CHAPTER NINETEEN
I
On reaching her own street, Janet had to plough her way to the Lorillard tenements through shoals of children that scampered about as derelict as herself. She felt the keenest pity for these little tots who came from the very immodel tenements not far away, where five or even eight people existed in a single room, defying the decencies of life by day and mocking them by night in order to live up to "the highest standard of living" in the world.
She did not expect Robert until two o'clock, when he regularly returned from the League of Guildsmen. In the interval she looked, as a matter of course, under Cornelia's alarm clock, where the four friends were in the habit of putting brief communications for one another. She found the following note addressed to her in Robert's painstaking hand:
Dear Janet:
Forgive me for not being on hand this afternoon. During the next few days, and perhaps longer, I shall be in Pittsburgh. For some time, therefore, the whole burden of the firm of Barr & Lloyd will have to rest on the shoulders of one partner. Lucky that this partner is so thoroughly staunch and dependable, isn't it?
What is taking me out of town is the strike in Pittsburgh. Thousands of steel workers have laid down their tools in protest against the conditions under which they are obliged to work. The contest between these men and their all-powerful employers is horribly uneven, and the apathy of the general public towards the issues at stake is appalling. Naturally, every agency that is pledged to the success of a healthy labor movement must pitch into this prickly business. For the strikers need all the help they can get, whether of a material or a moral kind.
It is on the moral side that our League of Guildsmen comes in. The recent war has filled the earth with indescribable bitternesses and resentments. It has also given sovereign strength to the idea that henceforth the control of the world's affairs must be taken away from the idlers and profiteers and given to the workers and producers. At every turn, omens of a vast incalculable change force themselves upon our senses.
Clearly, those who don't want a bloody revolution have got to work tooth and nail for a pacific one. Now the Guildsmen, being advocates of a change that shall be peaceful though drastic, have a vital interest in drumming it into people's heads that violence can never breed anything save violence and violence again.
You see, don't you, that I am needed there far more than here? Please believe that I'm sorry in the last degree to upset our joint business plans and to hold up "The Klondike Mail" on the typewriter at just the critical moment when Mr. Grey's double-dyed desperadoes are holding it up in the middle of the third act. It makes me feel like an accessory to the crime, all the more so in that it gives you, at the secretarial end, the task of foiling one more villain.