There he remained eight months, at the end of which time, for two reasons, he was loath to leave us.  One reason was that he had fallen in love with Anna Roylston, and the other was that he had become one of us.  It was not until he became convinced of the hopelessness of his love affair that he acceded to our wishes and went back to his father.  Ostensibly an oligarch until his death, he was in reality one of the most valuable of our agents.  Often and often has the Iron Heel been dumbfounded by the miscarriage of its plans and operations against us.  If it but knew the number of its own members who are our agents, it would understand.  Young Wickson never wavered in his loyalty to the Cause.  In truth, his very death was incurred by his devotion to duty.  In the great storm of 1927, while attending a meeting of our leaders, he contracted the pneumonia of which he died.*

* The case of this young man was not unusual.  Many young men of the Oligarchy, impelled by sense of right conduct, or their imaginations captured by the glory of the Revolution, ethically or romantically devoted their lives to it.  In similar way, many sons of the Russian nobility played their parts in the earlier and protracted revolution in that country.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST

During the long period of our stay in the refuge, we were kept closely in touch with what was happening in the world without, and we were learning thoroughly the strength of the Oligarchy with which we were at war.  Out of the flux of transition the new institutions were forming more definitely and taking on the appearance and attributes of permanence.  The oligarchs had succeeded in devising a governmental machine, as intricate as it was vast, that worked—­and this despite all our efforts to clog and hamper.

This was a surprise to many of the revolutionists.  They had not conceived it possible.  Nevertheless the work of the country went on.  The men toiled in the mines and fields—­perforce they were no more than slaves.  As for the vital industries, everything prospered.  The members of the great labor castes were contented and worked on merrily.  For the first time in their lives they knew industrial peace.  No more were they worried by slack times, strike and lockout, and the union label.  They lived in more comfortable homes and in delightful cities of their own—­delightful compared with the slums and ghettos in which they had formerly dwelt.  They had better food to eat, less hours of labor, more holidays, and a greater amount and variety of interests and pleasures.  And for their less fortunate brothers and sisters, the unfavored laborers, the driven people of the abyss, they cared nothing.  An age of selfishness was dawning upon mankind.  And yet this is not altogether true.  The labor castes were honeycombed by our agents—­men whose eyes saw, beyond the belly-need, the radiant figure of liberty and brotherhood.