JACKALS FIGHT TO KEEP FROM FIGHTING
The evening after my first day spent as a clerk of the District Board
for the City of New York I reached the Jane Leonard in time to be among
the first who entered the dining-room for dinner. The meal was good
enough, soup, roast lamb and a vegetable, and it being Monday the aprons
and shirt-waists of the waitresses were still clean, but—oh, the flies!
These pests swarmed over everything except Miss Diggs’ table. That was
always kept carefully covered with mosquito-netting.
Getting through dinner as soon as I decently could, I hurried up to one
of the piazzas and sat watching the boats passing back and forth on the
river—every conceivable sort of craft from a tiny dory manned by two
half-nude small boys to huge Sound steamers with noisily splashing
side-wheels. Among this noisy throng now and then there would pass such
strangely colored boats, boats that made me think them the product of
some cubist or futurist when in the clutches of a nightmare—camouflage,
weird twistings and curves in blues, greens, purples, black, gray,
white. It was soon after the disappearance of one such boat that Miss
Stafford came out and took the chair next to mine.
“How do you like your new position?” she asked, as turning her chair
sideways to the piazza railing she put her feet on the rung of my chair.
“W-e-l-l,” I hesitated. “I don’t know whether to be amused by it or to
hate it—reading the affidavits of draft-evaders. There are so many of
them I feel like kicking, yet, at the same time I feel like crying—to
find that there are so many persons living in our country, fattening on
it, enjoying its benefits and not caring enough for it to fight for its
ideals.”
“You mustn’t expect everybody to be as keen about doing their bit as you
are. Your fingers are never still. You must roll bandages or knit
sweaters in your sleep,” she laughed. “What are the other employees
like?”
“We’re a grab-bag lot. It is just as though the Secretary of War,
wishing to set going the machinery of the draft, had thrust his hand
into a bag filled with a miscellaneous collection of workers, and
would-be workers, and grabbed a handful. The head of the subdepartment
in which I work was a saleswoman in a smallish Brooklyn shop, at eight
dollars a week. Now she is getting twenty-five, and seems to look upon
it as a miracle.”
“I can sympathize with her,” the librarian told me. “In the New York
public library I only received forty dollars a month. Now I get eighty
and the promise of a bonus at Christmas. After you’ve skimped and
struggled so long to have your salary doubled in one jump does make you
feel inclined to pinch yourself. But when the war is over—you don’t
think salaries will go down again, do you?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out—whether wages should
go still higher, remain on the present level, or fall back to the
pre-war figure.” Then I outlined what I had done, and what I planned to
do.
“Until after the war—go from one position to another? I never heard of
such a thing!” she exclaimed. “You will never make anything, taking what
employers offer you.”
“I’ll learn conditions and, incidentally, employers.”
“But you might do so much better. With your pull even though you can’t
go abroad you could land something big. There’s the publicity
department——”
“Allah forbid!” And even a Moslem himself could not have been more
fervent.
“But why not? You’re a writer, and——”
“It is because I am a writer,” I interrupted. “Because I am a writer and
intend some day to be an author.”
“You make a distinction! Whom do you think of as authors?”
“Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, George Eliot, Margaret Deland, Booth
Tarkington, and others,” I answered, then added: “Come, let us talk
about people, not books.”
“All right,” she agreed pleasantly, though she still kept her feet on my
chair. “You say the head of your subdepartment gets twenty-five a
week—what does the head of the department receive? And what manner of
individual is he or she?”
“Fifty a week. A man, of course, about forty, hale and hearty, with a
wife and no children. I think he must be what is called a political
hanger-on. I heard him tell Mr. Jobaski that he hadn’t been without a
political job for more than twenty years, just stepped from one to
another.”
“And Mr. Jobaski?”
“Quite a young man, not more than twenty-six. He’s the head of another
department and receives fifty a week. His name tells his nationality.”
“Unmarried?”
I nodded my head. “But he has a mother,” I added, wishing to give as
good an account as possible of my fellow workers.
“Dependent?” The librarian had quick-moving, clear blue eyes. There was
still enough daylight for me to see that she suspected my object.
“W-e-l-l,” glancing at her through the corners of my eyes and catching
her watching me, I laughed, “to tell the truth Mr. Jobaski is a
draft-evader, or trying to be. Miss Sneezet, my immediate boss, told me
that he had been drafted, but was ‘tryin’ to keep from goin’.’ This
afternoon, as a great honor, he offered to let me use his pen. He
assured me it was solid gold, and given him by his mother at his last
birthday. It certainly is solid something, almost as large as my thumb,
with a larger emerald set in the end—really a handsome stone. For a pen!
It felt more like a crowbar. Any more questions, Miss Persecuting
Attorney?”
“Since you don’t really enjoy the work, it must be the persons with whom
you are thrown. I may as well learn your taste,” Miss Stafford informed
me, and it was entirely evident that she did not approve of the plan I
had mapped out for myself. “And the individuals in your department—men,
women, or whatever they may be?”
“Women and girls. The one on my right had been peddling matches when she
was ‘taken on’—she couldn’t get anything else, so she told me. The one
at my left was cashier in a butcher-shop, seven a week. Another had been
a saleswoman in a jewelry store, seven a week. Next her a girl who, as a
learner on a power-machine, had not arrived at the dignity of a salary.
While the one taken on after me was in her second year at high school
when eatables began to sky-rocket so fast last winter. She had to go to
work, cash-girl in a department store at five a week, to help her father
support her younger brothers and sisters.”
The librarian shook her head and continued to regard me with speculative
eyes. I could see that she was thinking of me, what she regarded as my
peculiar taste, not of the persons about whom I had been talking.
“Don’t you think it’s pathetic?” I began again after a short silence.
“These women and girls are forced to think of such a catastrophe as the
war as a godsend. From five dollars a week to fifteen, think what a
relief it must be. I don’t believe that the girl who was selling matches
made even—” Glancing up stream I caught my breath. “Hush,” I whispered,
peering at a dark bulk on the river gliding toward us.
“Hush!” the woman at my elbow repeated, and others taking up the word it
ran the length of the piazza.
“Yes! Yes! It is they,” the woman at my elbow exclaimed, half under her
breath. “I saw them against a light on the water. They are in
uniform—our boys!”
It came on, that huge black ship; it made no sound, there was no ray of
light. Against the reflections of the shore lights dancing on the water
we made out, peering through the gloom, the trim young figures packing
every deck and leaning from the port-holes. The other crafts on the
river, as though recognizing the destination of the great ship and the
preciousness of her freight, all made way for her—three of them crowding
close against the shore in front of the Jane Leonard.
“May we not call God’s blessing to them?” a woman’s voice farther along
the piazza questioned, half sobbing.
“Give the German spies in this house a chance to have their ship sunk as
it leaves the harbor? Not much.” It was the little woman at my elbow.
As they drew nearer—our boys—each woman found her pocket-handkerchief.
There was no waving, no word; now and then a half-smothered sob. A mute
tribute to the soldiers on the dark ship to which they responded as
mutely—as the ship swept past, against the dancing lights on the water,
we saw that they all bared their heads.
Bending far out over the banisters of the piazza we watched it gliding
away from us—a silent ship upon a silent river, no sound, no ray of
light. Now and again as it passed a building on the island we would get
a glimpse of the trim silhouette of a young figure. Under the bridge it
slipped and beyond, at every heart-beat growing smaller and more dim.
Then it melted into darkness—a black-gray speck upon a black-gray river.
The women on the piazza drew a deep breath that sounded almost like a
heavy sigh from one breast as they sank back in their chairs. The men in
the three crafts that had put in against our shore began to talk—not
loudly, but to call back and forth, as though giving and taking orders.
A bell clanged, a whistle sounded, and the three boats again started on
their way—busily noisy boats on a busy, noisy river.
“I’m going down-stairs,” the woman at my elbow announced. “If any of
those damned spies tries to use the telephone, I’ll know how to stop
her.” She was no bigger than a second.
“I’ll go with you,” a woman called from the far end of the piazza.
Conversation was not resumed. One by one the women went in until finally
the piazza was left to the librarian and me. Unmindful of my
surroundings I sat staring straight ahead—for all I knew one of my
brothers, or all of them, might be on that silent ship. Would they sail
away into the unknown without being allowed to say good-by to any one,
even their mothers? Had the country that my ancestors helped to found
come to such a pass?—its sons going to fight in its defense must steal
away in the darkness. Immigrants? Loathsome ingrates!
“I’m thinking of your grab-bag lot,” Miss Stafford remarked, and I,
having forgotten her presence, turned grouchily toward her.
“Politics, like want, makes strange bedfellows,” I replied
indifferently. Somehow the heart seemed to have been dragged out of my
body by the passing of that ship. I longed to go away, get off by
myself, yet dreaded the hot discomfort of my little room. Why could not
this woman go to her comfortable room and leave me the piazza?
“Under a Democratic administration it is to be expected that Democrats
will get all the jobs,” the librarian reminded me. “To the victors
belong the spoils, you know.”
“All I know about it,” I replied crossly, “is that Judge Roger Pryor
once told me that he was the first to use that quotation as a political
slogan. I don’t know the politics of any of my fellow workers.”
When this subject recurred to me the following day I promptly began a
quiet investigation. Much to my surprise I learned that with the
exception of Mr. Gallagher, every person with whom I had come in contact
who received above fifteen dollars a week, the lowest salary paid, was a
Republican, and had voted against President Wilson. And they made no
bones about either fact. Mr. Jobaski boasted of having held, for several
years, another federal job. And that he still held it, having put in a
substitute at a lower salary. Speaking of it, he assured me that it was
the easiest and safest way for a person to make money.
The head of the department in which I worked, the fifty-dollar-a-week
man, also had a code of morals somewhat different from any I had ever
heard put into words.
“What’s your hurry?” he would ask, on seeing you returning to your work
after lunch, or at any time. “No need for you to rush around and kill
yourself. When you cheat the government you are only cheating
yourself—taking what really belongs to you, your own property.”
He certainly lived up to his own preaching. In the whole six weeks that
I was on that job I never saw him do so much as an hour’s work. When he
was not lolling back, his chair on its two hind legs, smoking an
expensive cigar, he was strolling along the corridors smoking or talking
with anybody he could buttonhole. He was a great man for “ordering”
supplies for the department—pencils, paper, printed blanks of every
known variety, in short anything that he could think of, or that was
suggested to him. Because my eyes were giving me trouble I borrowed an
eye-shade and wore it while at work. This man caught a glimpse of me and
at once sent in a written order for eye-shades for every worker in the
department, including himself. When the shades came and were distributed
everybody, excepting myself and the man, tossed them aside with scorn.
Up to the very day of his discharge this man made a point of wearing his
eye-shade when strolling along the corridors smoking. To-day among my
“exhibits” I treasure a green celluloid eye-shade, paid for by the
United States.
In this federal job my work at first was winnowing out and getting
together the papers of drafted men whose claim for exemption had to be
passed on by the District Board. And such claims as many of them did set
forth!—reasons why they should not be called on to fight for their
country. They called themselves _men_!
It was from these papers that I learned a new use for a wife—to help her
husband evade draft duty. The variety of these dependent ones was almost
as great as their number. One was dependent because her husband paid
fifteen thousand a year for an apartment in which to keep her. The
husband of this expensive dependent was a composer of popular music, who
described himself as a “creative artist,” and he gave his yearly income
at such a very low figure that the greatest of the many surprises in his
paper was that he was able to pay his rent. That man’s papers were so
absurd, for, while pleading his inability to support his wife if he was
forced to go to the front, he boasted of the huge sums he had received
in royalties, so that I always had a suspicion that they were prepared
by his publicity agent with his tongue in his cheek.
Another proud possessor of a dependent wife was the son of a millionaire
bread-maker. His application proved him to be in such dire poverty that
we all decided he had made a mistake—instead of being the son of a
bread-maker, he must have been the son of a bread-line.
Unfortunately for the evaders their wives were not always so complacent.
One man made out a very good case—his wife was delicate, their baby less
than two years old, and his salary small. Alas for his hopes! His
father-in-law also sent an affidavit with the necessary number of
witnesses. He proved that this dearly beloved dependent wife had been
deserted by her now affectionate husband six months after marriage—the
father-in-law had supported both mother and child. This old man stated
plainly that he would be very grateful to get his son-in-law sent out of
the country, and kept out—he did not specify on which battle-field.
When Alice left me I felt sure that never again would I meet a person
with such an exalted opinion of a college education. That was an error.
I was yet to meet two more. The first of these two appealed to me the
day that our department was moved up-stairs—the top floor of the old
Post-Office Building. In appearance he was an unusually fine-looking man
of about twenty-five—a blond, and slightly under six feet in height. He
was the picture of health, well fed and exceptionally well groomed.
Stopping in the door he glanced around and chanced to catch my eyes.
Smiling he walked across and greeted me with great cordiality. He wished
very much to know just how his case stood, he explained, and was sure
that I could assist him materially. I had not read his papers, so I
asked him for an outline of his case, as well as his name and address.
On learning these particulars my face must have expressed a lack of
enthusiasm in his cause, for he hastened to add:
“It’s like this—if I’d thought I was going to be drafted, I would have
enlisted. Now all I ask ’em is to let me enlist.”
“Now that you are drafted why do you wish to enlist?” I asked, for this
was a new type of an evader to me.
He drew himself up to his full height and looked down on me with
indignation.
“I’m a college man,” he informed me haughtily. “It is impossible for me
to associate with the type of man sent to —th Camp.”
“Why, what is the matter with them?” I questioned, still at a loss to
know at what he actually was driving. “What could they do to you?”
“Do to me?” He was so disgusted that he appeared to consider turning his
back on me. Evidently he had a second and what he considered a wiser
thought. “I’ll tell you just how it is—what happened when I went out
there the other day,” he began in the confidential tone assumed by some
men when they think they are about to help themselves to a kiss. “The
first man I met was a barber—the fellow who has been shaving me every
morning for—oh, I don’t know how long.” Looking at him I waited—I was
not waiting for the kiss. “Now, you couldn’t expect me to associate with
fellows like those—could you?” I looked away without replying—there are
so many different kinds of fool in this world. After a moment he added
pettishly: “If you were a college woman you’d understand.”
He not only made me feel ill, but he made me feel evil. I felt just as
one does when in the grip of a bilious attack—what is it all about?—why
not kill me at once without putting me through such nauseating torments?
“I am a college woman,” I told him, feeling weak from nausea. The next
instant resentment flared up, and taking the bit in my teeth I lied
without shame. “I’m not only a college graduate, but I have four
honorary degrees.”
“Four degrees!” he cried, staring at me goggle-eyed. “Why, why! What you
work here for?—’mong these people?”
“For one reason, because I’m not a jinnyass,” I snapped back at him.
“For another, I’d sweep the streets, be glad to sweep them, for the sake
of helping my country win this war.” Then I stood and glared at him, and
I think I clinched my fists. “God help a college that turns out such
male creatures as you.” Turning my back on him I stalked over to a
window and stood staring at the front of the City Hall.
I was not grieving for the lie told when claiming four degrees. But I
did regret, rebelliously regret, that it was not within my power to form
all draft-evaders in one company, force them to the front, and leave
them for the Germans to finish. I questioned, and I still question, the
right of any person, man or woman, to live in a country for which he or
she is unwilling to fight. I felt and I still feel that if they had any
sense of honor in their puny souls, they would get out and found a
country of their own—a country of draft-evaders!
As contemptible as these persons seemed to me there was another class
for which I had an even greater abomination—a class, as I now see
conditions, that not only threatens the life of our country but of what
we call Christian civilization. That class against which the most
beloved of our Presidents never ceased to thunder—the intentionally
childless married woman.
There was never a day that we, handling the papers of draft-evaders,
did not see and recognize her as she stalked, marched, waddled, or
blew in on us—the contemptuous, eyebrow-lifting type, the
I-know-my-rights-and-I’ll-have-’em type, the life-is-so-hard type, and
the airy-fairy-Lillian type. They all came, singly, in couples, and
occasionally in trios, all on the same business—“to see about my
husband’s case.”
Well do I remember the first of this class that fell to my lot. She blew
in like a slender, perfectly equipped racing-sloop, with one tall
billowy sail. In spite of her slenderness there was a suggestion of
Cleopatra—her slow smile, her slumberous dark eyes, which, when you
crossed the wishes of their owner, became pin-points of amber flame
behind narrow slits.
By nature I am as soft as a man about good-looking women. This girl was
beautiful. She said she felt sure that I would be able to help her. Odd
how one could always recognize a congenial person, she added. And the
smile with which she made this assertion was a poem, and the glance of
her wonderful slumberous eyes might have made any man feel sure that he
could write an epic. Of course had she not wished my services she would
never have wasted either on—a woman.
Her husband, poor dear boy, wished to go to the front. She had coaxed
him not to enlist, even gone so far as to say that if he did not enlist
and should be drafted, she would raise no objection. It seemed so
certain that he would not be caught, so many men were not, you know. Of
course a promise given under such circumstances could not be binding.
She had had her lawyer draw up the necessary papers asking her husband’s
exemption.
“We wives do have some rights, you know!” she exclaimed, at the end of
her story.
“You have been married five years and your husband’s salary is ten
thousand dollars a year—surely you have saved enough to supplement the
government’s allowance to the wife of a soldier,” I told her, for I
longed to help the man in his determination to fight for his country,
yet at the same time, I did not wish in any way to mar the dainty
perfection of this beautiful creature.
“Saved!” Another slow smile as her body swayed gracefully. “You have
never lived in a hotel, my dear. Saving is impossible. What they don’t
take from you on your bills they do in tips. It is terrible! Why—” She
paused, glanced me over as though taking my measure, then bent toward me
and lowered her voice to a confiding lower tone. “Even the clothes on my
back are not paid for.”
“But your children?” I demanded, for I was shocked, and my voice showed
it. “Surely you should save for your children.”
Her eyes flashed out at me—two sharp rays of amber flame between slitted
lids.
“Children?” she purred. “I’ve too much sense for that, to destroy my
best asset—my figure.”
Among the many wives-have-their-rights individuals who paid us personal
calls was one who waddled in at the lunch-hour, when Miss Sneezet and I
chanced to be the only ones in the department. She was short, plump, and
wore expensive clothes. She had come to find out what she could do about
her husband, she explained to Miss Sneezet. He’d been drafted, and she
wanted to make sure that he would pay her the alimony awarded her by the
courts.
Miss Sneezet reminded her that the government made certain provisions
for dependent wives. Oh, yes, she knew about that, this woman replied,
but it was such a small amount. The courts had allowed her thirty
dollars a week alimony; if the government took her husband away it
should not only make good that amount, but should see that she got her
husband’s insurance. Suppose he got killed, then her alimony would stop
entirely. Yes, it was only right that the government should make it up
to her and guaranty her against loss. A wife had some rights, and she
wanted hers.
“Perhaps your husband had his insurance made payable to his children,”
Miss Sneezet suggested.
“Children!” the woman cried, her eyes round with surprise. “He ain’t got
no children. I never had none, and he ain’t never married again.”
“Suppose you give me your name,” Miss Sneezet finally suggested, as a
means of getting rid of her. When the name was given Miss Sneezet
glanced up from her writing-pad and her eyes were round with
astonishment. “Mrs. John Tooler! But—but you gave your husband’s name as
Henry Madden.”
“Well, you see he ain’t exactly my husband, not now. He used to be, but
I divorced him before I married John,” the woman explained, and she was
not the least bit abashed.
When one considers there is no reason why she should have felt abashed.
Such cases are so common that the woman not only continues to demand her
pound of flesh after remarriage, but should the earnings of the first
man materially increase, she goes to court and asks for a larger share.
Nine cases out of ten she gets it. And why shouldn’t she? Having gone
through the marriage ceremony not only prevents her from being classed
with her twin sister, the woman of the street, but secures for her a
share of any worldly goods that may come into the possession of the man
until death them do part. If death should part them?—there she stands,
next in order after the undertaker and the doctor, demanding her dower
rights. Wives have rights!
Having stood the strain—reading the papers of draft-evaders and
listening to the stories of the daughters of a horse-leech—until I
longed to get off the earth, I asked to be transferred to the filing
department. There my boss was an ex-milliner.
“I had a good little business,” she confided to me one day at lunch.
“Five girls workin’ for me, and a boy to deliver. The war wiped me out.”
She paused, picked at her paper napkin with her fork, then went on. “If
I’d only known enough to stop when trade first begun to fall off!” She
paused again, this time staring at me in a sort of breathless amazement.
“I even used mother’s burial money—payin’ off my girls. She made me take
it—we was both so sure the war would soon be over.”
“You’re replacing it now,” I suggested, trying to make my tone
consoling—in the tenements for a child to use a parent’s burial fund is
a mortal sin.
An expression of satisfaction, almost blissful in its depths, spread
over her face and seemed to strengthen her whole person. “I’m doing it
though there isn’t any need. Mother’s makin’ bigger money than me. She
is company-companion to a rich lady—don’t have to do no work of any
kind, just walks out with the old lady and helps her in and out the
limmossin when they goes drivin’. The trained nurse who waited on the
old lady went to France.”
“Does she give your mother the same wages?” I asked.
“Sure. Forty a week. You oughter see the eats she brings home nights.
Last night she had a baked chicken—only the wings and a little of the
breast had been cut off. The cook told mother she might as well take
it—the help was tired of chicken. Somehow—” She paused thoughtfully, a
troubled look clouding her eyes, then added wistfully: “Somehow I can’t
just fancy folks havin’ good things to eat so constant that they’d get
tired of baked chicken, can you?”
In the filing department my next-seat neighbor was the heir apparent of
the Irish throne. Having bossed the princess royal of the same country
while at Sutton House, I bore with equanimity this close association
with such an exalted personage. Of course I was careful to defer to his
judgment on all matters of importance—such as the proper length of a
lady’s skirt, when one gentleman should knock another gentleman down,
just how drunk a gentleman or a lady might be permitted to get at their
grandmother’s wake, and politics. Yes, of course politics. All rightful
heirs to the Irish throne whom I have met, and I have met thousands,
have talked politics. That I take it, talking politics, is the surest
sign of their royal blood.
Just at this time the state and city elections were brewing in New York.
John Purroy Mitchel was standing for re-election as mayor of the Greater
City. One day, wishing to keep in touch with the thoughts of my royal
neighbor, I asked if he thought Mr. Mitchel would win.
“Win!” he cried, in a voice of haughty scorn. “He’ll be snowed under.”
Then he added reprovingly: “You should know that.”
“How should I know?” I inquired, meek though puzzled.
“Every Catholic has been instructed to vote against the scoundrel,” he
informed me.
“Ah!” I exclaimed, for I was genuinely startled.
“That order came straight from Rome,” he assured me, in a lowered tone.
“If your brother lived here he would have told you.”
I stared at him, and he, misinterpreting my expression, smiled
jubilantly as he nodded his head in emphasis.
“I wonder if either of my three brothers could have told me?” I
questioned, and I looked him straight in the eyes. “My brothers are all
Americans.”
“I’m an American,” he asserted indignantly. “I was born——”
“I don’t care where you were born,” I interrupted. “No one, man or
woman, who takes orders from a power outside the United States is an
American. A person who takes orders from Rome is no more to be trusted
than one who takes orders from Berlin. I’ll not sit by either.”
Grabbing my file in one hand and my chair in the other, I marched to the
other end of the table. Two days later this man was caught on the roof
caressing one of the youngest of the girls in our department—she had
been taken from school to help her parents support the family. What the
men employees did to this fellow I never knew. He did not return, not
even to finish that day.
For one thing I am devoutly thankful—that Polly Preston is an American.
It must be the most stupid of tasks to write about a human being who is
forbidden to think for him or her self. I had as soon write about a
white bait.
During the later part of September, while still working for the District
Board for the City of New York, I moved my belongings from the Jane
Leonard to the top floor of a rooming-house in Greenwich Village—in the
same house and on the same floor with Hildegarde Hook. Having met this
young woman at the Y. W. C. A. and learned from herself that she was a
writer, and from the Association that she was a problem, I decided to
put her on my list of those and that to be investigated.
Early in October the workers for the District Board began to be laid
off. When my turn came I was not sorry. Jobs were plentiful, wages on
the rise, and I was anxious to try another field.