CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW FOREMAN
The Dan Lewis who came back to Clarke's Bottle Factory was a very different man from the one who had walked out of it five years before. He had gone out a stern, unforgiving, young ascetic, accepting no compromise, demanding perfection of himself and of his fellow-men. The very sublimity of his dream doomed it to failure. Out of the crumbling ideals of his boyhood he had struggled to a foothold on life that had never been his in the old days. His marriage to Birdie Smelts had been the fiery furnace in which his soul had been softened to receive the final stamp of manhood.
For his hour of indiscretion he had paid to the last ounce of his strength and courage. After that night in the lodging-house, there seemed to him but one right course, and he took it with unflinching promptness. Even when Birdie, secure in the protection of his name and his support, lapsed into her old vain, querulous self, he valiantly bore his burden, taking any menial work that he could find to do, and getting a sort of grim satisfaction out of what he regarded as expiation for his sin.
But when he became aware of Birdie's condition and realized the use she had made of him, the tragedy broke upon him in all of its horror. Then he, too, lost sight of the shore lights, and went plunging desperately into the stream of life with no visible and sustaining ideal to guide his course, but only the fighting necessity to get across as decently as possible.
After a long struggle he secured a place in the Ohio Glass Works, where his abilities soon began to be recognized. Instead of working now with tingling enthusiasm for Nance and the honeysuckle cottage, he worked doggedly and furiously to meet the increasing expense of Birdie's wastefulness and the maintenance of her child.
Year by year he forged ahead, gaining a reputation for sound judgment and fair dealing that made him an invaluable spokesman between the employer and the employed. He set himself seriously to work to get at the real conditions that were causing the ferment of unrest among the working classes. He made himself familiar with socialistic and labor newspapers; he attended mass meetings; he laid awake nights reading and wrestling with the problems of organized industrialism. His honest resentment against the injustice shown the laboring man was always nicely balanced by his intolerance of the haste and ignorance and misrepresentation of the labor agitators. He was one of the few men who could be called upon to arbitrate differences, whom both factions invariably pronounced "square." When pressure was brought to bear upon him to return to Clarke's, he was in a position to dictate his own terms.
It was the second week after his reinstatement that he came up to the office one day and unexpectedly encountered Nance Molloy. At first he did not recognize the tall young lady in the well-cut brown suit with the bit of fur at the neck and wrists and the jaunty brown hat with its dash of gold. Then she looked up, and it was Nance's old smile that flashed out at him, and Nance's old impulsive self that turned to greet him.
For one radiant moment all that had happened since they last stood there was swept out of the memory of each; then it came back; and they shook hands awkwardly and could find little to say to each other in the presence of the strange stenographer who occupied Nance's old place at the desk by the window.
"They told me you weren't working here," said Dan at length.