To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.
The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have ceased their work in anger.
Luke saw them glance up at him as his open taxicab whirled past them: uncouth, slouching figures, with stooped shoulders and sullen faces. He had not supposed that he could be known to a score of them, but the portraits of him distributed for campaign purposes had made him familiar: the first few groups merely looked at him and sneered; then someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when the cab drew up before the office-door of the factory, a half-brick, tossed from the farther side of the street, shattered the glass windscreen at the chauffeur's back.
Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal. He jumped from the taxi and darted around it.
On the other side of the street there was only a single figure in sight: a figure that leaned against a lamp-post. Once it had been a woman; now it was only misery. Red toes burst from its bulging shoes from which the stockings fell so far that, the filthy skirt held up by a claw-like hand, at least six inches of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible. The ragged jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed a flat chest. Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and almost hid a red and swollen face. Through the hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned yellow. The right hand was extended, clenched.
"You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.
Luke turned toward the factory-door. To reach it, he had to press through a double line of men and women, silent, ominous: the strikers' picket-line. The woman's voice croaked from across the street:
"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!
Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room papered in green, with framed advertisements about the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby hat....
Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to Forbes's office.