Before Hal could reply Donatello interrupted. He feared that McCormack might be antagonized by such blunt and embarrassing questions. He knew, from long experience, that persuasion, not bluff, was the weapon with which to fight the prejudices of the young Guardsman.
“You do not need so closely to question him!” he exclaimed. “I know him. He is safe. He believes in the solidarity of labor the world over. His sympathies, they are with our men in this struggle for the human rights. Is it not so, Lieutenant?”
“It is decidedly so,” replied Hal.
“And he will that way interpret his duty as officer to do least injury to us, his brothers. Is it not so, Lieutenant?”
“That is correct,” replied Hal. “I do not intend to fail in the performance of my duty in any quarter.”
Donatello turned toward his guests with a wide sweep of his hands.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “with that we must be content.”
But it was an hour later, after much discussion of economic problems, and the methods by which they were to be solved, that Chick unlocked the door and let Lieutenant McCormack out into the street. And neither of them saw the figure of a man patiently waiting in a dark recess two doors away, a man who had seen all of Donatello’s guests arrive, and who was waiting to see them all depart.
Later on, as Hal thought over his visit to the printing shop, he felt that he had said nothing that he did not fully believe, that he had made no promise either of action or inaction that he did not stand ready to fulfil. It was very true that his sympathies were with the working class of men. He seconded all their efforts for their own betterment. He felt that some day labor, united, harmonious, acting in concert, under one leadership the world over, would move its enormous body, would rise, tremble, stretch itself like some great giant, and in the process would upheave society; and that out of the tumult and confusion and wreckage would arise a new social order in which every man would be the equal of every other man in all things material and immaterial with which a beneficent Creator had endowed them. It was a dream, perhaps. Donatello had dreamed it. His two visitors had dreamed it. A hundred thousand men with toil-hardened hands, under the shadow of the Stars and Stripes, had dreamed it. Countless millions in the old world, under the iron heel of autocracy, had died dreaming it. Yet, some day, notwithstanding the natural perverseness of the human heart, the dream was bound to come true. So the dreamers believed; so they taught, and to that end they struggled and fought.