The Spider's Web

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

The strike dragged on wearily. After the first outbreak of violence, the leaders were able, for a time, to prevail upon the strikers to use more peaceable methods; but the resulting days of siege were as trying for both sides as the active warfare had been. Forbes's boasts to the contrary notwithstanding, the firm, handicapped by the unskilled labor of the strike-breakers, found itself unable to fulfil its contracts; the new recruits were all raw men, whereas much of the factory's work was intended for trained women: badly needed money was being forfeited. The dispossessed employees, on the other hand, rapidly exhausted their own supplies; because they had gone over to industrial unionism, the American Federation of Labor, to which their old "local" had been attached through the trade-union that it was a part of, refused help and forbade the union to give any; there had been a national reaction against the I.W.W., and it could furnish but little money. The strikers held angry meetings and faced starvation; Luke and Forbes met in long conferences and faced ruin.

In those days, only Luke's love for Betty sustained him, and Betty, being new to both love and disaster, remained loyal. She was confident that the politicians and the papers were conspiring against him, and, knowing her father's gentleness in his home, she was equally confident that the strikers were wrong.

Luke did not inquire as to the reasons of her steadfastness. In the first darkness of disaster, he was too glad for support to quarrel with its origin. She was warm and human, sympathetic and at hand; she loved him. With all his heart and soul, he returned her love. In the last analysis, he fought, he told himself, for an ideal that, if greater than them both or separately, was yet necessary to them. The ideal had an undeniable lien upon the best of his strength of body and mind; yet whatever of these the ideal could spare was not for him, but for Betty.

Then came the death of the man whom Luke had regarded as the personification of the evils from which the country was suffering. It came close enough upon the Cooper Union speech to make that speech appear in the worst possible taste; but it was an event considered of such tremendous importance in itself that Luke was forgotten and once for all swept from the columns of the newspapers.

Those papers, even the daring few that had once or twice had the temerity feebly to question the lesser schemes of the man who now pursued no more schemes, were crowded with reverential accounts of his illness, awed pictures of his last moments, laudatory descriptions of his Napoleonic career, and editorials that spoke only of his undeniable greatness and his outstanding benefactions. The country talked as if its king had died; the achievements of none of the three presidents killed while in office had received louder praise or more lengthy attention. He left two large fortunes to individuals: one to the niece to whom Yeates was engaged, and one to be divided among more distant relatives, with bequests to faithful servants in his house and businesses; but the bulk of his money went to the colleges and hospitals that he had so magnificently assisted during his life. Firmly, the entire press observed the Latin maxim: they let nothing but good be spoken of the dead.

Luke was by this time prepared for such an attitude on the part of the papers, but, on his own part, he permitted no illusions. The fact of death must always be solemn; but the force that ended wrong-doing did not palliate it. This blow was like a judgment from Heaven. Luke did not think so much of how it would benefit him as of how it would benefit the country, but he was of too common clay not to spare some reflection to the influence of the event upon his own affairs: it would probably mean the dissolution of the antagonism to him in business; it would surely mean the cessation of the personal persecution that had already wrecked his political and professional career. Yet it was more for the triumph of the larger and broader good that he felt ready to chant a Jubilate.

Once the thoughts crossed his mind: If Heaven were just, and this death were indeed Heaven's judgment, why had Heaven's judgment been so long delayed? And, since Heaven had been tardy when the death of a single man could thus ease the world and make for social righteousness, how could he have held it wrong had some sufferer from that evil struck, in Heaven's default, this single blow for the freedom of society? But he was in no mood to front casuistry: the thing had happened, and that was happiness enough.

He was reading the news in his rooms at the Arapahoe. He had sat up late with Forbes the night before and had risen late this morning, breakfasting in the apartment house. He knew that he ought to go to the factory, but he could not go at once.

He began again to dream dreams as he used to dream them. His personal failure counted for nothing in what must happen now. Suppose he were discredited and unable to win back the public confidence: somebody, without party and without politics, a larger and better man than he had been, would assume a national leadership, where his had been small and local, and would now bring the whole country back to the simple political faith and the plain, honest financial and industrial policies of the nation's founders. The mercenaries of darkness that had served the evil mind could not now, with the evil mind in perdition, stand for one day against the Army of Light.

Himself? He would begin over again, with Betty and for her. In the new order, under the reign of equity, public opinion would soon clarify, and he could re-establish himself and perform some part, however small, of the mighty work of reconstruction. He had been too busy of late with love and politics and business to continue in the social life in which Jack Porcellis had launched him. Porcellis's sporadic returns to New York—the man was just now in India on the pretense of studying its religions—were, latterly, Luke's sole occasions of approaching that existence. Save to secure the loan, he now contritely recalled, he had neglected Ruysdael, whose agent as yet evinced no misgivings over the effect of the strike upon Forbes's securities, and on his last incursions into Mrs. Ruysdael's set, though Luke had found himself liked, he was made aware that the liking for his small-talk was severely tempered by scorn for his enthusiasms. He must overcome all that now. To be of use, to help Betty, he must regain.