The meeting had so clearly put before Frederick the tragi-comedy of
existence that his sense of humour was stirred and he was capable of
taking the painful situation less seriously.
The cab with the ladies drove up. Simultaneously half a dozen reporters
stepped into the lobby. Frederick, to his surprise, observed that most of
them were on a rather free and easy footing with Ingigerd, and shook
hands with her familiarly. She looked very dainty and pretty.
Her rather numerous body-guard, which now included Mr. Samuelson and his
assistant, were ushered into the audience chamber, a lofty wainscoted
room with bay windows. When they entered, they saw Mr. Garry's tall
figure already seated at a long table near the empty chair that the Mayor
was to occupy. He was dressed in black, almost like an English clergyman,
and the theological spirit of the Puritan shone from his face. Yet there
was too much worldly acumen, too much cold determination in his
impressive features for a clergyman. He held his eye-glasses in his hand
and now and then turned over the pages of his notes. Mr. Samuelson and
Mr. Lilienfeld took seats on the other side of the Mayor's chair, without
greeting him. The rest of the space about the table was occupied by a few
clerks, the reporters, and other persons interested, among whom sat
Frederick, Lilienfeld's wife, prepossessing and stately, and Ingigerd
Hahlström, the _casus belli_.
The Mayor entered by a high folding door a few feet behind his chair. He
was an Irishman, somewhere between forty and fifty, wearing a smile of
mixed shrewdness and embarrassment. Though he did not go through the
formality of a greeting, there was a touch of courteous affability in the
glance he cast about the room.
One of the reporters at the bottom of the table whispered to Frederick:
"Miss Hahlström's case is going to come out all right. Everybody is of
the firm opinion that the Mayor is going to give that old hypocrite a
jolt." As a matter of fact, the Mayor's manner toward his honourable
neighbour on the right was too cordial to presage good. Silence was
ordered, and the session began. The Mayor called upon Mr. Garry to
speak.
The old gentleman arose in all his height, with a gravity and
self-assurance seldom seen except in eminent statesmen. Frederick was
fascinated. He could not remove his eyes from him and almost regretted
that his speech, according to the reporter, was doomed to failure in
advance. As for Frederick's feelings in regard to the real issue, when he
listened to the voice of his passion, he did not desire Ingigerd's
appearance in public. But for some time he had learned to silence that
voice, and he had no objections if his cure were to be accomplished as
the result of a severe operation. He felt certain that for Ingigerd to
receive permission to dance in public would mean a definite verdict in
his own case.
Mr. Garry first set forth clearly and succinctly the aims of his society,
citing a number of cases to show how children are maltreated, how their
health is ruined in industry, commerce and on the stage.
Here a reporter whispered in Frederick's ears:
"He should sweep before his own door. He's a Wall Street man and employs
a whole lot of children in his chemical works in Brooklyn. He is a
merciless exploiter."
Mr. Garry went on to explain that these abuses had necessitated the
organisation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
The society made it its duty to interfere only in cases in which the
maltreatment could be actually proved. Such a one was the case in hand.
"For several years," he said, "New York has been overrun by a peculiar
sort of freebooters." He laid emphasis on the word freebooters. "There is
a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our
country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and
dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion. This growing
immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills
the sails of those pirates. The disease is not of American origin. It has
come to us from the dens of vice in the large European cities, London,
Paris, Berlin, Vienna. It is an epidemic the spread of which must be
arrested, and to that end we must put a curb upon the freebooters who
spread the infection and continue to bring it in from abroad."
Lilienfeld, red as a lobster with rage, fidgeted on his seat.
"In the opinion of these men, circumventers and despisers of the laws of
the land, the United States is here merely for their purposes, to allow
them to sow disease and rake in the dollars. They are not good American
citizens, these peculiar Europeans. They are not citizens at all." Mr.
Garry pronounced every word with hard correctness. "That is why it is a
matter of perfect indifference to them if our religion, our customs, our
morals are destroyed. They are unscrupulous birds of prey, and once they
have filled their crops, they return with their spoil to their haunts in
Europe. The time has come when Americans should take thought and repel
the invasion of such parasites."
While the old jingo made these cutting remarks, speaking with an unshaken
front, proudly, hitting straight out from the shoulder, Frederick
unwearyingly watched every movement of his hard, noble old face. The
anthropologist and the newly awakened sculptor in him were equally
stirred. When comparing the "freebooters" to birds of prey, Garry himself
had resembled a bird of prey. His expression was like an eagle's. He
stood with his back to the windows, but with his head turned slightly to
one side, and when he spoke of the birds filling their crops, it seemed
to Frederick that his light-blue eyes paled to a whitish sheen.
Garry now came down to the subject of Ingigerd.
"By God's will a tremendous shipwreck has occurred, an appalling event,
wholly calculated to turn men's thoughts to repentance." He interrupted
himself to say it was useless to go into more details on this point,
since those who did not know how to respect such a visitation from God
were beyond redemption. "It has not been proved that the girl who
survived the shipwreck is over sixteen years of age. I propose to place
her in a hospital, have one of the steamship companies transport her back
to Europe as soon as possible, and consign her to her mother, who lives
in Paris. She should be placed in the care of a physician and under
guardianship. She has been trained to do a certain dance, during which
she falls into a pathologic condition not unlike an epileptic fit. She
turns stiff and rigid as a block of wood, her eyes start from her head,
she plucks at her clothes. Finally, she falls into a faint and loses
consciousness of her surroundings. Such things do not belong on the
stage. It would be an outrage, an insult to public opinion to reproduce
this hospital scene in a theatre. I protest against it in the name of
good taste, in the name of public morality, in the name of American
decency. It is not seemly to drag that poor unfortunate child before an
audience and shamelessly exploit her misery, merely because the shipwreck
has placed her name in everybody's mouth."
Mr. Garry seated himself. He had pronounced his last words with sharp
emphasis. Mr. Samuelson, Lilienfeld's counsel, turned pale and arose
instantly. The reporters moved up closer and leaned forward, cocking
their ears to catch every word of the famous lawyer. He began in a very
faint voice. Frederick as a physician saw he was suffering from chronic
laryngitis, probably having exchanged his sound larynx for his millions.
Samuelson's delivery, his way of pleading were well known. At first he
would spare himself, in order later to take his auditors by storm in a
violent outburst of passion.
When the violent outburst of passion came, it did not fulfill the
expectations either of Lilienfeld, his client, or the reporters, or
Frederick. It was very noticeable that his indignation was forced, that
it did not flow from a natural source, but from a bottle standing long
uncorked. His iron will compelled him to simulate a feeling that he owed
it to his client to display. In fact, the tired, harassed man, with his
small, pointed beard and his worn, dirty-looking skin, was remarkable
merely as a victim of his profession. Even in that capacity he was not so
imposing as pitiable. Unfortunately, he was most pitiable when he gave
the whip and spurs to that jaded little charger, the Rosinante of his
eloquence, to ride down his opponent.
Mr. Garry and Mr. Ilroy, the Mayor, looked at each other significantly.
They seemed to wish to return good for evil and come to the help of this
knight of the sorry figure on his hack all skin and bone, which at the
end of the attack fell and broke his legs.
Lilienfeld could not restrain himself. He turned crimson. The veins of
his forehead swelled. The time for remaining silent had ended and the
time to speak had come. Since the man with the hundred typewriters and
the millions was unequal to the task, Lilienfeld had to take the reins in
his own hands. From the mouth of the dumpy, bull-necked impresario, the
words came pouring with irresistible momentum, with elemental force, as
from the crater of a volcano.
Now it was Mr. Garry's turn to suffer in silence the thrusts and blows
that rained down on him from his opponent. The old gentleman was not
spared. He had to swallow many disagreeable statements about the
exploitation of children in certain factories in Brooklyn, about Puritan
hypocrisy, about drinking water in public and wine in secret. He was told
he was a member of that narrow-minded caste hating art, culture, and life
itself, and seeing devils with cloven hoofs and long tails in authors
like Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe.
"Such people," Lilienfeld said, "are always trying to turn back the hands
on the clock, a most revolting sight in this so-called land of freedom.
There is very little hope of success in trying to turn back the hands
on the clock. The days of Puritan prudery, the bothersome Puritan
conscience, Puritan orthodoxy, and Puritan intolerance have passed,
never to return. There is no stemming the tide of time, or the tide of
progress, or the tide of culture. But the forces of reaction, threatened
in their mediæval management of things, have begun a cowardly guerilla
warfare, a series of petty, cowardly, miserable, meddlesome tricks."
And now Lilienfeld handed back to Mr. Garry what Mr. Garry had given Mr.
Lilienfeld.
"If there really is a pest in America, its seat is in the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society is the very breeding-place
of the epidemic, in so far as there is an epidemic in the land. It is
ridiculous in Mr. Garry to maintain that Europe is a plague-boil. Europe
is the mother of America. Without the genius of a Columbus--we are at
this very moment celebrating Columbus's discovery of America--without the
genius of a Columbus and the constant influx of powerful intellects from
Germany, England and Ireland," here he winked an eye at the Mayor, "the
United States would be a dead and dreary land."
After thus moving heaven and earth and sea for the little dancer's sake,
Lilienfeld exposed the base intent of his competitors, Webster and
Forster, in denouncing him to the Society, and indignantly repudiated
Garry's assertion that he, Lilienfeld, was an exploiter. His competitors,
perhaps, were exploiters.
"See how good the conditions are under which Miss Hahlström is filling
her engagement with me. There is my wife. In some respects she has been
a mother to the girl. She is taking care of her in our own home, and
the girl is in good health. She has a dancer's physique. It is a piece
of bare-faced impudence to impugn the girl's honour. She is not a
degenerate. She is not a neglected child. On the contrary she is simply
a great artist."
Lilienfeld had left his highest trump for the last.
"Mr. Garry," he shouted so loud that the lofty windows rattled, "Mr.
Garry called me a foreigner, a freebooter and the like. I object most
decidedly. I am as much an American citizen as Mr. Garry. Mr. Garry, do
you hear I am an American citizen?" For certain reasons Lilienfeld had
had himself naturalised only a month before. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am
an American citizen?" he cried several times in succession, directly
addressing the old jingo and leaning far across the table. "Mr. Garry, do
you hear I am an American citizen? Mr. Garry, I am an American citizen,
and I will have my rights like you."
That was the end. The wheezing in Lilienfeld's chest, as he seated
himself, breathing heavily, was distinctly audible. There was not the
faintest quiver in Mr. Garry's face.
After a rather lengthy pause, during which there was profound silence,
the Mayor spoke. His words came out quietly, in his customary manner of
mild embarrassment and shrewd affability, which rather became him. His
decision was exactly what the political augurers, judging by the
constellation in the ascendant, had prophesied. Ingigerd was granted the
right to dance in public.
"The young lady, according to the decision of physicians called upon to
testify, has been declared sound in body. There is no occasion to doubt
that she is over sixteen years of age and no reason for preventing her
from earning her livelihood by the exercise of an art which she has
already practised in Europe."
The reporters grinned at one another significantly. The secret hate of
the Irish Catholic toward the native Puritan of English descent had
broken through the surface. Mr. Garry arose and shook his enemy's hand
with cold dignity. Then he walked away, drawn up to his full height. His
other adversary, of a very different nature from the Mayor, did not
succeed in darting in his face his look of hate, also of a very different
nature from the Mayor's; for Mr. Garry's eyes did not rest upon
Lilienfeld for the fraction of a second.
Everybody crowded about Ingigerd, overwhelming the girl, the impresario
and his wife with congratulations. In her joyous excitement Ingigerd's
small face beamed sweetly. She looked very lovely. It was something to
her heart's desire, this struggle to possess her carried on, as it were,
before the eyes of two continents. Indeed, the extreme importance to
which her person had attained almost humbled her a bit; but her pride and
pleasure every now and then showed in her glances, even in the glances
she sent Frederick. The men fairly courted her and did homage to her. Had
a princess of the royal blood come along at that moment, their attention
could not have been diverted for an instant from the little dancer, whom
the delight, even gratitude shining in her face made very attractive.
Lilienfeld immediately invited all the reporters to luncheon. Mr.
Samuelson declined the invitation, pleading an urgent appointment in the
Court House. This may have been a pretext, for Frederick noticed, not
without peculiar sympathy, that he was suffering under the consciousness
of his failure. The poor man, so famous and influential, but now totally
disregarded, was extremely grateful when Frederick, descending the City
Hall stairs beside him, said a few words of appreciation of Samuelson's
presentation of the case, though he actually felt no appreciation.
To excuse himself from taking part in the luncheon, Frederick said he had
several business engagements. Nevertheless he had to promise Ingigerd
that he would return in time for the demi-tasse.