The Spider's Web

BETTY STOOD AT THE WINDOW IN THE FULL LIGHT OF THE STREET-LAMP

THE SPIDER'S WEB

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

Author of "The House of Bondage," etc., etc.

Illustrated by
JEAN PALEOLOGUE

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1913

To
EVERETT HARRÉ
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. Molière 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

§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.

§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."

§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 Château 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.

§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."

§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!

Halleyloolyah, 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:

"Halleyloolyah, 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."