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"Vote!... Vote!... Vote!..." roared up to Dulac from all over the hall.... It was the end. He was powerless to stay the rush of the desire of those weary men for peace. Dulac turned slowly around, his back to the crowd, walked to a chair, and, with elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. There was a silence, as men looked at him and appreciated his suffering.
In its weary heart it knew what it was there to do, and it would do it in spite of Dulac.... He would not admit it. He would not submit to defeat. He talked on and on, not daring to stop, for with the stoppage of his harangue he heard the death of the strike. It lived only with his voice. In the body of the hall a man, haggard of face, arose. "'Tain't no use, Mr. Dulac," he said, dully.
It was as though he were forced to her against his will. The silence in the room was the tense silence of a human crisis....Then it was broken ruthlessly. There came a pounding on the door that was not a knock, but an alarm. It was imperative, excited, ominous. "Oh..." Ruth cried. Her mother was opening the door. "Dulac! Where's Dulac?" a man's voice demanded. "Here," he replied. "What is it?"
Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany bars. Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did not bend under it.
Five days she had been married, when, going to the door in answer to the bell, she opened it, to find Dulac standing there. She uttered a little cry of fright and half closed the door. He held it open with his knee. Sudden terror, not of him, but of herself, caused her to thrust against the door with all her strength, but he forced it open slowly and entered.
Protestation would only humiliate him. He turned slowly and walked into his own room, where he stood erect before his desk. "Miss Frazer," he said in a level, timbreless voice, "the labor leader Dulac lives in your house. You come of a family of labor agitators. Therefore you are discharged." "WHAT?" she exclaimed, the unexpectedness of it upsetting her poise.
You have been held too long in this miserable suspension, neither maid nor wife, neither woman nor stockfish. Ah! shameful. But we 'll right it. The step, for us, is the most reasonable that could be considered. You shake your head. But the circumstances make it so. Courage, and we come to happiness! And that, for you and me, means work. Look at the case of Lord and Lady Dulac.
Somehow he was not surprised, not startled, not afraid yet he knew there was danger. A word, a movement, might unleash the passions that seethed within Dulac.... Dulac stepped one step toward Bonbright, and paused. The movement was catlike, graceful. It had not been willed by Dulac. He had been drawn that step as iron is drawn to magnet. His eyes did not leave Bonbright's.
"Dulac," said Bonbright, leaning forward as though drawn by spasmodic contraction of tense muscles, "is this true?" For once Dulac did not become theatrical, did not pose, did not reply to this doubt, as became labor flouting capital. Perhaps it was because the matter lay as close to his stormy heart as it did to Bonbright's. "Yes," he said. "Then where..." "I don't know."
At that moment Dulac entered the room with a packet of letters just arrived from Paris by estafette.
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