THE QUARREL

Bishop Marion came toward Janeway half laughing, and with a questioning expression, as one might greet another after a mutual shock.

“Mr. Janeway, you have put me very much in your debt,” declared the Bishop.

Janeway regarded him gravely. “I hope you are not given to sarcasm, Bishop?”

“Sarcasm?” echoed Bishop Marion, in surprise.

“Never,” exclaimed Janeway, cutting off the Bishop’s further words, and speaking in wrathful emphasis, “have I been so humiliated as I was by the deception practised on me last night--and on you. I hope you believed my assurances----”

Bishop Marion only laughed, pointing to himself. “Isn’t my presence excellent evidence of that? I came precisely to tell you that I needed no assurance of your entire good faith in the circumstances, and, I repeat, I _am_ in your debt.”

* * * * *

Janeway, regarding his visitor closely, showed that he felt more at ease. “I can’t explain it,” he said, in lighter vein. “No doubt I ought to be ashamed to admit it. But I love a riot--especially in a room where there are a few things loose. That kind of a situation affords the closest chance to an honest expression of opinion that a corporation lawyer ever gets.” Janeway waved his hand to a chair. “Be seated, Bishop.”

“My bones aren’t of great value,” continued Bishop Marion, sitting in the chair Simms had just left, “but when men desert me after having urged me into a mess--to have you come to my rescue as you did last night with a good right-and-left----”

“Pardon, Bishop,” interposed Janeway. “Honor to whom honor is due--it was a chair.”

“But I feared that last night’s affair might be your undoing,” the Bishop went on, more seriously, “so I came this morning to proffer my poor friendship and poorer counsel. I even thought I might myself go to Mr. Durand and tell him how badly his real interests are being managed in this trouble with the men--tell him the truth.”

Janeway, contained, indulged his vein of contemptuous irony. “Why tell the truth, Bishop? Why tell the truth when you know it is always an injury to society? Constant annoyances are caused by the obstinacy of people in telling the truth.”

“What should you tell--lies?” asked the Bishop, with a patient smile.

“Not at all,” returned Janeway blandly. “Tell what ought to be the truth--tell that which prevails, that which is accepted among our best people, our thinkers, our educators, our men of letters, as the truth. Why try all the time, or any of the time, to overturn veridical conventions--why stir things up?”

“Particularly,” assented the Bishop, amused, “if--as is usually the case nowadays--the stick you stir with is no closer to the truth than the conventions you disturb.”

“The truth,” continued Janeway, “is like the news. No newspaper gives you the news; it gives you what the proprietor thinks you need for news. Of course,” he added, “I wouldn’t for one moment assume to say what you should or should not do, about seeing Durand. But so far as concerns myself, I may say--very frankly--that you need not give what happened last night a thought. It could not possibly in any way be, as you express it, my undoing. But quite aside from that, I really shouldn’t attempt, if I were you, to see Mr. Durand; you would only expose yourself to insult. He is very bitter against you. The roots of what you fear may be my undoing go far back of last night’s events.

“Some time ago I signed a pardon application for one of our convicted dynamiters. He was guilty enough, but without the vicious character of the other three fellows, who used him as a tool. And the doctors said recently he was dying of tuberculosis.

“His wife had been haunting me for months; she said my signature would carry her petition. Once she brought the three children along--all little tots--darned and mended to the last stitch, and scrupulously clean; she’s a good woman--a victim of the sins of others. I always refused her, but she always came back. Kennedy, I suspect, abetted her--the fellow has a sneaking pity for the forlorn; and I knew he was in it, for she never appeared at inopportune moments--never when I was ill-tempered or under pressure. And there never were any demonstrations at my refusals; no tears, very few words at any time, just a mute appeal of the eyes; and when I said ‘No,’ silent departure. If she’d quarrelled with me it would have made it easier to turn her down.

“Finally, to be rid of her, I laid down what I thought an impossible condition. ‘If you’ll bring me your husband’s written confession of his part in the affair and it strikes me as the truth, I’ll sign your application.’

“She went away downhearted. But in a week she was back. What won’t a woman do for love of a man! She had been to the penitentiary herself, coaxed the truth from her husband--think of how she must have pleaded!--written it down herself--and it was beautifully written--and placed it in my hands--only asking that I make no public use of it.

“I read the story, handed it back to her, asked her for her petition, and signed it. Through our traffic department I then arranged transportation for the whole family to Arizona.

“After all those months, those pitiful failures, those constant rebuffs, she never broke till that moment. I was never so upset in my life. She caught my hands, dropped on her knees and kissed them in a frenzy of tears.”

“When the end comes, Mr. Janeway,” said the Bishop simply, “that is a moment that should console you.”

“It doesn’t console me just now,” continued Janeway. “I keep thinking I may have held out too long; I worry for fear the cuss will die. Not that I care for him--but that would make her victory a barren one. ‘Now, go to it,’ I said to her rather shamefacedly. ‘Beat the doctors if you can.’

“You’d hardly believe it, but Durand was violently angry with me for signing that petition. He got it all from the newspapers, of course. It was our first open rupture. I took the position that the responsibility was purely mine; I had secured the man’s conviction. Every one concerned felt that justice had been satisfied in the fellow’s case; I was the last man holding out. I made no apologies to Durand; in fact, I talked pretty sharp to him for abusing me. It was a minor incident, but it only showed he and I never could get along.”

“I knew a little of that case,” said Bishop Marion, “together,” he added, “with certain incidents you have not recounted. She told me of the check you gave her to ‘get her on her feet,’ as you expressed it, in Arizona. It was that that broke her down. And why,” said the Bishop again, “shouldn’t I confess that there was, besides Kennedy, a further conspirator in her persistence in dogging your steps? I am afraid it was Kennedy and I together who told her that if she would be _patient_--you would not ultimately refuse her.”

Janeway, laughing rather cynically, tossed his head. “Wheels within wheels; conspiracies on every hand,” he remarked, slowing down. “And we think, each of us, that nobody fools us!”

“This unhappy man,” continued the Bishop, “was one of my own stray sheep--not of my immediate flock, for, of course, strangers are sent in to do jobs such as that. But he was, or should have been, a Catholic, and his poor wife is an exemplary one. She came here to Fond du Lac during his trial and has lived here ever since, supporting herself and her children by doing washing.”

Something in the Bishop’s words woke Janeway up. He looked suddenly at his visitor and pointed his finger at him. “Tell me, Bishop Marion, do you and your fellow bishops feel no culpability in not advocating your own labor-unions for your working men? Don’t you to-day, in effect, force your own men--in order to protect themselves from capitalistic greed--to join unions where there is care neither for God nor man?--unions infested with thugs and teeming with extortioners and murderers, as American labor-unions are to-day? Doesn’t every criminal act of remorseless union-labor villainy point its finger at the shepherds who virtually condemn their sheep to such associations? You warn your people to beware of evil communications, and practically condemn your Christian working-man to take hands with villainy and crime.”

“My dear Mr. Janeway,” returned the Bishop, unhesitatingly, “your views and mine are too closely alike on that subject to leave room for discussion. Some day a Ketteler will arise among us to tackle that problem--along with our many others.”

“My difficulties with Mr. Durand,” continued Janeway, reverting in composed fashion to the subject of the Bishop’s solicitude, “really originate in a fundamental difference of opinion concerning the labor policy of the corporation--a difference in principle--which, as you know, is always a serious matter. Have you ever noticed,” he continued, as if for a moment digressing, “that radical men grow more conservative as they grow older? And that conservative men, being older, grow more radical?

“I think something like that has happened to me,” Janeway went on, without giving chance for answer. “I grew up on Adam Smith and Bentham and the _laissez-faire_ school of political economists. But I’ve left them.”

“And where are you now?” asked the Bishop.

Janeway did not even shrug his shoulders. “Nowhere,” he said, with contempt in his tone.

“Like too many others, I fear,” returned the Bishop.

“But I do,” resumed Janeway, with characteristic decision, “recognize in your Church--though far from my ken--a real constructive element of the only civilized society we know by experience anything about--our own. I recognize in it--as many thinking men do--a bulwark of social order. I don’t mean Mark Hanna’s social policeman--I mean a counter-check, a poise, a pretty good code to back up against. And if Christianity with a voice of authority can’t step in between capitalistic hogs like Durand and corrupt labor leaders such as we are cursed with nowadays, we may as well give up our ideas of civilization and all go to making bombs. In the social warfare of to-day there’s no half-way between Christianity and dynamite.”

Bishop Marion listened attentively. “Newman once said,” he remarked, “that if men would define their terms, discussion would cease. But it would put you too far afield to ask you to define Christianity. There’s another thing about you that puzzles me,” he observed. Janeway only looked at him. “To the prosperous man whatever _is_, is right; to the unfortunate man whatever is, is wrong. You puzzle me a little, because my rule doesn’t quite work with you.”

The office door opened. A clerk stepped into the room. “Mr. Durand, Mr. Janeway.”

“I’ll see him presently,” snapped Janeway.

The clerk, as if not knowing whether to say more, paused doubtfully. “He seems somewhat in a hurry,” he ventured.

“He usually does,” returned Janeway, unmoved. “What’s your haste?” he asked, with a suspicion of impatience, as the clerk retired and Bishop Marion rose. “There’s not the slightest reason for any.”

“He shouldn’t meet me here,” said the Bishop seriously. “If what you tell me is correct, it would only get you into more trouble.”

Janeway laughed. “There the question of ‘terms’ bobs up again! But in point of fact, nothing could get me into more ‘trouble.’ Sit down, do.”

“No,” returned the Bishop, resolved to withdraw, “I have really said all I have to say; except, perhaps,” he added, and he paused with a questioning expression as he regarded the lawyer, “to ask----”

“Go ahead,” said Janeway.

“Why men like you, while professing to admire Christianity, stand so comfortably aloof from it?” The Bishop was retreating toward the corridor door.

“By my word!” exclaimed Janeway, signalling with the buzzer for Durand’s admittance, and following Bishop Marion in a leisurely manner. “I hardly expected, so soon after the episode of the chair, to be accused of standing aloof from Christianity!”

“You know what I mean,” returned Bishop Marion, in like vein, “and it applies, Mr. Janeway, to men like you!”

“I suppose,” responded Janeway lazily, “I’m like the man that was hard up. His minister complained he ought to be doing something for religion. ‘It’s a debt you owe the Lord,’ he urged. ‘I know it,’ admitted the man. ‘I’d like to do something. But the Lord isn’t pressing me as hard as the rest of my creditors.’”

Robert Durand flung open the office door. In his keen glance at both men he made no effort to conceal his hostile attitude.

“Interrupting your conference, I’m afraid,” he said harshly.

Janeway stood quite unruffled. “It is closed.”

Durand, evidently laboring under pent-up wrath, glared at the Bishop. “I congratulate you on securing the co-operation of Mr. Janeway in your efforts to make trouble among my men.”

The challenge could hardly be ignored; indeed, Bishop Marion made no effort to ignore it, though he spoke without feeling. “Much as I prize Mr. Janeway’s good-will, I must say I need yours even more, Mr. Durand, in any effort, not to make trouble among your men, but to avert industrial warfare in this community.”

“What I hate to see, in any kind of a fight, is hypocrisy,” said Durand, under control, but biting off his words with emphasis. “You agitate under the lying pretense that your own people are affected. Less than one-third of our men, by actual count, belong to your church.”

“They all belong to humanity, to God. They are men with wives, children, souls.”

“All possible dupes and supporters for fat priests who won’t work themselves.”

The Bishop eyed his accuser calmly until he had done speaking; then he regarded rather deprecatingly his own lean proportions. “Perhaps I deserve no credit for not being fat; I am personally somewhat the victim of a faulty assimilation. But what would it really avail me, Mr. Durand, to retort in kind, and speak of fat dividends and the scandalous profiteering of the last three years? My fight, if you deem it such, against working men twelve hours a day and seven days a week is the fight of humanity as well as of Christianity. Your methods breed human hyenas. And if you don’t lift them above their ferocity, they will one day tear you and your class limb from limb. It is men like you,” said the Bishop, without either haste or undue feeling, “as well as other men--that Christianity strives to protect from the certain consequences of their own folly.”

“And this,” remarked Durand, looking at Janeway as the Bishop passed through the door and closed it behind him, “is the sort of Socialistic eloquence that finds sympathy with a man who draws fifty thousand dollars a year----”

“My salary,” retorted Janeway, “paid by the corporation of which you are president, was fixed at your suggestion--not at mine. And remember--you came to me--not I to you.”

“--who draws fifty thousand a year to look after my legal interests,” persisted Durand bitterly.

“But not one dollar to look after your illegal or inhuman interests,” interrupted Janeway evenly.

“Fine discrimination,” commented Durand, not repressing his sneer.

“Fine discrimination,” returned Janeway composedly, “keeps many capitalists out of the penitentiary.”

Durand had ample reason to know that his counsel was a difficult antagonist in such an encounter as he was persisting in, but his anger made him reckless. “It’s time for you and me to have an understanding,” he blurted out. The very realization of his helplessness at Janeway’s hands enraged him the more; he was like a bull faced by a toreador.

“I agree with you,” returned Janeway.

“Men on the staff of the corporation,” said Durand, regaining, with the hackneyed pronouncement, something of his dignity and pompousness, “may honestly differ with me in my policies. But I will have strict loyalty from them, or their resignations.”

“My resignation was placed in your hands last night. And it has been there before, you know,” added Janeway.

“This is the second time you’ve played traitor to me.”

“I think it’s the third,” said Janeway. “The first was when you asked me to help send Simms to the United States Senate.”

“You refused a year ago to get my divorce for me.”

“Getting a divorce, tainted with fraud, for the President is no part of the duties of the general counsel of the Durand Steel Corporation.”

Durand burst into a rage. “General counsel of hell and damnation----”

“Something like that,” interposed Janeway.

“When you refer to my divorce bill as tainted with fraud, you say what is absolutely false.”

Janeway regarded him with a more malevolent look than had heretofore entered his eyes. “Were I your wife’s advocate,” he said, “I should correct you even on that point. No fraud?” he echoed, stirred by Durand’s denial. “No fraud? You signed my name to this complaint as attorney, making me in effect party to your contemptible charges.”

“You _were_ my attorney!” roared Durand.

Janeway almost rose in his chair. “Not _your_ attorney; never _your_ attorney. I told you that a year ago. You had no right to join me as your attorney without my consent. You had no right to file with my name on it a complaint I never saw. Fraud?” repeated Janeway with stinging emphasis, “your hands are dripping with fraud! I warn you, Durand, in so far as you have attempted to mix me in it, this injustice to your wife shall be righted.”

Durand, too angry for prudence, kept on. “If it wasn’t too late,” he almost shouted, “I’ll guarantee you’d take her case against me.” The retort that it might not be too late was on Janeway’s lips, but he suppressed it. Durand, mistaking his silence, blundered ahead. “It wouldn’t surprise me, if after acting as my legal adviser, you’d stoop to anything.”

“Since you mention it,” agreed Janeway, looking coolly out of the window, “it wouldn’t greatly surprise me, either.”

“A man,” exclaimed Durand, “that will take from me fifty thousand a year, and get up as you did last night, in a public meeting, and defend this meddling Bishop--the worst agitator in Fond du Lac--a man that’s a traitor under cover to every legitimate business enterprise in this town--why, I wouldn’t call myself a man to do it!”

Cumulative abuse, even if stupid, sometimes bores into an antagonist. Janeway’s eyes lighted again with anger. “Don’t call yourself a man, Durand!” he said, pounding in his words with his heavy voice. “It would spoil the one word that decency may still lay claim to! Before you agreed to this meeting, you asked my advice. I warned you what was coming. I told you I’d never defend a twelve-hour day, seven days a week. You followed other counsel. Then you asked me to use my influence, when Simms had failed, to arrange this meeting and have Marion there, promising me everything should be open and aboveboard.

“I did my part. And you didn’t keep your word. That’s the trouble with you, your word is never dependable. You went to work and packed the meeting--a public meeting called to urge arbitration to avoid a disastrous strike. You packed it with your own thugs, to assault the Bishop and those that opposed you--you’ve been known to boast you’d drive him out of town. I told you what would happen if you attempted violence.

“By Heaven, I sometimes wonder what you take me for. Because I sent the union-labor dynamiters from this town to the penitentiary, you seem to expect me to countenance methods of yours as vicious as theirs.

“Durand,” persisted Janeway, ignoring interruptions and forcing his words on Durand with savage energy, “I’m no longer speaking to you as your legal and friendly adviser. But if I were, I couldn’t tell you other than this: You can’t safely use force and violence in this country toward men that don’t happen to agree with you. This isn’t Europe--this is America, and you can’t enslave men or hire brutes to beat up those that oppose your rapacity, without sometime paying the penalty. I don’t know and don’t care how much money you’ve made in the last three years, but with your stupendous profits you can ill afford to stick out in a labor fight, even if your men become infected with some of your own monstrous greed--and I can’t see but that they have much right in this quarrel on their side. And don’t be too sure of beating this shabby Bishop. He’ll give you a man’s fight before you’re done; you’re not dealing now with a defenseless woman!”

It was Durand’s opportunity to sneer again. “It’s a pity, Janeway,” he said coolly, “you couldn’t befriend her, too!”

The lawyer’s head jerked with the violence of his anger; his head fell forward and his eyes shot fire.

“If she ever so much as raised her little finger to _me_ for help,” he exclaimed, throwing himself viciously into his words, “I’d befriend her, too quick!”

“Simms,” Durand blustered on defiantly, “tells me you’ve ‘demanded’”--he gave an unpleasant emphasis to the word--“to be substituted out of my case. I want to tell you I’m glad of it. Don’t plume yourself I need you in any way. I’ll have my divorce just the same. And you can act as anybody’s attorney you dashed please.” He flung the words at his former associate with the air of a man who, casting off the last shackles of prudence, says exactly what he wants to say to a man thoroughly hated.

Janeway’s chair, after his recent explosion, had been turned sidewise, and he was gazing wrathfully out on the peaceful waters of Lake Michigan. Listening to Durand’s contemptuous words, he swung gradually around to face him as he ceased speaking, and regarded him for an embarrassing instant intently but silently. Then he pushed a letter-head slowly across the table. “I suppose,” he remarked questioningly, “you mean what you say?”

Durand, an experienced poker player, “stood” on his hand. “I usually mean what I say!” he retorted insolently.

Janeway was not to be moved from his composure. “I’ve no desire,” he said, “to take advantage of an angry moment”--he spoke the words with his accustomed deliberation. “But if you really are equal, for once, to sticking to a statement, Durand, put that in writing.”

Unwilling to “take water,” as Kennedy would have expressed it, Durand snatched the pen from the ink-well and wrote out the substance of his words. He signed the statement with a flourish. Janeway had more than once, and in all sincerity, complimented Durand on his clean, clear handwriting. He refrained from doing so now.

Durand tossed the paper back with further bitter recriminations--but to these Janeway made not the slightest response. He picked the paper up just as Kennedy opened the office door. Perceiving Janeway’s attention bent on the clearance in his hand, Kennedy hesitated. “What is it, Kennedy?” Janeway asked, his voice falling back to its usual dryness.

Kennedy looked nonplussed at Durand. But Janeway’s impatience called for a categorical answer. “Mrs. Durand, Mr. Janeway,” he said, as if casting on the two angry men before him responsibility for any possible scene.

“I will see her at once,” said Janeway instantly.

Durand, taken completely by surprise, and with words now sounding ominous in his ears, reached for his hat as if accepting a challenge. “Don’t let me interfere.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you wouldn’t interfere in the least,” retorted Janeway, injecting as much contempt as he possibly could into his words. “Kennedy,” he snapped, “show Mr. Durand out through the corridor.”

He had been standing at the side of his table. He stood now truculently watching Durand follow Kennedy, who went through the form of his orders with becoming dignity. “Never you mind,” said Durand angrily. “I’m quite equal to finding my way out of this office.”

Alone, Janeway turned once more toward his chair, passed his hand nervously over his disordered hair--what Harrison irreverently termed his jury hair--and, sitting down, picked up the paper Durand had signed, and adjusted his nose-glasses. He glared at it an instant, opened a private drawer and flung the paper into it, dropped his glasses on the blotting-pad in front of him, turned sidewise, and, flattening one hand abruptly on the table, stared again stolidly out on the lake.