Part 18

The day was Saturday, and the cars were filled with released workers, but Luke avoided them by going far and descending at the least important of the train's stops. Tired though he was, he walked beyond the little town. He cut across fields to a hill crowned by a clump of trees and there, in the shade, threw himself on the ground and lay for hours thinking of nothing and looking at white clouds sailing across a blue sky. He wished that he could lie here forever....

It was one o'clock in the morning before he returned to his rooms. It was far too late to reply to the score of telephone-calls that, he was told, Forbes had made on him.

Luke remembered that he had promised Betty to go with her to service at Nicholson's church.

Sec.7. He was strengthened by his brief rest, and he went to Betty with a heart renewed.

"Father's still asleep," she said, as she met him in the hall of the Forbes house, her gloved fingers busied with her hair, preventing the escape of one of the yellow wire pins that held the few strands too short for her pins of tortoise-shell. "He wanted to be called, but he was so tired out, I told the maid not to disturb him. He sat up ever so late, waiting for you. Where were you, Luke?"

Luke had rarely seen her looking better. The Sunday calm had erased all the tokens of the recent trying days from her face: it was rosy and young; it was appealingly almost childish. The morning sun was in her hair; her brown eyes were wide and bright. He did not want to spoil her by the story of his yesterday's defeat, and so he passed it by with some facile excuses for his absence from the factory.

"We're late," he said, as he helped her into the Forbes motor-car.

The chauffeur ran close to the speed-laws all the way to Manhattan. They reached their journey's end immediately after the choir had taken its position in the chancel.

The ritualistic church of St. Athanasius is one of the handsomest in New York. It was built in close imitation of Beverley Minster, and so elaborate was the work done upon it that, in spite of its wealthy congregation's assistance, it still staggered under the load of a heavy debt. It has the Yorkshire building's two Early English transepts, Perpendicular towers, and a Late Decorated nave with flying and pinnacled buttresses. Inside, as Luke and Betty entered it, the warmly-colored light fell through many Lancet windows on the crowd of fashionable worshipers kneeling before narrow chairs. Nicholson's voice, coming from behind the choir-screen, sounded clear but far away.

Luke and Betty walked up the nearest aisle and took the seats assigned to the Forbes family, close to the carved pulpit and under the triforium. The high arches were carried on clustered pillars, and, down the perspective of the nave, Luke could see into the choir, to the Decorated reredos, where, as in Beverley, the piers increased in size by successive groups of shafts that projected like corbels. He knelt beside her and tried to give his mind to the service; but his eyes, familiar though they were with the church, wandered to the north aisle's windows and the ogee and foliated arcade under them, to the people in front of him, and so, inevitably, to the girl at his side.

The service proceeded. The people said the Lord's Prayer; Nicholson recited the collect, and then read the Ten Commandments of Moses, the congregation responding.

"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."

After the creed, Nicholson walked to the pulpit. He climbed its steps, and for a few moments only his clasped hands were visible as he knelt inside. Then rising, he took his stole from the pulpit rail, kissed the cross embroidered at the top of the stole, and put it on.

"In the Book of Ecclesiastes," he began, "in the ninth chapter and the second verse, it is written:

"'All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good, and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.'"

Nicholson's face was earnest. It was at once stern and irradiated, the face of an ascetic turned seer.

"And in the General Epistle of St. James," he proceeded, "in the second chapter and the twenty-second verse:

"'Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?'"

Nicholson spoke without notes, but without hesitation.

"A great man," he said, "has just died. We have heard evil report of him, and good report. We have heard whispers against him, and we have seen good that he has done; but his greatness no man questioned. To-day he has passed to his last account. To-day the dead man stands before his Eternal Judge. One of those events that happen to the rich and poor alike has happened to him. With what he has done that is over, the Court of Heaven now alone, in all its boundless mercy, has to deal. We that remain here on earth may not judge of that. We that remain on earth must consider the things that he has done and are not over, the things he has left behind; we must concern ourselves only with what concerns us; it is our duty to remember him by the works that he has made his monument."

The preacher dwelt upon the dead man's rise from poverty to vast riches, a hopeful lesson in the reward of thrift and wisdom to every poor boy in a republic that grants equal opportunity to all. He spoke with an admiration of the genius that had carved its way to power until its will was felt in the uttermost corners of the earth.

As he proceeded, Nicholson seemed to forget his admonition against the judgment of things over and done with. He made direct reference to Luke's Cooper Union speech, and he looked full in Luke's face as he made it.

"Not long ago," he said, "while this man was tottering upon the brink of eternity, another man, a sincere, but misguided man, made terrible charges against him, charges that reflected, however veiled, upon the character and motives not only of the man now dead, but a whole group of people eminent in public and business life. And what was the result? Nothing that lent the least credit to the accuser's intelligence or appreciation of the value of evidence, for nothing at all was proven, nothing even corroborated."

Luke flushed. He felt Betty looking at him, but he would not return her gaze. He felt other people in the congregation turned toward him. He could not guess what had changed Nicholson.

The sermon was proceeding with praises of the dead man's benefactions. One by one they were described and extolled.

"His greatness," said Nicholson, "would have availed him nothing at this one event for the righteous and the wicked if he had not had charity, for we are told that though we speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, we are become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Charity, however, this man had. The institutions that he supported and has endowed have given and now forever will give learning to thousands who, but for them, would have lived in ignorance--healing to thousands who, but for them, would have died in agony.

"Charity: but charity alone will not suffice. Sounding brass itself, unless it is informed by faith! And this man's sublime faith even his worst enemy cannot deny. For his counsel and advice, for his painstaking and sagacious investment of its funds the Church is indebted to this man as it is to no other. Many a denomination outside our own fold can truly say the same of him and should say and does say how much we owe him, also, for the unceasing flow of his money into our treasuries. He did not speak of these things. He did not let his right hand know what his left hand did; but we of the Church remember that he gave millions of dollars to the faith.

"The faith of men of money is tested by their money; yet this man's faith had many another test and rose triumphant from them all. His attendance at the Church's services--not only on Sundays, but on fast-days and holidays, on saints'-days and work-days--never failed. His wisdom was free to our councils, and I have been told on reliable authority that he never rose in the morning, went to bed at night, or embarked on any business enterprise, however small, without first humbly and privately asking direction of the Most High. He knew in his every act that the greatest man is as nothing before God; and when he came to die, he died like a Christian, a priest of God by his side and the words of God's mercy sounding in his dulling ears. From first to last, his works and his faith were one: 'Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?' For us who are Christians, that is enough. It is enough to make us each pray to meet his end, each at his own station in life, as this great man met his. _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_."

Only amazement had held Luke in his chair. At this phrase, he half rose.

Nicholson, however, was concluding:

"There is but one word more, a word personal to us of this congregation, to be said. I need not recall to you the heavy privations that this church in which we now are has undergone. They were generously met and nobly borne, but, in spite of all your nobility and all your generosity, the time came, a week since, when it seemed indeed as if the forces of evil were about to conquer, and as if, unless Heaven intervened, this beautiful building must pass out of our hands.

"Three days before the death of the man I have been speaking of this morning, an impulse came to me, and I wrote him a letter. My friends, I do not believe that that impulse was of this world.

"I have since been told that when the letter reached him, his eyes were too dim to read it; yet, when he was informed of its purport, he asked that it be read to him. It was read, and then, with a hand already trembling at the touch of death, he took a pen and signed the last check of his career. That check was our emancipation; it was a check for the entire sum for which this Church of St. Athanasius--this beautiful church in which it is our privilege to worship God--stood indebted. I ask you to join in prayer for the soul of our dead benefactor and then to unite in the doxology for thanksgiving to God. 'Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?'"

Sec.8. "Where are you going?" gasped Betty.

The people were kneeling, but Luke was on his feet.

"I'm going to get out of here," he answered. "I'm going to get into the open. I want fresh air."

He strode down the aisle under the clustered pillars of the triforium, and Betty hurried after. At the church door stood a table bearing a pile of leaflets, and unconsciously he took one as he passed.

Sec.9. In the sunlit street, he felt a little ashamed of his impetuosity. Betty was indignant.

"Why did you make such a scene?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," said Luke. "I simply couldn't stand it. A priest talking like that! And Nicholson the priest!"

"He shouldn't have attacked you," Betty granted, "but you didn't put him in the wrong by behaving impolitely."

"Oh, I don't care about putting him in the wrong, and I don't care about his attacking me!" Luke helped her into the waiting motor, and the car started smoothly on its return journey. "What I couldn't stand was the Church making a hero out of such a man; the Church selling itself for a few thousand dollars."

"But the man did do good, Luke."

"How much--compared with the evil he did?"

"I can't know that. Who can?"

"You talk like Nicholson!"

"No, I don't." She put her hand on his. "But what good can come of abusing the man?"

"I don't want him abused: I only don't want God's Church to make a saint out of him."

"Nobody's doing that, Luke. They're simply being decent about him. After all, he _is_ dead."

Luke shook her hand free. Then, suddenly, he tossed back his head and broke into a high laugh. He frightened her.

"Luke! What is it?"

He could not at once answer.

"Oh, what is the matter?" she pleaded.

"You!" he laughed. "You, too!" To control himself he unfolded and looked at the leaflet that he had picked up in the church doorway, and had been heedlessly folding and unfolding ever since. His mirth stopped. "Listen to this," he ordered. "By Jove, it's not Nicholson alone; it's the whole bunch, and speaking officially, too! Listen to this. It's a printed statement issued by the General Executive Committee of the whole church--not St. Athanasius alone, but the entire denomination--and it's worse than Nicholson's sermon." His eyes ran from line to line. "'We call upon the prayers of the faithful,'" he read as well as the motion of the car permitted.... "'He has not buried his talent nor hidden his candle under a bushel.... So far as a man's life can, his life exemplified Law and Order, realized the truth uttered by Richard Hooker: "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is in the bosom of God, the harmony of the world."'"

Betty had been listening attentively.

"Well?" she asked.

"'Well?'" repeated Luke. "'Well?' Don't you see? The whole Church is standing up for him. And not our Church alone: all churches. He'd bought them--bought them!"

"Luke! How can you?"

"Yes, he has. One way or another. He or his kind: for I'm beginning to see at last he wasn't alone--never was and never will be. And seeing that, I'm not blaming him so much--any of the _hims_. I don't say, any more, he was worse than the rest of us; he was only stronger. Maybe he was only the average man in extraordinary circumstances. He didn't make them--I'm beginning to believe that, too,--they made him. But the Church! The churches! They've sinned against the light. They're liars. They're--why, they must be founded on a lie: their light must be darkness!"

The girl had edged away from him, her brown eyes big with horror at his blasphemy. The motor was drawing up before the door of the Forbes house; it was drawing up in a quiet Brooklyn street. And there, in that Sunday stillness, and among those surroundings of commonplace respectability, suddenly the Marvel came to him.

It came to him, this denial of Religion, as a profound religious experience. It was Miracle, burning, blinding, transfiguring. Elemental, tremendous. It was a stroke that affected his entire being; suffused him; changed him, spiritually, in every atom. It hurled him from all his old bases and set him in a new relation to the universe. It was not reformation; it was revolution. Luke was another personality: this was the "new birth." He saw the glory of individuality, the divinity of his humanity. In the flash of revelation, he learned to walk and knew that for all his life he had been permitting himself to be carried. Without guessing it, he had been, he now knew, all these years, afraid, and now, with this new inspiration, he faced all things and feared none. Believing, he had been dead, but denying, was alive again; faithful, he had been lost, faithless, he was found, and not by any other help than his own: he had found himself. It was the thing that, in the twinkling of an eye, can make an honest man of a liar, an abstainer of a dipsomaniac, good out of evil. It was the same thing that happens to a penitent at the moment of "conversion," of "receiving grace," of "experiencing religion"; the same force operating with the same power and the same manner, but in an opposite direction.

As St. Paul rose from the earth after his vision near Damascus, so Luke staggered from the Forbes motor-car. His hands groped at the air.

"Betty!" he gasped; "tell your father I can't see him. Not now.--I'll be back later.--Perhaps in a little while.--Later."

She put out her arms to him.

"What is it, Luke?" she cried. "What's the matter?"

His eyes looked at her, but he did not see her. He turned from her to the street.

"I don't know," he said, "but I think--I think I'm Being Saved."

*CHAPTER XVII*

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

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

Sec.2. Forbes was waiting in the library.

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

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

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

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

"No. I'm only getting well."

Forbes's tone was more considerate:

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

"I'm all right," said Luke.

"But Betty says----"

"Where is she?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke bowed assent. He knew now what to expect.

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

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

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

"No, thank you."

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

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

Forbes blushed.

"Are they?" he countered.

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

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

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

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

"What else did he say?" Luke repeated.

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

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

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

Luke winced.

"Don't begin that," he commanded.

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

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

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

"So I must?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke was not listening. He was saying to himself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't," he said sharply.

"But, Luke----"

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

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

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

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

He laughed rudely.

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

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

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

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

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