The Walking Delegate Part 38

He took his hat mechanically. "The future?"

"You were right."

"You mean--we should not meet again?"

"This is the last time."

Again he stood silent, unmoving.

"You had better go," she said. "Good-night."

"Good-night."

He moved sideways to the door, his eyes never leaving her. He paused.

She stood just as she had since she had touched his shoulder. He moved back to her, as in a trance.

"No." She held up a hand, as if to ward him off.

He took the hand--and the other hand. They were all a-tremble. And he bent down, slowly, toward her face that he saw as in a mist. The face did not recede. Their cold lips met. At the touch she collapsed, and the next instant she was sobbing convulsively in his arms.

And all that night she lay dressed on her couch.... And all that night he walked the streets.

Chapter XXII

THE PROGRESS OF THE STRIKE

When morning began to creep into the streets, and while it was yet only a dingy mist, Tom slipped quietly into his flat and stretched his wearied length upon the couch, his anguish subdued to an aching numbness by his lone walk. He lay for a time, his eyes turned dully into the back yard, watching the dirty light grow cleaner; and presently he sank into a light sleep. After a little his eyes opened and he saw Maggie looking intently at him from their bedroom door.

For a moment the two of them maintained a silent gaze. Then she asked: "You were out all night?"

"Yes," he answered pa.s.sively.

"Why?"

He hesitated. "I was walking about--thinking."

"I should think you would be thinking! After what happened to you Wednesday, and after losing your job yesterday!"

He did not correct her misinterpretation of his answer, and as he said nothing more she turned back into the bedroom, and soon emerged dressed.

As she moved about preparing breakfast his eyes rested on her now and then, and in a not unnatural selfishness he dully wondered why they two were married. Her feeling for him, he knew, was of no higher sort than that attachment which dependence upon a man and the sense of being linked to him for life may engender in an unspiritual woman. There was no love between them; they had no ideas in common; she was not this, and not this, and not this. And all the things that she was not, the other was. And it was always to be Maggie that he was to see thus intimately.

He had bowed to the situation as the ancients bowed to fate--accepted it as a fact as unchangeable as death that has fallen. And yet, as he lay watching her, thinking it was to be always so,--always!--his soul was filled with agonizing rebellion; and so it was to be through many a day to come. But later, as his first pain began to settle into an aching sense of irreparable loss, his less selfish vision showed him that Maggie was no more to blame for their terrible mistake than he, and not so much; and that she, in a less painful degree, was also a pitiable victim of their error. He became consciously considerate of her. For her part, she at first marveled at this gentler manner, then slowly yielded to it.

But this is running ahead. The first days were all the harder to Tom because he had no work to share his time with his pain. He did not seek another position; as he had told Ruth, he knew it would be useless to ask for work so long as the charge of being a dynamiter rested upon him.

He walked about the streets, trying to forget his pain in mixing among his old friends, with no better financial hope than to wait till the court had cleared his name. Several times he met Pig Iron Pete, who, knowing only the public cause for Tom's dejection, prescribed a few drinks as the best cure for such sorrow, and showed his faith in his remedy by offering to take the same medicine. And one evening he brought his cheerless presence to the Barrys'. "Poor fellow!" sighed Mrs. Barry after he had gone. "He takes his thumps hard."

One day as he walked about the streets he met Petersen, and with the Swede was a stocky, red-faced, red-necked man wearing a red necktie whose brilliance came to a focus in a great diamond pin. Petersen had continued to call frequently after nightly attendance had become unnecessary. Two weeks before Tom had gleaned from him by hard questioning that the monthly rent of twelve dollars was overdue, the landlord was raging, there was nothing with which to pay, and also nothing in the house to eat. The next day Tom had drawn fifteen dollars from his little bank account, and held it by him to give to Petersen when he next called. But he had not come again. Now on seeing him Tom's first feeling was of guilt that he had not carried the needed money to Petersen's home.

The stocky man, when he saw the two were friends, withdrew himself to the curb and began to clean his nails with his pocket knife. "How are you, Petersen?" Tom asked.

"I'm purty good," Petersen returned, glancing restlessly at the stocky man.

"You don't need a little money, do you?" Tom queried anxiously.

"No. I'm vorkin'." He again looked restlessly at his manicuring friend.

"You don't say! That's good. What at?"

Petersen's restlessness became painful. "At de docks."

Tom saw plainly that Petersen was anxious to get away, so he said good-by and walked on, puzzled by the Swede's strange manner, by his rather unusual companion, and puzzled also as to how his work as longsh.o.r.eman permitted him to roam the streets in the middle of the afternoon.

When Tom met friends in his restless wanderings and stopped to talk to them, the subject was usually the injustice he had suffered or the situation regarding the strike. Up to the day of the Avon explosion the union as a whole had been satisfied with the strike's progress. That event, of course, had weakened the strikers' cause before the public.

But the promptness with which the union was credited to have renounced the instigator of the outrage partially restored the ironworkers to their position. They were completely restored three days after the explosion, when Mr. Baxter, smarting under his recent loss and not being able to retaliate directly upon Foley, permitted himself to be induced by a newspaper to express his sentiments upon labor unions. The interview was an elaboration of the views which are already partly known to the reader. By reason of the rights which naturally belong to property, he said, by reason of capital's greatly superior intelligence, it was the privilege of capital, nay even its duty, to arrange the uttermost detail of its affairs without any consultation whatever with labor, whose views were always selfish and necessarily always unintelligent. The high a.s.sumption of superiority in Mr. Baxter's interview, its paternalistic, even monarchical, character, did not appeal to his more democratic and less capitalized readers, and they drew nearer in sympathy to the men he was fighting.

As the last days of May pa.s.sed one by one, Tom's predictions to Ruth began to have their fulfillment. By the first of June a great part of the building in the city was practically at a standstill; the other building trades had caught up with the ironworkers on many of the jobs, and so had to lay down their tools. The contractors in these trades were all checked more or less in their work. Their daily loss quickly overcame their natural sympathy with the iron contractors and Mr. Baxter was beset by them. "We haven't any trouble with our men," ran the gist of their complaint. "Why should we be losing money just because you and your men can't agree? For G.o.d's sake, settle it up so we can get to work!"

Owners of buildings in process of construction, with big sums tied up in them, began to grow frantic. Their agreements with the contractors placed upon the latter a heavy fine for every day the completion of the buildings was delayed beyond the specified time; but the contracts contained a "strike clause" which exempted the bosses from penalties for delays caused by strikes. And so the loss incurred by the present delay fell solely upon the owners. "Settle this up somehow," they were constantly demanding of Mr. Baxter. "You've delayed my building a month.

There's a month's interest on my money, and my natural profits for a month, both gone to blazes!"

To all of these Mr. Baxter's answer was in substance the same: "The day the union gives up, on that day the strike is settled." And this he said with unchangeable resolution showing through his voice. The bosses and owners went away cursing and looking hopelessly upon an immediate future whose only view to them was a desert of loss.

But Mr. Baxter did not have in his heart the same steely decision he had in his manner. Events had not taken just the course he had foreseen. The division in the union, on which he had counted for its fall, had been mended by the subsidence of Tom. The union's resources were almost exhausted, true, but it was receiving some financial a.s.sistance from its national organization, and its fighting spirit was as strong as ever. If the aid of the national organization continued to be given, and if the spirit of the men remained high, Mr. Baxter realized that the union could hold out indefinitely. The attempt to replace the strikers by non-union men had been a failure; Mr. Driscoll and himself were the only contractors who still maintained the expensive farce of keeping a few scabs at work. And despite his surface indifference to it, the pressure of the owners of buildings and of the bosses in other trades had a little effect upon Mr. Baxter, and more than a little upon some other members of the Executive Committee. A few of the employers were already eager to yield to the strikers' demand, preferring decreased profits to a long period of none at all; but when Mr. Isaacs attempted to voice the sentiments of these gentlemen in a meeting of the Executive Committee, a look from Mr. Baxter's steady gray eyes was enough to close him up disconcerted.

So Buck Foley was not without a foundation in fact for his hopeful words when he said in his report to the union at the first meeting in June: "The only way we can lose this strike, boys, is to give it away."

Which remark might be said, by one speaking from the vantage of later events, to have been a bit of unconscious prophecy.

Chapter XXIII

THE TRIUMPH OF BUSINESS SENSE

Mr. Baxter had to withstand pressure from still another source--from himself. His business sense, as had owners and contractors, demanded of him an immediate settlement of the strike. In its frequent debates with him it was its habit to argue by repeating the list of evils begotten by the strike, placing its emphasis on his losses that promised to continue for months to come. Unlike most reformers and other critics of the _status quo_, Mr. Baxter's business sense was not merely destructive; it offered a practicable plan for betterment--a plan that guaranteed victory over the strikers and required only the sacrifice of his pride.

But Mr. Baxter's pride refused to be sacrificed. His business sense had suggested the plan shortly after the union had voted to strike. He would have adopted the plan immediately, as the obvious procedure in the situation, had it not been for the break with Foley. But the break had come, and his pride could not forget that last visit of Foley to his private office; it had demanded that the walking delegate be humiliated--utterly crushed. His business sense, from the other side, had argued the folly of allowing mere emotion to stand in the way of victory and the profitable resumption of work. Outraged pride had been the stronger during April and May, but as the possibility of its satisfaction had grown less and less as May had dragged by, the pressure of his business sense had become greater and greater. And the Avon explosion had given business sense a further chance to greaten. "Try the plan at once," it had exhorted; "if you don't, Foley may do it again."

However, for all the pressure of owners and contractors and of his business sense--owners and contractors urging any sort of settlement, so that it be a settlement, business sense urging its own private plan--in the early days of June Mr. Baxter continued to present the same appearance of wall-like firmness. But his firmness was that of a dam that can sustain a pressure of one hundred, and is bearing a pressure of ninety-nine with its habitual show of eternal fixedness.

Mr. Baxter had to withstand pressure from yet another source--from his wife. When he had told her in early May that the strike was not going to be settled as quickly as he had first thought, and had asked her to practice such temporary economy as she could, she had acquiesced graciously but with an aching heart; and instead of going to Europe as she had intended, she and her daughter had run up to Tuxedo, where with two maids, carriage, and coachman, they were managing to make both ends meet on three hundred dollars a week. But when the first days of June had come, and no prospect of settlement, she began to think with swelling anxiety of the Newport season.