How V. Vivian still felt the Same about the Huns, No Matter
what Sam thought; also, how Kern Garland lost Something at
the Works, and what made Mr. V.V. look at her That Way.
While Vivian was still engaged with his sick, O'Neill, recently returned
from a three weeks' industrial tour of the State, stuck his head
informally through the office door.
"Oh! Busy, hey?"
"This is the last, I think. Step into the waiting-room and come in when
I whistle."
In three minutes Vivian whistled, and O'Neill instantly opened the door.
It looked as if he had meant to come in just then anyway, and he had.
"Say, V.V.!--step out here!" he said in a low, interested voice.
"There's a whiskered bum dodging around your back hall here, and if I'm
not very much mistaken, he's got your Sunday pants!"
"It's Mister," said V.V., looking round from his secretary. "Shut the
door."
"Oh!--_Garland_, hey? But he's swiped your best pants!"
"They were a gift," said V.V., with a touch of soberness. "_Sh!_ he'll
hear you."
"Oh!" said the Labor Commissioner again, and looked a little
disappointed.
He shut the door and came on in, a substantial figure in his glossy
suit. It was the 30th of January, and he had been taking on flesh
since October.
"Well, when'd _he_ blow in? Say, he's a ringer for Weary Waggles, all
right."
"Sometime in the night," replied the young man, tilting back in his
swivel-chair. "Mrs. G. found him in the entryway when she went down for
the milk, asleep in the Goldnagels' hall-rug. I'm afraid he's only come
to be outfitted again, and she will not be firm with him, no matter what
she promises.... By the way, they were not my best trousers at all,
except in a sort of technical sense. Never had 'em on but once, at a
funeral.--Well, how was the lunch with the Governor?"
The Commissioner, having pushed a new brown derby to the back of his
head, walked about.
"Pretty good," said he--"we had a very satisfactory talk. One of his
cigars I'm smoking now. I told him what I'd noticed around the State,
and gave him an outline of the legislation I want next year. Said my
ideas were just right. Paid me some nice compliments. Speaking of
legislation," added the Commissioner, flicking cigar-ash on the bare
floor with a slightly ruffled air, "you'll be interested to hear I've
been down to Heth's since I was in the other day. Saw Heth himself...."
The doctor remarked that he had been thinking of Heth's, not five
minutes before.
"I let Corinne go back to work this morning, you see--not that she's
well again yet by a good deal, or that that's the place for her at any
time. However.... You saw Mr. Heth himself?"
"Yair. I saw him--last time I'll fool with him, too! Says he guesses the
law's good enough for him. Told me pointblank he wouldn't spend a cent
till he had to. How's that for public spirit?"
Having halted by the secretary, the Commissioner looked down at his
friend in the open manner of a speaker confident of sympathy.
"Trouble is," said the friend, frowning and sketching circles over some
yesterday's memoranda, "Mr. Heth probably doesn't know anything about it
himself. Got a lot of other interests, you see. He allows that
blackguard MacQueen an absolute free hand at the Works--takes everything
he says for gospel. He probably--"
"Don't you fool yourself, V.V.! Heth's too smart a man to turn over his
principal business to anybody. And I'm sick and tried of jollying with
him. Say, remember that letter you wrote in the 'Post' last fall?"
It appeared that V.V. did recall the thing, now that Sam mentioned it.
He said introspectively:
"So you think he's still got a grudge about that?... Well, I'm sorry,
but that letter was all true, Sam, absolutely true, in all
particulars.... Why," said he, "what's the use of talking? You can't
have omelettes without breaking eggs. You cannot."
"That's right. 'S what I came to talk about. Now, what do you say to
another strong letter to-morrow, right in the same place. These--"
"_Another_ letter!..."
"You betcher--hurt their feelings, anyway, if it don't do anything else.
I guess you had it right, that a heavy dose of public opinion is--"
"Well, no," said V.V., frankly--"no.... Another letter would be a
mistake, at just this stage of the game--a great tactical blunder--"
"Why d'you think that?" said Sam O'Neill, rather taken aback.
"Why do I think it, you say? Well, I--I know it."
"Well, I don't know it. It's a blame good thing to make these swell
obstructionists feel ashamed of themselves. Let 'em see their names
right in print. As for damages, Heth's shown that he's afraid to go
into court--"
But V.V. waved aside the idea of a suit. "The whole thing," said he, "is
merely a question of tactics. Things are going along very satisfactorily
as they are. There's a drift on, a tendency--you might say. The clothing
people have come in. Magees have come in. Why, they've agreed to do
every blessed thing you asked--fireproofed stairways and fire-doors,
ventilators and rest-rooms--"
"That makes the attitude of these others all the worse. I tell you
they've practically told me to go to hell."
The good-natured Commissioner spoke with a rare touch of irritation. To
have bagged all four of the offending local plants, without the aid of
law and relying only on personal influence and tactful pressure, would
undoubtedly have been a great card for the O'Neill administration.
Moreover, Mr. Heth's manner of superior indifference yesterday had been
decidedly galling.
"Well, give 'em a little more time," counselled V.V., lighting a pipe
which looked as if it had had a hard life. "You must make some allowance
for their point of view, Sam. Here's Mr. Heth, just to take an
example,--not making much this year, you say, and mortgaged up pretty
well, besides. Well! Just when he's probably getting worried about his
book-keeping, down you drop on him and ask him as a favor to you to put
up a new building, which is practically what--"
"He'll have to do it, too. If he don't do it now, I'll have a law next
year that'll get him right in the neck."
"Exactly. _But_--mark my words, he won't wait for the law, now that
we've got this drift going. Don't you be deceived by what he may say now
in--in pique. Give him a little chance to adjust himself to the new
idea, that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day, Sam--as you've said."
"Look here, old horse, what's struck you?"
"How do you mean, what's struck me?"
The two young men gazed at each other.
"You're pipin' a mighty different tune than you were when you wrote that
letter. I've noticed it for some time."
The look of the fine-skinned young man at the desk changed perceptively.
O'Neill was made to feel that his remark was in questionable taste, to
say the least of it.
"I wish you wouldn't speak as if I were a band of travelling bagmen. I'm
not piping or tuning in any way. I say now precisely what I've said all
along. Rouse these people to their responsibilities, and you can tear up
your factory laws! Different cases require different methods of--"
"Why, last fall--"
"Now, Sam--here! Arguing's no good--I'll tell you what. Suppose you just
leave Heth's to me. Go ahead and hammer the Pickle people if you think
that'll do the slightest good. But you leave Heth's to me for a while."
"Well! That's an order," said the Commissioner, somewhat derisively,
yet looking interested, too. "And what'll you do with them?"
"All that I care to say at present," replied the tall doctor, apparently
choosing his words with care, "is that I--ah--feel everything's going to
work out very satisfactorily in that quarter."
O'Neill stared at him, the gubernatorial cigar forgotten. "Oho!...
You've met the Heths personally?" "I've met some of them personally, as
you call it,--far as that goes."
O'Neill, puffing again, digested this information speculatively.
Presently he looked knowing and laughed.
"Say, remember my saying to you, time you wrote that letter, that if you
knew any of these yellow captains and horse-leeches' daughters
personally, you'd feel mighty different--"
"But I don't! I don't! You don't seem to get me at all, Sam. I've just
shown that my position's exactly--"
"They're a lot of Huns, and that's why they'll shell out thousands and
modernize their plants just because you ask 'em?"
The two men eyed each other again, O'Neill good-natured and rather
triumphant. V.V., for his part, was smiling just a little sternly.
"Sam," said he, "you thought I was a mad ass to write a letter a few
months ago. Now time passes and you say I was quite right, and won't I
please write you another in to-morrow's paper. This time, I tell you
that a letter will only do harm--great harm--"
"'Phone, Doctor!" bawled a husky young voice from below. "Aw, Doctor!
'Phone!"
"All right, Tommy!" shouted Doctor.
Rising to his height, he shot at O'Neill: "And once more you'll see I'm
absolutely right! I don't change, my dear fellow, the simple reason
being that I've got a guiding principle that doesn't change. I must
answer that 'phone."
"Well, I'll trot along with you. I've got to get on up the hill...."
They headed together for the door. By reason of the prohibitory
expense, Dr. Vivian had no telephone of his own, but through the
courtesy of Meeghan's Grocery just across the street (which
establishment was in receipt of medical attendance gratis), the initiate
could always "get a message" to him. Commissioner O'Neill, at once
puzzled and somewhat impressed by his friend's air of confidence,
resumed conciliatively:
"Now, jokin' aside, V.V., what's the proposition? D'you honestly think
Heth can be made to clean up by your persuading his wife or daughter to
ask him to? Is that it?--You met 'em at your uncle's reception,
I s'pose?"
But V.V.'s reserve had fallen, like a mysterious wall between. "You say
you're at the end of your rope," said he, stepping with his long stride
into the hall. "Well, suppose you give me a few months, that's all."
The two friends descended the long stairs in silence. Vivian's
meditations were rather tense. He recalled the hard words of the Severe
Arraignment; he remembered the unforgivable speech he had made in the
summer-house; before his mind's eye rose the moment in his uncle's
lamplit den when he had told the girl to her face that her father was a
homicide. Sacrificing natural inclinations to kindliness, he had done
and said these things. And Sam O'Neill, knowing practically nothing of
the facts in the case, had the nerve to stand up ...
O'Neill, descending, reflected that old V.V. was undoubtedly a queer
one. Chuck full of hazy optimism, he was of late. Hazy optimism: O'Neill
repeated the phrase, liking it. Still it was possible he might manage to
work on the girl's feelings--O'Neill was sure it was the girl--whatever
that was worth. He was a kind of appealing fellow, and did have
connections with the swells, though it was really he, O'Neill, and Mrs.
O., who ought ...
"Well, be good," said he, as they emerged from the decayed grand
entrance. "I'm breakin' in a new stenographer--troubles of my own. See
you again in a day or two."
"All right. And by the way," said the tall doctor, speaking with polite
restraint, "please don't get it into your head that I'm letting up on
these people, or anything of that sort. As a matter of fact, my tendency
is all the other way. Not to judge them too harshly--not to do the--the
most serious injustice--that's what _I've_ got to guard against...."
He turned away, bareheaded in the mild January sunshine, and crossed to
Meeghan's, where his telephone call proved to be from Rev. Mr. Dayne,
desiring a personal conference later in the day. Cumbered with many
cares though he was, the kind-faced Secretary of Charities had been
captured at sight by Vivian's plan of buying the old Dabney House, and
bringing it to life again as a great Settlement. The problem now
engrossing both was how to raise the necessary money, twenty-five
thousand dollars being a large sum, particularly with the benevolent
field just swept clean by the Associated Charities canvass. However, the
tireless Secretary seldom despaired, V. Vivian never. The young man
promised eagerly to call on Mr. Dayne, whom, in common with most of the
rest of the world, he admired immensely.
Hanging up the receiver, Vivian purchased a five-cent box of blacking, a
commodity not ranking among Meeghan's best sellers, and returned to make
ready for his professional rounds. In the closet of his bedroom, where
he went for hat and coat, he was struck with the brooding sense of
something lost, and readily recalled the episode of the trousers. He
became conscious of a certain feeling of destitution. Undoubtedly the
whole question of new clothes would have to be taken up seriously some
day. For the present there did not lack a sense of economic
precariousness: it was he and these trousers against the world....
While brushing his hat in the bedroom, Vivian wondered if Mister had yet
donned the gift articles, and how he looked in them. He fell to musing
about Kern's erring parent, thinking what a strange life he led. It was
many and many a year ago since Mister and society had parted company;
and through all this time, it was certain that every hand had been
against him. In many cities he had stood before sarcastic judges, and
been sent on to serve his little time. Adown highways unnumbered he had
sawed wood, when necessary; received handouts, worn hand-me-downs;
furnished infinite material for the wags of the comic press. Long he
had slept under hedges and in ricks, carried his Lares in a bandana
kerchief, been forcibly bathed at free lodging-houses in icy winters.
Dogs had chased him, and his fellow man: he had been bitten by the one
and smitten by the other. Ill-fame and obloquy had followed him like a
shadow. And yet--so strong and strange are our ruling passions--nothing
could wean him from the alluring feckless ways which had heaped all
these disasters upon him....
Thus and otherwise philosophizing, V. Vivian slipped on his overcoat
(which had so far escaped Mr. Garland's requisitions) and flung wide the
office windows to rid his chambers of the medical smell. He had had a
busy morning, his habit of having no billheads, while regarded as
demoralizing by professional brethren of the neighborhood, being clearly
gratifying to the circumambient laity. It was now getting toward noon,
and the doctor was in a hurry. Besides calls on his sick, he was very
anxious to get uptown before dinner and inquire after his uncle
Armistead Beirne, who had lain ill, with a heavy, rather alarming
illness, since a day or two after his New Year's reception. This call
was purely avuncular, so to say, Mr. Beirne employing a reliable
physician of his own....
The young man picked up his doctor's bag and opened the door. At the far
end of the long hall, where the Garlands' apartments were, he caught a
glimpse of a skirt, just whisking out of sight. He thought he recognized
the skirt, which was a red one, and called, in surprise:
"Corinne!"
There was no answer.
"Corinne!" he called, louder. "Is that you?"
Sure enough, Kern's face peeped out of a door, a long distance away.
"It's me, and it ain't me," she cried, mockingly. "I'm here _in-cog."_
And her head bobbed back out of sight again.
"What're you talking about?" called Vivian into the emptiness. "Did you
feel too weak to work?"
"Like in the books," said Kern, and stuck her head out again with a
giggle. "Why, I thank you kindly," she went on in a mincing stage voice.
"I'm feeling very, very, _very_ well, my Lord Dook, Mr. V.V. On'y I
decided I'd spend to-day lazyin' at my writin'-desk, readin' over my
billy-doox from peers of the rellum, 'stead of working my hands and legs
off in that nasty, _nasty_, NASTY--"
"Stop that cuckoo-clock nonsense!" called Mr. V.V., starting to walk
towards her. "What are you doing here, I say?"
"I'm helping mommer soak colliflower, Mr. V.V. Honest!" "But why didn't
you stay at the Works? Come, stop this foolishness, Corinne, and answer
me sensibly."
The girl's cheek rested against the door-facing. She stopped her
foolishness.
"Mr. V.V., I'm fired."
A bullet would not have stopped Mr. V.V.'s advance more abruptly.
"You're WHAT?"
Kern nodded slowly a number of times. "I wasn't goin' to tell you till I
got me another job, and maybe never, on'y you caught me--"
"Come here," said Mr. V.V. in rather a queer voice. "Walk," he added, as
she began to take the long hall at a skip.
Kern came at a walk. Eyeing Mr. V.V. as she drew near, she soon made out
that he was taking it even harder than she had expected. She herself had
accepted the loss of her position with the easy fatalism of the poor,
though it was a serious enough matter, in the slack midwinter and
following three weeks of idleness. However, after her sex, her present
overweening instinct was to erase that sort-of-white look from Mr.
V.V.'s face.
"It's on'y some of that sickenin' MacQueen's foolishness," she called
out from some distance away--"and I was tired of workin' in that old
nasty place anyway. Up and said he didn't have no job for me. Didn't
have _a_ job for me. So I just laughed at him and stayed round a little
while, havin' a good time, and then he happened up to the bunchin' room
and told me to git. So I gitted ... Lor, Mr. V.V.! I can find all the
good places _I_ want. Goodness me, sir! I'll get more orfers of jobs--"
"Come into the office," said Mr. V.V., turning back.
In the office, Kern, acting under medical instruction, sat down on the
horsehair lounge with one leg gone, and told her simple story in detail.
In these weeks, while she had gone down with mild pleurisy, been
successfully "tapped" and haled back to something like an economically
valuable condition, the work of the world had marched on. That another
operative sat now on Kern's stool and manipulated Kern's machine might
appear natural enough, as the superintendent, it seemed, had insisted
with his sour smile. But this was not to consider Kern's exceptional
skilfulness, known and recognized throughout the Heth Works. Replace a
girl who could bunch sixty-five hundred cheroots in a single day? No,
no, you could hardly do that....
For this dismissal there was an explanation, and it was not hidden from
the young physician. He spoke slowly, struggling not to betray the
murder in his heart.
"The devil's doing this because he knows you're a friend of mine. He
hits you to punish me.... By George, I'll show him!"
The intensity of his face, which in all moods looked somehow
kind-of-sorrowful to her, made Kern quite unhappy. She was moved by a
great desire to soothe Mr. V.V., to conjure a smile from him....
"Lor, Mr. V.V.! What do you and 'me care for his carryin's on? We can
get on heaps better without him than he can without Me! The
Consolidated'll jump down my throat--"
"You are going back to the Works," spoke Mr. V.V., in his repressed
voice.
"Oh!" replied Kern, trying not to look surprised. "Well, then, all
right, sir, Mr. V.V. Just whatever--"
"I'll give him one chance to take you back himself. I'll assume, for his
sake, that there's a misunderstanding.... If he refuses, so much the
worse for him. I shall know where to go next."
"Oh!--You mean John Farley?"
It was a shrewd guess. John Farley, sometime of the sick, and ever a
good friend of the Dabney House, was known to hold past-due "paper," of
the hard-driving Heth superintendent.
But Mr. V.V., continuing to speak as if something pained him inside,
only said, "I was not thinking of Farley...."
The young man stood silent, full of an indignation which he could not
trust himself to voice. Yet already he was beginning to put down that
tendency to a too harsh judgment which, as he himself admitted, was his
besetting sin ... Perhaps there was some misunderstanding: this
contemptible business hardly seemed thinkable, even of MacQueen. At the
worst, it was MacQueen personally and nobody else. No argument was
needed to show that the owners would not for a moment tolerate such
methods in their Works. Merely let them know what sort of thing their
superintendent was up to, that was all. O'Neill should see ... Mr. Heth,
to be sure, he did not happen to know personally....
"Well, then. That's all settled," Kern was saying, eagerly, "and I '11
go back to MacQueen or not go back, just whichever you want me, and
don't less think about him any more. Oh, Mr. V.V.--"
"He can consider himself lucky if he doesn't lose _his_ job for this
day's work."
"Mr. V.V., _what d'you think?" _cried Kern; and having caused him to
turn by this opening, she fixed him with grave eyes, and hurried on:
"Well, there was a man here named Avery, and he was ridin' his
automobile slow down a dark road and his lamps went out. And there was
two men walkin' down the road, and he ran over one of them. So he turns
back to see if the man was hurted, and the road bein' so dark he runs
over him again. So he turns back again, scared he had killed him, and
then the other man that had hopped into the ditch, he sings out to his
friend, 'Get up, you damn fool, _he's comin' back!'"_
Having quite failed to follow Kern's cheer-up narrative, Mr. V.V.'s
stare remained blank, engrossed; but presently he was caught, first by
the silence, then by his little friend's wide and intensely expectant
gaze, just beginning to fade into childlike disappointment. He promptly
burst into a laugh. It began as a dutiful laugh, but Kern's expression
soon gave it a touch of genuineness.
"Ha, ha!" said he. "That's a good one! Well, where on earth did you get
that one?"
"Off Sadie Whirtle!" cried Kern; and springing up gleefully from the
sofa, began to pirouette and kick about the bleak office.
The young man watched her, buttoning his overcoat, his specious
merriment dying.... For all the high wages she earned, the Works was of
course the last place on earth for her; but for the moment that did not
happen to be the point.
"Was it not bein' a lady to say the word like he did?" said Kern,
swaying about and waving her arms like wings. "I told Sadie Whirtle it
wasn't netiquette, but Sadie she said it wasn't funny without you used
the swear. And I did want to make you laugh.... She druther be funny
than netiquette, Sadie said."
The young man picked up his bag again, his face intent. "I'm late with
my calls," said he. "Tell your mother that I mayn't be back for dinner."
"Sadie she heard a lady say damn once right out, a customer in the
store, in a velvet suit--"
"Now stop that foolish dancing, Corinne."
Kern stopped dancing. She still looked a little pale from her illness,
which had cost her seven pounds. That morning she had donned her
working-clothes expectantly, but she had changed since coming in, and
that accounted for her favorite red dress. The dress was a strict copy
of the slender mode; she looked very small, indeed, in it. She wore a
brave red ribbon in her hair, a necklace of red beads, and a long gilt
chain which glittered splendidly as she moved.
"What makes you look at me that way, Mr. V.V.?"
The young man gave a small start and sigh.
"You must take better care of yourself, Corinne," said he, from the
depths of troubled thought. "I shall certainly do something better for
you later on. That I promise."
"Why, I feel very, _very_ well, Mr. V.V., truly."
"You're much too clever and pretty to be wearing your life out at this
sort of thing.... Much too dear a little girl...."
Kern turned away. Mr. V.V. had never said such a thing to her before,
and he now made a mental note that he must be careful not to do it
again. He had honestly intended only a matter-of-fact statement of
simple and, on the whole, pleasant truth; but Kern, with her
sensitiveness and strange delicacy, too clearly felt that he had taken a
liberty. All her gaiety died; her cheek seemed to flush a little. She
walked stiffly past Mr. V.V. to the door, never looking in his
direction.
"I'll go soak the colliflower, sir," she murmured, and slipped away into
the hall.