Chapter 12

"And," she went on, "I blundered into a luncheon party Jane was giving. You never saw--you never dreamed of such style--such dresses and dishes and flowers and hats! And I was sitting there with them, enjoying it all as if it were a circus or a ballet, when--Oh, Victor, what a silly, what a pitiful waste of time and money! So much to do in the world--so much that is thrillingly interesting and useful--and those intelligent young people dawdling there at nonsense a child would weary of! I had to run away. If I had stayed another minute I should have burst out crying--or denouncing them--or pleading with them to behave themselves."

"What else can they do?" said Victor. "They don't know any better. They've never been taught. How's the article?"

And he led the way up to the editorial room and held her to the subject of the article he had asked her to write. At the first opportunity she went back to the subject uppermost in her mind. Said she:

"I guess you're right--as usual. There's no hope for any people of that class. The busy ones are thinking only of making money for themselves, and the idle ones are too enfeebled by luxury to think at all. No, I'm afraid there's no hope for Hull--or for Jane either."

"I'm not sure about Miss Hastings," said Victor.

"You would have been if you'd seen her to-day," replied Selma. "Oh, she was lovely, Victor--really wonderful to look at. But so obviously the idler. And--body and soul she belongs to the upper class. She understands charity, but she doesn't understand justice, and never could understand it. I shall let her alone hereafter."

"How harsh you women are in your judgments of each other," laughed Dorn, busy at his desk.

"We are just," replied Selma. "We are not fooled by each other's pretenses."

Dorn apparently had not heard. Selma saw that to speak would be to interrupt. She sat at her own table and set to work on the editorial paragraphs. After perhaps an hour she happened to glance at Victor. He was leaning back in his chair, gazing past her out into the open; in his face was an expression she had never seen--a look in the eyes, a relaxing of the muscles round the mouth that made her think of him as a man instead of as a leader. She was saying to herself. "What a fascinating man he would have been, if he had not been an incarnate cause."

She felt that he was not thinking of his work. She longed to talk to him, but she did not venture to interrupt. Never in all the years she had known him had he spoken to her--or to any one--a severe or even an impatient word. His tolerance, his good humor were infinite. Yet--she, and all who came into contact with him, were afraid of him. There could come, and on occasion there did come--into those extraordinary blue eyes an expression beside which the fiercest flash of wrath would be easy to face.

When she glanced at him again, his normal expression had returned--the face of the leader who aroused in those he converted into fellow-workers a fanatical devotion that was the more formidable because it was not infatuated. He caught her eye and said:

"Things are in such good shape for us that it frightens me. I spend most of my time in studying the horizon in the hope that I can foresee which way the storm's coming from and what it will be."

"What a pessimist you are!" laughed Selma.

"That's why the Workingmen's League has a thick-and-thin membership of thirteen hundred and fifty," replied Victor. "That's why the New Day has twenty-two hundred paying subscribers. That's why we grow faster than the employers can weed our men out and replace them with immigrants and force them to go to other towns for work."

"Well, anyhow," said the girl, "no matter what happens we can't be weeded out."

Victor shook his head. "Our danger period has just begun," he replied. "The bosses realize our power. In the past we've been annoyed a little from time to time. But they thought us hardly worth bothering with. In the future we will have to fight."

"I hope they will prosecute us," said Selma. "Then, we'll grow the faster."

"Not if they do it intelligently," replied Victor. "An intelligent persecution--if it's relentless enough--always succeeds. You forget that this isn't a world of moral ideas but of force.... I am afraid of Dick Kelly. He is something more than a vulgar boss. He SEES. My hope is that he won't be able to make the others see. I saw him a while ago. He was extremely polite to me--more so than he ever has been before. He is up to something. I suspect----"

Victor paused, reflecting. "What?" asked Selma eagerly.

"I suspect that he thinks he has us." He rose, preparing to go out. "Well--if he has--why, he has. And we shall have to begin all over again."

"How stupid they are!" exclaimed the girl. "To fight us who are simply trying to bring about peaceably and sensibly what's bound to come about anyhow."

"Yes--the rain is bound to come," said Victor. "And we say, 'Here's an umbrella and there's the way to shelter.' And they laugh at OUR umbrella and, with the first drops plashing on their foolish faces, deny that it's going to rain."

The Workingmen's League, always first in the field with its ticket, had been unusually early that year. Although it was only the first week in August and the election would not be until the third of October, the League had nominated. It was a ticket made up entirely of skilled workers who had lived all their lives in Remsen City and who had acquired an independence--Victor Dorn was careful not to expose to the falling fire of the opposition any of his men who could be ruined by the loss of a job or could be compelled to leave town in search of work. The League always went early into campaign because it pursued a much slower and less expensive method of electioneering than either of the old parties--or than any of the "upper class" reform parties that sprang up from time to time and died away as they accomplished or failed of their purpose--securing recognition for certain personal ambitions not agreeable to the old established bosses. Besides, the League was, like the bosses and their henchmen, in politics every day in every year. The League theory was that politics was as much a part of a citizen's daily routine as his other work or his meals.

It was the night of the League's great ratification meeting. The next day the first campaign number--containing the biographical sketch of Tony Rivers, Kelly's right-hand man ... would go upon the press, and on the following day it would reach the public.

Market Square in Remsen City was on the edge of the power quarter, was surrounded by cheap hotels, boarding houses and saloons. A few years before, the most notable citizens, market basket on arm, could have been seen three mornings in the week, making the rounds of the stalls and stands, both those in the open and those within the Market House. But customs had rapidly changed in Remsen City, and with the exception of a few old fogies only the poorer classes went to market. The masters of houses were becoming gentlemen, and the housewives were elevating into ladies--and it goes without saying that no gentleman and no lady would descend to a menial task even in private, much less in public.

Market Square had even become too common for any but the inferior meetings of the two leading political parties. Only the Workingmen's League held to the old tradition that a political meeting of the first rank could be properly held nowhere but in the natural assembling place of the people--their market. So, their first great rally of the campaign was billed for Market Square. And at eight o'clock, headed by a large and vigorous drum corps, the Victor Dorn cohorts at their full strength marched into the centre of the Square, where one of the stands had been transformed with flags, bunting and torches into a speaker's platform. A crowd of many thousands accompanied and followed the procession. Workingmen's League meetings were popular, even among those who believed their interests lay elsewhere. At League meetings one heard the plain truth, sometimes extremely startling plain truth. The League had no favors to ask of anybody, had nothing to conceal, was strongly opposed to any and all political concealments. Thus, its speakers enjoyed a freedom not usual in political speaking--and Dorn and his fellow-leaders were careful that no router, no exaggerator or well intentioned wild man of any kind should open his mouth under a league banner. THAT was what made the League so dangerous--and so steadily prosperous.

The chairman, Thomas Colman, the cooper, was opening the meeting in a speech which was an instance of how well a man of no platform talent can acquit himself when he believes something and believes it is his duty to convey it to his fellow-men. Victor Dorn, to be the fourth speaker and the orator of the evening, was standing at the rear of the platform partially concealed by the crowd of men and women leaders of the party grouped behind Colman. As always at the big formal demonstrations of the League, Victor was watching every move. This evening his anxiety was deeper than ever before. His trained political sagacity warned him that, as he had suggested to Selma, the time of his party's first great crisis was at hand. No movement could become formidable with out a life and death struggle, when its aim frankly was to snatch power from the dominant class and to place it where that class could not hope to prevail either by direct means of force or by its favorite indirect means of bribery. What would Kelly do? What would be his stroke at the very life of the League?--for Victor had measured Kelly and knew he was not one to strike until he could destroy.

Like every competent man of action, Victor had measured his own abilities, and had found that they were to be relied upon. But the contest between him and Kelly--the contest in the last ditch--was so appallingly unequal. Kelly had the courts and the police, the moneyed class, the employers of labor, had the clergy and well-dressed respectability, the newspapers, all the customary arbiters of public sentiment. Also, he had the criminal and the semi-criminal classes. And what had the League?

The letter of the law, guaranteeing freedom of innocent speech and action, guaranteeing the purity of the ballot--no, not guaranteeing, but simply asserting those rights, and leaving the upholding of them to--Kelly's allies and henchmen! Also, the League had the power of between a thousand and fifteen hundred intelligent and devoted men and about the same number of women--a solid phalanx of great might, of might far beyond its numbers. Finally, it had Victor Dorn. He had no mean opinion of his value to the movement; but he far and most modestly underestimated it. The human way of rallying to an abstract principle is by way of a standard bearer--a man--personality--a real or fancied incarnation of the ideal to be struggled for. And to the Workingmen's League, to the movement for conquering Remsen City for the mass of its citizens, Victor Dorn was that incarnation.

Kelly could use violence--violence disguised as law, violence candidly and brutally lawless. Victor Dorn could only use lawful means--clearly and cautiously lawful means. He must at all costs prevent the use of force against him and his party--must give Kelly no pretext for using the law lawlessly. If Kelly used force against him, whether the perverted law of the courts or open lawlessness, he must meet it with peace. If Kelly smote him on the right cheek he must give him the left to be smitten.

When the League could outvote Kelly, then--another policy, still of calmness and peace and civilization, but not so meek. But until the League could outvote Kelly, nothing but patient endurance.

Every man in the League had been drilled in this strategy. Every man understood--and to be a member of the League meant that one was politically educated. Victor believed in his associates as he believed in himself. Still, human nature was human nature. If Kelly should suddenly offer some adroit outrageous provocation--would the League be able to resist?

Victor, on guard, studied the crowd spreading out from the platform in a gigantic fan. Nothing there to arouse suspicion; ten or twelve thousand of working class men and women. His glance pushed on out toward the edges of the crowd--toward the saloons and alleys of the disreputable south side of Market Square. His glance traveled slowly along, pausing upon each place where these loungers, too far away to hear, were gathered into larger groups. Why he did not know, but suddenly his glance wheeled to the right, and then as suddenly to the left--the west and the east ends of the square. There, on either side he recognized, in the farthest rim of the crowd, several of the men who did Kelly's lowest kinds of dirty work--the brawlers, the repeaters, the leaders of gangs, the false witnesses for petty corporation damage cases. A second glance, and he saw or, perhaps, divined--purpose in those sinister presences. He looked for the police--the detail of a dozen bluecoats always assigned to large open-air meetings. Not a policeman was to be seen.

Victor pushed through the crowd on the platform, advanced to the side of Colman. "Just a minute, Tom," he said. "I've got to say a word--at once."

Colman had fallen back; Victor Dorn was facing the crowd--HIS crowd--the men and women who loved him. In the clear, friendly, natural voice that marked him for the leader born, the honest leader of an honest cause, he said:

"My friends, if there is an attempt to disturb this meeting, remember what we of the League stand for. No violence. Draw away from every disturber, and wait for the police to act. If the police stop our meeting, let them--and be ready to go to court and testify to the exact words of the speaker on which the meeting was stopped. Remember, we must be more lawful than the law itself!"

He was turning away. A cheer was rising--a belated cheer, because his words had set them all to thinking and to observing. From the left of the crowd, a dozen yards away from the platform, came a stone heavily rather than swiftly flung, as from an impeded hand. In full view of all it curved across the front of the platform and struck Victor Dorn full in the side of the head.

He threw up his hands.

"Boys--remember!" he shouted with a terrible energy--then, he staggered forward and fell from the platform into the crowd.

The stone was a signal. As it flew, into the crowd from every direction the Beech Hollow gangs tore their way, yelling and cursing and striking out right and left--trampling children, knocking down women, pouring out the foulest insults. The street lamps all round Market Square went out, the torches on the platform were torn down and extinguished. And in a dimness almost pitch dark a riot that involved that whole mass of people raged hideously. Yells and screams and groans, the shrieks of women, the piteous appeals of children--benches torn up for weapons--mad slashing about--snarls and singings of pain-stricken groups--then police whistles, revolvers fired in the air, and the quick, regular tramp of disciplined forces. The police--strangely ready, strangely inactive until the mischief had all been done entered the square from the north and, forming a double line across it from east to west, swept it slowly clean. The fighting ended as abruptly as it had begun. Twenty minutes after the flight of that stone, the square was empty save a group of perhaps fifty men and women formed about Victor Dorn's body in the shelter of the platform.

Selma Gordon was holding his head. Jane Hastings and Ellen Clearwater were kneeling beside him, and Jane was wiping his face with a handkerchief wet with whisky from the flask of the man who had escorted them there.

"He is only stunned," said Selma. "I can feel the beat of his blood. He is only stunned."

A doctor came, got down on his knees, made a rapid examination with expert hands. As he felt, one of the relighted torches suddenly lit up Victor's face and the faces of those bending over him.

"He is only stunned, Doctor," said Selma.

"I think so," replied the doctor.

"We left our carriage in the side street just over there," said Jane Hastings. "It will take him to the hospital."

"No--home," said Selma, who was calm. "He must be taken home."

"The hospital is the place for him," said the doctor.

"No--home," repeated Selma. She glanced at the men standing round. "Tom--Henry--and you, Ed--help me lift him."

"Please, Selma," whispered Jane. "Let him be taken to the hospital."

"Among our enemies?" said Selma with a strange and terrible little laugh. "Oh, no. After this, we trust no one. They may have arranged to finish this night's work there. He goes home--doesn't he, boys?"

"That's right, Miss Gordon," replied one of them.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Here's where I drop the case," said he.

"Nothing of the kind," cried Jane imperiously. "I am Jane Hastings--Martin Hastings' daughter. You will come with us, please--or I shall see to it that you are not let off easily for such a shameful neglect of duty."

"Let him go, Jane," said Selma. "There will be a doctor waiting. And he is only stunned. Come, boys--lift him up."

They laid him on a bench top, softened with the coats of his followers. At the carriage, standing in Farwell Street, they laid him across the two seats. Selma got in with him. Tom Colman climbed to the box beside the coachman. Jane and Miss Clearwater, their escorts and about a score of the Leaguers followed on foot. As the little procession turned into Warner Street it was stopped by a policeman.

"Can't go down this way," he said.

"It's Mr. Dorn. We're taking him home. He was hurt," explained Colman.

"Fire lines. Street's closed," said the policeman gruffly.

Selma thrust her head out. "We must get him home----"

"House across the street burning--and probably his house, too," cut in the policeman. "He's been raising hell--he has. But it's coming home to him at last. Take him to the hospital."

"Jane," cried Selma, "make this man pass us!"

Jane faced the policeman, explained who she was. He became humbly civil at once. "I've just told her, ma'am," said he, "that his house is burning. The mob's gutting the New Day office and setting fire to everything."

"My house is in the next street," said Colman. "Drive there. Some of you people get Dr. Charlton--and everything. Get busy. Whip up, driver. Here, give me the lines!"

Thus, within five minutes, Victor was lying upon a couch in the parlor of Colman's cottage, and within ten minutes Dr. Charlton was beside him and was at work. Selma and Jane and Mrs. Colman were in the room. The others--a steadily increasing crowd--were on the steps outside, in the front yard, were filling the narrow street. Colman had organized fifty Leaguers into a guard, to be ready for any emergencies. Over the tops of the low houses could be seen the vast cloud of smoke from the fire; the air was heavy with the odors of burning wood; faintly came sounds of engines, of jubilant drunken shouts.

"A fracture of the skull and of the jaw-bone. Not necessarily serious," was Dr. Charlton's verdict.

The young man, unconscious, ghastly pale, with his thick hair mussed about his brow and on the right side clotted with blood, lay breathing heavily. Ellen Clearwater came in and Mrs. Colman whispered to her the doctor's cheering statement. She went to Jane and said in an undertone:

"We can go now, Jane. Come on."

Jane seemed not to hear. She was regarding the face of the young man on the couch.

Ellen touched her arm. "We're intruding on these people," she whispered. "Let's go. We've done all we can."

Selma did not hear, but she saw and understood.

"Yes--you'd better go, Jane," she said. "Mrs. Colman and I will do everything that's necessary."

Jane did not heed. She advanced a step nearer the couch. "You are sure, doctor?" she said, and her voice sounded unnatural.

"Yes, miss----" He glanced at her face. "Yes, Miss Hastings. He'll be out in less than ten days, as good as ever. It's a very simple affair."

Jane glanced round. "Is there a telephone? I wish to send for Dr. Alban."

"I'd be glad to see him," said Dr. Charlton. "But I assure you it's unnecessary."

"We don't want Dr. Alban," said Selma curtly. "Go home, Jane, and let us alone."

"I shall go bring Dr. Alban," said Jane.

Selma took her by the arm and compelled her into the hall, and closed the door into the room where Victor lay. "You must go home, Jane," she said quietly. "We know what to do with our leader. And we could not allow Dr. Alban here."

"Victor must have the best," said Jane.

She and Selma looked at each other, and Selma understood.

"He HAS the best," said she, gentle with an effort.

"Dr. Alban is the best," said Jane.

"The most fashionable," said Selma. "Not the best." With restraint, "Go home. Let us alone. This is no place for you--for Martin Hastings' daughter."

Jane, looking and acting like one in a trance, tried to push past her and reenter the room. Selma stood firm. She said: "If you do not go I shall have these men take you to your carriage. You do not know what you are doing."

Jane looked at her. "I love him," she said.

"So do we," said Selma. "And he belongs to US. You must go. Come!" She seized her by the arm, and beckoning one of the waiting Leaguers to her assistance she pushed her quietly but relentlessly along the hall, out of the house, out of the yard and into the carriage. Then she closed the door, while Jane sank back against the cushions.

"Yes, he belongs to you," said Jane; "but I love him. Oh, Selma!"

Selma suddenly burst into tears. "Go, Jane, dear. You MUST go," she cried.

"At least I'll wait here until--until they are sure," said Jane. "You can't refuse me that, Selma."

"But they are sure," said Selma. "You must go with your friends. Here they come."

When Ellen Clearwater and Joe Wetherbe--the second son of the chief owner of the First National--reached the curb, Selma said to Wetherbe:

"Please stand aside. I've something to say to this lady."

When Wetherbe had withdrawn, she said: "Miss Hastings is--not quite herself. You had better take her home alone."

Jane leaned from the open carriage window. "Ellen," said she, "I am going to stay here until Victor recovers consciousness, and I am SURE."

"He has just come around," said Ellen. "He is certain to get well. His mind is clear."

"I must see for myself," cried Jane.

Selma was preventing her leaving the carriage when Ellen quietly interfered with a significant look for Selma. "Jane," she said, "you can't go in. The doctor has just put every one out but his assistant and a nurse that has come."

Jane hesitated, drew back into the corner of the carriage. "Tell Mr. Wetherbe to go his own way," said Ellen aside to Selma, and she got in beside Jane.

"To Mr. Hastings'," said Selma to the driver. The carriage drove away.

She gave Ellen's message to Wetherbe and returned to the house. Victor was still unconscious; he did not come to himself until toward daylight. And then it was clear to them all that Dr. Charlton's encouraging diagnosis was correct.