Part 11

"The Church," said Nicholson, "has always had them. What she lacked was the co-operation of such men in the practical world. If all of our millionaires were like some few of them, our work would be easy; but now we scarcely know which is more dangerous: the evil tyrant or the evil demagogue."

He talked for some time in this strain, not to weariness, but with the completeness of the zealot. Nicholson regarded wealth as a sacred trust, a gift from God given to the great intellects of the world only that it might be administered for the benefit of the lesser of God's creatures. He mentioned no specific instance, but he saw in many of the country's rich men souls that were proving worthy of their trust and others that were using their money selfishly and even cruelly. For the former he had the highest regard, for the latter the severest condemnation; the spiritual and physical welfare of the poor he considered as the especial care of the more fortunate, and charity was not only the right of penury: it was the salvation of the rich.

Betty listened to him with a rapt face; Luke honored him, but sincerely hoped that he would go. Fearing that this desire was becoming too patent, Luke said:

"The Manhattan and Niagara people don't seem to share your views."

"Ah," said Nicholson, "there you touch a vexed problem, because there you have to do with a corporation, and it is almost a fact that corporations have no souls."

"If that corporation ever had any, it is damned," said Luke; "but what I'm driving at is that the individuals composing a corporation have moral responsibilities."

The clergyman agreed, but in corporations, he thought, responsibility was so intricately subdivided and so sinuously delegated that no one man had much left to him or could incur much guilt for his individual errors. In connection with most such accidents as a railway wreck, there was really an ethical basis for the legal phrase "an act of God."

"Not in the North Bridge wreck," said Luke. "It's been shown that the company used cheap material, didn't have any proper system for checking its work-reports so as to tell whether ordered repairs were made, and didn't hire competent men. The company can't get out of this mess by saying its experts were forced on it by the unions: it hasn't any legal right to delegate its choice of experts to a union. It's a common carrier and, if it can't do its work properly, then it ought to stop work."

Nicholson saw this much as Luke did, and said so at a good deal of length. It was some time before his part of the conversation lagged and he rose to go.

Sec.4. Luke waited only until he heard the door close upon the departing clergyman. Then he turned to Betty with a relieved sigh.

"Phew!" he said. "I'm glad that's over."

She was sitting opposite him in the full glare of light from an old-fashioned, crystal-hung chandelier. Betty could bear strong lights.

"Why?" she asked. Her brow was puckered, but her lips smiled. "I like him. He's very good, and he's doing a really great work. I like him ever so much."

"Oh, yes," said Luke. "Nicholson's all right. He has what he admires in other men: high convictions and the courage of them. Most of us always admire in others what we don't have ourselves; but not Nicholson. He is doing a big work, too. But I'm glad he's gone, just the same."

"Why?" repeated Betty.

Luke rose. He came over to Betty and stood looking down at her, his arms folded across his chest.

"Because," he said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"It didn't look so. It looked as if you wanted to talk to Mr. Nicholson."

"I wanted to talk to you and about you."

She stopped fencing. She gave him her full, frank gaze.

"Well?" she asked.

"You know what I want to say, Betty," he answered. "You've seen for a long time what I was coming to. I held off. I held off because I hadn't anything to offer you. Even now I haven't much. I haven't half enough. If I win this fight I'm in, it won't give me anything that would make me deserve you. I've not been a bit better than I should be." His voice grew tense. "When I come down to brass tacks, when I--I beg your pardon; but what I mean is that when I get to the point of telling you I love you, I see how far I've been from being what I should be. I---- Oh, hang it all, Betty!" He put out his hands. "I love you. I've never really loved anybody else and never can. If I win this confounded--blessed fight, will you marry me?"

She got slowly to her feet: it seemed to Luke minutes before she had stood up and begun her answer. Then she took both his hands.

"You don't have to win the fight to win me, Luke," she said.

The realization swept over him. He took her in his arms. He looked in her upturned face--the eyes wide, the sweet, fresh cheeks hot, the lips parted, breathing quickly--and then he felt the blood rush to his head, felt it hammer at his temples. It got into his eyes and blinded him. He ground his lips upon hers.

The dull despair of his last months under Leighton commanded a reaction. The rushing changes of the last two days had set his nerves to a speed that would not now cease in whatever physical activities he engaged himself. These things flung him along a new road; they raced him down a way of which he had known but little. As he felt the warmth of her gracious young body next his, he was hurled with such violence down a course so unfamiliar to him that only the thought of losing his race by running it too swiftly could serve to lessen his straining speed. Like a quarter-mile runner stopping himself short in the last hundred yards before the tape, he almost fell as he forced himself to release her.

"Your father," he panted. He looked away from her: "I must see him now."

Betty did not understand. She was only exalted by this new thing; she was only happy.

"Now?" she whispered.

"Yes." He looked back at her and, with a white face, smiled. "He has a right to know." He caught her hand, pressed it only as tightly as he dared. "I'll go to him in the library. Wait for me."

Sec.5. Forbes was seated at a round table, engaged in his regular nightly task of reading the editorial-page of the _Evening Star_, nodding his head when he agreed with its generalities and muttering maledictions upon it when it specifically ridiculed the Progressive Party. As Luke came in, Forbes was in the midst of one of the paper's attacks on progressivism, and his frown seemed to drive his beaked nose into his mustache.

"Oh, Huber," he said, without at once relaxing his scowl; "I didn't know you were here. Come in. Been here long?"

Luke could not have guessed how long he had been in the house.

"Not very," he ventured.

"Sit down," said Forbes. He had not risen. He indicated an easy-chair near his own.

"Thanks," said Luke; but he did not sit down.

Forbes at last noticed his visitor's nervousness.

"I suppose you've had a hard day," he said. "Pardon me for not congratulating you sooner on your success. This sheet"--he brandished the _Evening Star_--"doesn't want anything but to be against everything. It upsets me every evening. But you've done a big thing. I think you should have come clear over to our side, but I dare say you will do that in time. Meanwhile, I'm sincerely glad for your good fortune. You deserve it."

"You're very good," said Luke. His eyes twinkled a little. "I wonder if you know about it--all."

"Only what this mealy-mouthed sheet says. It's absolutely inexplicable to me, Huber, how a paper written by such able men can be so narrow-minded on broad subjects. However, I think they're going to support _your_ party, if they may be said ever to support anything."

"I'm afraid they _are_ rather reticent about the real news," said Luke.

"They never tell anything that weighs against their theories."

"They haven't had a chance to tell this."

Forbes looked puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"It's only just happened." Luke breathed deeply. "I'm engaged to be married," he said. He spoke with an unusual rapidity. "Engaged to be married, and I'd like it to come off--the wedding, I mean--right after the election."

Forbes scrambled up. He wrung Luke's hand.

"Well, well," he said, "you are to be congratulated!"

"I am glad you think so," said Luke, "for you know the girl better than I do."

"The girl? I know her better----" Forbes's voice rose. "You don't mean---- You don't mean to say----"

"Yes," Luke nodded. "It _is_ luck, isn't it? It's Betty."

"Bless my soul!" Forbes brought his left hand down on Luke's right shoulder. "Bless my soul! My little girl! Huber, you--you rather knock the wind out of me."

He said all the conventional things; his manner showed all the proper surprise; and both men understood that he had been expecting this news for a long time and wanting it.

"Huber," he said, "of course this is sudden, and of course I'm an old fool not to have got over considering Betty a child--a mere baby--but, now you're here with the announcement, I'm quite certain that, out of all the men who've been tagging after her, you're the one that I'd want for a son-in-law."

Luke again mumbled his thanks.

"You're not standing still," pursued Forbes: "you're going ahead. You have a great deal to you, and Betty's the very girl to make you make the best of yourself"--Forbes's voice abandoned the commonplace note and fell to the note of genuine feeling--"then there's your interest in the Business. Huber, I've always regretted that I didn't have a son to leave the Business to, as my father left it to me and his father to him. If you'd married somebody else, and Betty had married some chap that had no interest in it, the Business might have gone over to you eventually, and so on to children of another stock than mine; whereas, now"--he looked around Luke to the doorway--"Betty!" he said.

She had not obeyed Luke; she was standing at the door.

"I couldn't wait," she confessed; but she said it with an allegiance that was now all for Luke.

"Come here," her father ordered.

He released Luke's hand and shoulder. The girl ran to him and put her arms about his neck.

"Please be nice, daddy," she whispered. "Please be nice."

Forbes managed to draw a handkerchief and blow his nose.

"I _am_ a fool," he said. "I--Betty, you're looking so much to-night the way your mother--By George, I _am_ a fool! I think I must be getting old, Huber."

Sec.6. In the room at the end of the hall marked "Family Entrance" to a saloon in Fifty-second Street, near Eighth Avenue, a red-headed man dressed in cheap clothes of fashionable cut, was leaning across a table at which he was drinking raw whisky with a girl who, had she not been too heavily painted, would have had a face like that popularly ascribed to Joan of Arc.

"I've got him showed to me," the man was saying. "He lives at the Arapahoe on Thirty-ninth Street. I'll play lighthouse. All you gotta do's put on them glad clothes an' get him into Pearl's Six' Av'nue place. He's in wrong, anyhow. Then I'll tip off Charley Guth, an' he'll put Donovan wise an' pinch the joint. See?"

The girl that looked like Joan of Arc nodded comprehendingly.

"But the clothes has got to be real swell," she said.

*CHAPTER X*

Sec.1. As Luke left the Forbes house that night, his step kept time with the beat of his pulses, and he walked fast. At last he thought that he saw happiness within reach.

He was not yet happy; he was quite clear about this. One half of him, perhaps the nobler half, was engaged in a political battle with the forces of corruption, but it was so engaged that those forces affected it; they invaded his individuality and, therefore, curtailed his freedom and curtailed completeness. Happiness, if it was to be found at all, was to be found only in the perfect development of self, and such a development was impossible so long as self, seeking expression in politics, found expression thwarted by an evil opposition in the political field.

Nevertheless, this opposition, Luke was sure, could be crushed and swept away; his ideal for the good of the city, which had become his own good, could be attained; and then, he told himself, that other part of him, the part that loved Betty and that Betty loved, could enjoy Betty as the reward of the whole man. It was as if he were one of two runners. Betty he saw not as the goal, but as the prize to be given him for leading at the goal; not a prize that any other runner could win by worsting him in the race, but a prize that he himself could deserve only if he were to lead at the finish.

He was thinking of this when he left the Subway station and walked toward the Arapahoe, but under his conscious thoughts the subconscious self was still tingling with the emotions that had flamed up in him when he took Betty in his arms and felt her lips on his. He quivered with the physical recollection, and though the flame had burned, his flesh found the pain of it sweet.

At the corner nearest the apartment house in which he lived, he became aware of a woman. The street was nearly empty, but until she was close beside him he did not notice her. How she came to be at his elbow he did not appreciate, nor did he at first realize whether she were young or old, beautiful or ugly.

"Will you tell me the time, please?" she asked.

Luke's experience in Leighton's office had long ago taught him that such a request was the commonest form of watch-stealing, but he was not afraid of losing his watch. He stopped under a lamp-post.

"Certainly," he said.

"I know it's late," pursued the woman, "but I don't know how late."

The words were thick. The voice was the voice of all the phantoms of the street, low in pitch and hoarse, but luring because of all that it connoted: because of the mystery, the adventure which, after all knowledge of her sordidness and all understanding of her frigidity, the woman who most reveals her body has maintained by that revelation's forced screening of her soul.

Luke consulted his watch.

"It's a quarter to eleven," he said.

He looked at her, and he was glad to look. That she was well-dressed, but overdressed and wore her clothes with the defiance of one unhabituated to them, did not impress him. What impressed him was the face that, in spite of its tokens of much evil done and more evil suffered, retained the fragile beauty which men associate with innocence. The calm, broad brow, the gray eyes wide and steady, the underlip timidly drawn back, the delicate chin upturned above a slim white throat, reminded him of the pictures of Joan of Arc on trial and foredoomed by her English accusers.

"It _is_ late, isn't it?" she said.

"Yes," said Luke. He had forgotten about his watch; he was holding it loosely in his hand.

"I wonder," said the woman, "if it's too late for you to take a little walk with me."

Her eyes had narrowed coldly; a smile that was a trade grimace distorted her mouth.

The change in her wakened Luke. He restored his watch to his pocket. He felt a slight chill at his heart and a self-accusation.

"No," he said brusquely; and started to walk away.

The woman followed.

"Aw, come on," she urged. Her tone coarsened under his refusal.

"No," said Luke.

"Please?" her voice whined. She put her hand on his arm.

Luke shook off the hand. He was too angry with himself to have pity for her.

"Stop this," he ordered.

"But won't you listen?" The woman's hand returned persistently; it clutched. "I got somethin' to----"

Luke saw that they were at the door of the Arapahoe.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't stop to listen to you."

He went into the apartment house.

Sec.2. He really was sorry. Once inside the door of the Arapahoe, he said to himself that the woman had only been plying her trade, and that what he had visited upon her was a portion of the wrath against his own momentary weakness. He could never have given way to her, because he was so firm in his resolve to live worthily for Betty that he could not enough want to give way to offset the efficacy of his resolve; only the portion of him subject to his will without being a part of his will had momentarily weakened; it could not have rebelled victoriously, and although it merited punishment, the exterior cause of its weakness did not deserve censure. Altogether, Luke concluded, he had behaved in a rather contemptible fashion.

His mind was immediately diverted. As he passed the clerk's desk in the hall, the clerk beckoned darkly to him.

"There are some reporters looking for you here," he whispered. "I sent them into the waiting-room so's you could get by them when you came in, if you wanted to. Do you?"

Luke almost laughed as he reflected upon the figure he would have presented to the representatives of the press, had they been waiting for him at the door.

"Yes, I'll see them," he said.

They came to him in a body, seven of them. They worked for the morning papers and, because the evening papers had printed Luke's letter about his resignation from the District-Attorney's staff, they wanted a fresh sensation for their journals.

Luke leaned against a pillar in the lobby and talked to them. Most of them he had met while in Leighton's office. Personally, he was popular with them, and he liked them.

"I'll say anything you want," he agreed. "But what is there to say?"

The spokesman was a keen man with curling black hair.

"You might develop the last part of your letter," he suggested: "the part about the big financiers that you're going gunning for."

"I haven't got the gun yet," objected Luke. "Better wait and see if I'm nominated, boys."

"Oh, you'll be nominated, all right. Come on, Mr. Huber."

"You're going to support the League, anyhow," said a stout little fellow, whose paper opposed all reformers. "You can tell us how the League will go for the men at the top."

To this Luke agreed. He began to speak and, as he saw the busy pencils noting his best phrases upon sheets of roughly-folded copy-paper, he fell into stride with his subject. He declared that the League meant to put an end to the influence of Big Business in municipal politics, and, although he mentioned no names, it was evident what big business men he had in mind.

The reporters tried to make him mention names, but their efforts only seemed to restore his caution. They urged him to be specific in his charges against the present administration of the District-Attorney's office; but here again they encountered the impassive side of Luke with which they were more familiar.

"No, no," said Luke; "there may be a time for all that, but this isn't the time. Just wind up by saying we mean, once and for all, to put Wall Street out of politics and graft out of the administration of justice in New York City and to keep them out, if we have to send every financier and every policeman to jail."

Sec.3. The reporters made all that they could of what Luke gave them, and the next morning's papers were full of it. Leighton, on his way downtown, read them with anger against Luke and annoyance with himself for losing a man that might have been so valuable to him.

He began to be afraid of the effect of Huber's implications regarding the District-Attorney's office. Remembering that his party was in no position to risk putting up a weak candidate, he telephoned to George J. Hallett and was granted an interview: he said he knew of the letters in Luke's possession and knew how Luke came by them.

Hallett, whose office was almost the counterpart of that in which he consulted with his master and Rivington, sprawled in a deeply upholstered chair. He smoked steadily at a cigar, and when the letters were mentioned, he accepted the mention with complete composure.

"Who else knows about 'em?" he frankly inquired.

"Nobody," said Leighton--"unless Huber's been talking."

"He's got 'em, hasn't he?"

"Had them the last time I saw him."

"Anyway, you haven't 'em?"

"No, of course, I haven't."

Hallett took his cigar from his mouth; he looked at the cigar, and from it to Leighton.

"I don't see what use _you_ are to us, then," he said.

Leighton understood that the only satisfactory way to deal with this man was the direct way.

"I can't be any use to you except to tell you where the leak is these letters came through."

"What do you want us to do for you?"

"I want your support at election time."

"Can't promise it. The other side has just as good a claim on us."

"Heney?"

"An' the whole Democratic organization, yes."

"Would you promise not to interfere on either side?"

"Can't do it. You see, you haven't got much to sell."

Leighton ran his fingers through his black hair.

"Look here, Mr. Hallett," he began again, "we don't know each other personally----"

"That's all right," said Hallett.

"Well, then, if I can't count on your influence for the election, may I count on it for the nomination?"

"Who stole those letters?" said Hallett.

"I can count on you people in the matter of the nomination?"

"Yes."

"A man named Rollins."

Late that afternoon it was found that Rollins had made an overcharge for postage-stamps in the course of his secretarial work. He was arrested and "railroaded" to jail.

Sec.4. It was somewhat later when the Republicans nominated Leighton and then, to the amazement of the public, the Democrats and Progressives each opposed him with candidates so weak that every politician understood this as a surrender to Leighton in order to defeat the candidate of the Municipal Reform League. In advance of their occurrence, however, all these things were gossiped about by the leaders of every faction and so confidently expected that plans were shaped in accordance with them. Somehow, they sent word ahead to the Reform headquarters even on the day of the happening that set them in motion, and Venable and Nelson, together with the other executives of the M. R. L. bestirred themselves.

"Where's Yeates?" asked Nelson, as he came into Luke's room, where Venable and Luke were busy. "That young fellow's never around when he's wanted."

"He sent in word he had some other engagements," said Venable.

"Had to play golf with Hallett's son, I guess, if it wasn't L. Bergen Rivington," Nelson sneered. "There's too much society in that boy for any political usefulness."

Luke looked up from the notes he was preparing for his formal letter accepting the nomination that the League was next day to offer him:

"Is Yeates a friend of those people?" he asked. "I knew he knew some of them, but is he a friend?"

"Only socially," he said. "Yeates was born to it, but politically he is all right. He has high ideals and a really fine enthusiasm."

"Hum," said Luke. "What do you think of this paragraph, Nelson?"

He read from his notes:

"During the past few years, those persons in a position to observe the inner workings of our politics, both in national and municipal affairs, have been alarmed to see the steady encroachment made upon them by High Finance. There is no longer any room left for doubt. The purpose of this invading power is clear: its purpose is conquest. Unless the free voters act, and act quickly, the true government of the United States in general, and of New York in particular, will not rest in the President or Congress, in Mayors and Boards of Aldermen, in the Constitution, the charter, or the courts: it will rest in a combination of Big Business interests that will control the men elected as representatives of the people."

Nelson slapped his thigh.

"That's it!" he said. "That's the talk. We ought to have had some of that kind of medicine long ago. Look at all this recent drug-legislation, for instance. You can't imagine what my firm's been up against. They're getting an appetite for the wholesale drug-trade now, these big fellows are, and they're paving their way by lobbies at Washington and Albany and half a dozen state capitals!"