
him.
"Good," he said, "of course, I'm pleased that you think of me as you do,
and I accept."
Sec.2. He would be a busy man now, but he must have that morning and
afternoon to himself. However much he might want to start his campaign,
he must make that visit to Wall Street, and after luncheon he intended
to go to Betty.
The Wall Street interview seemed to him as successful as he could have
expected. He was unterrified by the strength of the fortress to be
attacked, but he had not looked forward to speedy surrender, so he was
satisfied with the conviction that he affected the three financiers more
than they cared to show. If they did not obey him, he would make the
Rollins letters a part of his appeal to the electors; but he felt that,
in the end, he would be offered obedience.
He lunched leisurely in the cafe attached to his apartment house, and
then went to his own room to change his clothes before seeking Betty.
He had completed the change and was about to leave when the telephone
rang and the voice of the clerk below stairs announced a visitor:
"Judge Marcus F. Stein."
It had begun already. Luke knew who Stein was, though the two had never
met. The man's title had been earned by a political appointment to fill
the unexpired term of a judge that died while on the bench. Stein had
begun his career as a young lawyer who specialized in damage suits
against the N. Y. & N. J. railway. He was once charged, before the Bar
Association--though the charges were never proved--with being a
"hospital runner": that is, with employing men to hurry to the hospital,
or the scenes of accidents, and induce victims to retain Stein to press
their claims for damages against the railroad on which they had been
injured. By devoting his best efforts against the N. Y. & N. J., he
tried to make the corporation realize that it would be cheaper to employ
him than to fight him, and he was, indeed, at last given a place on the
legal staff of the company's claim department. There was an ugly story
to the effect that, for a brief time before this charge was openly
announced, he received a salary from the road while apparently acting
for claimants against it and inducing them to compromise their claims
for trivial sums.
It was a subject of common rumor at the New York Bar. Stein soon worked
his way to the head of the claim department and thoroughly reorganized
it. He used old tactics for his new employers: he had the news of all
accidents immediately communicated to him, whereupon he would despatch
his agents, with no loss of time, to the hospital, there to persuade the
wounded, half stupefied by pain or drugs, to sign releases in return for
pittances in ready money. It was said he built up a secret service,
composed of men and women from private detective agencies, whose duty it
was to discover discreditable secrets in the lives of such claimants as
refused to compromise, or, failing in discovery, to manufacture or
invent such incidents. One married woman from Syracuse, who had been
injured in a wreck in New York and came there to press her suit, was
inveigled into a friendship with a woman detective commissioned to
engage a neighboring room in the house where the plaintiff took
temporary lodgings. The detective succeeded in getting the claimant
drunk and brought her, in this condition, with two of the road's
employees, to a house in which, when the four were partially unclothed,
another detective took a flashlight photograph of them. Then when the
victim's case was called for trial, she was told that, unless she
dropped her suit, the picture would be shown to her husband. By methods
of this sort, Stein was said to have reduced his road's expenses for
damages by two-thirds in three years.
Directly from his desk in the offices of the N. Y. & N. J., Stein was
appointed to the bench, where he did not cease his usefulness to his
employers. When his brief judicial term had ended, he took offices of
his own, and cultivated the higher branches of corporation law. The men
controlling the N. Y. & N. J. controlled many other corporations and saw
to it that Stein received a regular annual retainer as a consulting
lawyer from each of these. His business was not to win cases, but so to
aid in directing his clients' plans that they would avoid litigation;
he, therefore, rarely nowadays appeared in court and, though not one of
the most learned men so engaged by his principals, he was one of the
most serviceable, because to his merely crafty skill in the law he added
a deep knowledge of practical politics and a wide intimacy with
politicians.
Luke's first impulse was to deny himself to this caller, for he wanted
to hurry to Betty and he thought there might be a strategic value in
refusing to negotiate with any emissary. Curiosity, however, proved
strong, and he reflected that the emissary might just possibly come with
a word of complete capitulation.
"Show him up," said Luke into the telephone.
The ex-Judge was an imposing figure. He was big and broad and
frock-coated, and he moved with befitting gravity. His hair was
plentiful and white, his face clean-shaven. He had a strong nose and a
wide, firm mouth, and his eyes were large and benevolent. His air was
that of a man who has dealt with great interests for so many years that
they have become the weighty commonplaces of his existence.
Luke had resolved not to shake hands with his visitor, but the Judge
gave him no opportunity for refusal. He bowed courteously, smiled
politely, and settled into the most comfortable of Luke's chairs, which
he deliberately turned so that the light from the windows fell full on
his own face, thus leaving Luke to front him from the shadow.
Luke, who had been prepared for the contrary move, managed to show no
surprise. He sat down, extended his legs, and lowered his eyes. He
made no inquiry concerning the reason of the Judge's call: he wanted the
Judge to begin the talk.
Stein required no urging.
"I have never had the pleasure of meeting you before, Mr. Huber," he
said, speaking with what was evidently no more than characteristic
deliberation, "but I have watched your career with a great deal of
interest--a very great deal. It reminded me so much of my own early
struggles." He was looking steadily at Luke, whose eyes remained
lowered. "You will forgive an old man who is a scarred veteran of the
law for speaking frankly with you and for taking such an interest, I'm
sure."
"Very kind of you, indeed," Luke murmured.
"I thought," said the Judge, "that you handled that Maretti case
excellently, and the Dow trial, too; you showed an original cleverness
there. More than that, Mr. Huber, you showed promise. There has been a
great deal of promise in your professional work, and I thought I
detected the same promise in the reports of your political speeches.
With influential friends--for, of course, everybody needs influential
friends in these days: people of real and solid standing--you ought to
go far."
"Thank you," said Luke.
"Now," the Judge pursued, "I see by the early evening papers you may be
offered the candidacy for District-Attorney on the Municipal League
ticket."
"I believe there is some talk of that, Judge."
"Well, we need such a movement as this reform movement: we need it
badly. With proper backing, you ought to win. With proper backing, of
course."
Luke gave no sign of hearing this. Quite out of the air he drawled:
"I suppose you came about those letters, Judge Stein?"
For all the disturbance that he produced, he might as well have said
that it was a pleasant day, or that he expected rain. When his eyes at
this question were raised to meet the Judge's, the benevolent eyes of
the Judge did not quiver: like his voice, they were steady and
deliberate.
"Yes," said the Judge, "and I had them in mind when I spoke of your
career. Now, Mr. Huber, my friends think, and I think, that you have
been a little hasty and unreasonable because--and remember, it is an old
man who tells you so--you are still rather young. But because I know
you are an able young man, I have told them I was sure you would see
your haste and unreasonableness when you came to consider the matter.
As their friend and as a lawyer who has watched your career and
remembers his own start in life, I undertook to say so to you and to
offer my advice."
Luke's eyelids were again lowered. His hands were clasped in his lap.
To a less astute man than Stein, he might have seemed asleep.
"I shall be glad," continued Stein, "if I can help you out of your
embarrassing position."
"Who are your friends, Judge?" asked Luke.
The Judge smiled tolerantly.
"Come, come, Mr. Huber," he said; "you don't expect me to mention names,
I know. All I will say on that point--all you can justly ask me to
say--is that I don't come from them in my professional capacity. They
haven't retained me to do this. They haven't even asked me to do it. I
am acting entirely of my own volition, and on my own initiative, out of
good will for all the parties concerned and not least of all for you."
"Yet you seem prepared to plead their case."
"I am--on my own initiative, I am, because their case is the right one,
as I am sure you will end by seeing. In the first place, these letters
are their property."
"I doubt," said Luke, "whether they would go into court to prove
property."
"I do not think," said the unruffled Judge, "that they will go into
court for any purpose--unless their burden of good nature is rendered
intolerable. They can afford to appeal to their own conscience, because
they are morally clear."
"Of the North Bridge wreck?"
"Of the North Bridge wreck, Mr. Huber. Granting that those letters are
admissible evidence--which I shouldn't grant, if I were in the case--the
one is not an expert declaration; it is merely an expression of opinion
from persons with many grades of rails to sell and naturally anxious to
sell their most expensive and most profitable grade. As for the other
letter, it is informed by the knowledge of what prompted the
rail-makers' opinion, and in itself offers only a counter-opinion based
on the writer's long and successful experience with the cheaper rails."
"Yes--but the accident happened."
"Exactly: it merely happened and it was an accident. In other words, it
was something unforeseen and contrary to the experience of the writer of
the second letter."
The Judge waited a moment for a reply but, as Luke gave none, presently
continued:
"Now, the course I propose--quite personally, you will understand--is
honorable, harmless, and in the best interests of all concerned: you,
us, and even the public."
"What is it?" asked Luke.
"All that I would grant my friends is the return of those letters, which
are their own property, and are not admissible evidence in a court of
law. That is all I would grant them. On their part, I should exact a
pledge from them to have better rails laid throughout the suspected
sections of the M. & N. road."
Luke's eyes opened.
"That's all _I_ asked them to do," he said.
"Ah, yes; but to do it at once would be taken as a public confession of
guilt--and my friends are not guilty. You will see that the coroner's
jury says so."
Luke relapsed.
"It will," he said. "I'm sure of it."
"Therefore, the thing must be done slowly and discreetly, and meanwhile
we must protect the public by an increase of track-walkers and
road-inspectors."
"Would your friends," inquired Luke, "instruct the road not to fight the
damage claims growing out of the wreck?"
"Of course not," chuckled Stein. "You are too good a lawyer to expect
that, Mr. Huber, and too good a lawyer not to know how the sorrow or
wounds of the claimants--yes, and the big appetites of their attorneys,
too, I'm afraid--exaggerate their losses on the one hand and the riches
of the company on the other. No, no; the most we could get for them
would be liberal settlements. We mustn't bankrupt the road.
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