“The Guardian is a forlorn hope,” returns Marcia. “Mr. Robson is sacrificing it and with it all his ambitions and his future for the sake of a principle. That is his part in the war; the only part he can play.”
“Is it? I had heard otherwise.”
“What have you heard?”
“That he persuaded a doctor to declare him unfit.”
“That is a lie,” declares Marcia calmly, and gives the facts. “Who told you the lie?” she asks, at the close of the recital.
The other hesitates. “Mrs. Robert Wanser,” she says, at length. “I will speak to the rector about your plan,” she adds, and, by her tone, Marcia knows that she has won another recruit.
So from house to house flits the busy bee, arguing here, pleading there, feeling her way cautiously in doubtful places and always imposing secrecy until the organization shall be completed; enlisting trustworthy lieutenants,—Miss Pritchard; little Anne Serviss, vice-president of the senior class at Old Central; Magnus Laurens’s daughter, who comes down from the country to hot and dusty Fenchester to help; Miss Abbie Rappelje, sister of the Professor of Economics; Mrs. Montrose Clark; and, chiefest of all, the wary and wily Judge Selden Dana,... who, by the way, is working out a little scheme of his own all the time, in which Marcia is no more than a pawn, and without saying a word to her about it. Trust Dana for that!
While these processes were moving more or less bumpily on their appointed course outside The Guardian office, those wheels within wheels, upon which Andrew Galpin had philosophically animadverted, were whirling at an accelerated pace inside. The postponement of The Fair Dealer’s publication day had been a blow to certain developing plans in The Guardian’s press-room. When a labor leader has sedulously fomented ill-feeling, worked it almost to the point of explosion, promised the malcontents another job at increased pay if they strike to order on a certain date, and then had that date unavoidably postponed, his position becomes difficult and his next step doubtful. Such was the situation in the press-room of The Guardian. It was accentuated by the fact that The Guardian’s editor had taken to editorializing quite frankly upon certain developments in the labor world outside, thereby furnishing extra incentive to the waiting strikers, for, radical though he was, Jeremy held himself as free to criticize labor as capital when he deemed it in the wrong. In fact he was in the midst of a mid-afternoon editorial for the morrow on “Labor and the War,” when he came out of the fog of mental toil into a sensation of something wrong, something lacking. The presses had stopped. Surely it was n’t time for the run to be over! No; his watch marked four-ten.
From above sounded the scuffling of feet; a door opened and a furious, hard-breathing voice shouted an oath. Now there was a hubbub of voices, dull in the distance, and the floor shook lightly under some impact. Jeremy got to his feet, shaking and sweating. To such a condition of nerves had the overwork and overstrain of the last few weeks reduced him. He forced himself toward the door—when, with a roar and a clack, the presses took up their rhythm again, making sweet music for the relief of his beleaguered mind.