"An twent' from Rosie Légère's," said Angel, "maka two hundre'."
Hermann Hoffmann, alone behind the bar in Schleger's saloon, and half
asleep as he bent over a thumbed and stained copy of the last
evening's paper, scarcely raised his head. It was half-past one
o'clock in the morning. Except for Angelelli and the man to whom he
was talking at a table by the door, the place was empty of customers,
and so unconcerned were these two late-comers that, had he wished it,
every word of their conversation could have been taken down by the
bar-keeper.
But the bar-keeper did not wish it. He knew both the men, and had
heard something of the character of each, as every good bar-keeper
comes to know and to hear about most of the regular patrons of the
establishment that employs him. With Angel he had even had a nodding
acquaintance in the days of the brewery-wagon, and since he had
donned the white jacket he had seen often the narrow-chested,
stoop-shouldered, slouching Austrian now in conference with the
dapper Rafael. He had been told that this Austrian, with his
bristling brown hair, pale face, and thin mouth, pulled downward at
one corner by an ugly scar, made his regular living by appropriating
the wages of a girl that he nightly drove forth to scour the dark
streets, earning what money she could from what looks were left her
and stealing what she could not earn. And Hermann knew that, now an
election was near, both of these proud possessors of the suffrage
were doing their exacted duty for the powers that permitted them to
thrive, and were, like the army of others in their own profession,
through all New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, through the
tenderloin of every American city, providing for the voting of
repeaters, of dead men, of men that never were, in the interests of
whichever of the two great political parties happens to be in control
of the city where such votes are needed.
"Mirka," said Angel, laying down his gold-rimmed fountain-pen and
looking up from the back of the envelope on which he had been making
his calculations, "we weell need a hundre' more."
Mirka, the Austrian, tried to smile, but that ugly scar at the corner
of his mouth caught the smile in the making and pulled it down into a
sinister sneer.
"I can smoke out fifty if you can," he said.
"Da sama kind?"
"Yes."
Hermann, behind the bar, frankly yawned. He remembered, with a slow
smile, how, when he had first come across such practices, years ago,
he had gone to the ward-leader of that party in whose interests the
work was being done. He remembered how this potentate had first
assured him that he had "heard wrong," and finally met his
persistence with a warning that he had better keep his mouth shut.
He remembered how, at the rival headquarters, he had been told that
there was always a mass of such evidence, none of which could be
effectively used before election, and how, when he had ventured to
suggest that an election-offense was punishable after election-day,
he had been ridiculed. And lastly, he knew that his own Socialist
friends had already all the information that he had now obtained, but
could do no more at the polls than lodge protests that would be
overruled by the election-judges and subsequently pigeon-holed by the
courts.
"All right," Angel was saying, as he pocketed his pen and tore the
envelope into small bits, which he tossed deftly across the room into
the gutter beneath the bar. "I feexa heem. I geta da rest."
The two men rose and stepped to the bar for a nightcap of whiskey.
Already the Austrian had drunk more than was good for his temper, but
Hermann, whose eye was usually exact in discerning such matters, was
sleepy to-night, and did not notice this. Angel poured a bountiful
portion from the cool metal-stoppered bottle that Hoffmann shoved
clanking toward him. Mirka decanted even more, and then momentarily
released his hold of the bottle to speak to his companion. Hermann,
thinking both men satisfied, reached for the liquor.
"Keep your dirty fingers off of that!" cried Mirka, with no trace of
his nationality in his speech. "Can't you wait till I pour a real
man's drink?"
Hermann flushed.
"It's a bath, den, you're goin' to dake?" he asked.
"I will if I like, you damned fool!" rejoined Mirka, his eyes warming.
Hermann's blue glance surveyed the uncouth, slouching figure.
"All righd," he said; "you need von."
The Austrian glowered. Then, tilting back his bristling head, he
tossed the liquor down his long throat.
"Give me another, you Dutchie," he ordered, pushing his glass across
the bar.
Angel began a quieting word, but Mirka broke in, still addressing
Hermann.
"Get a move on, or I'll break yer face, Dutchie!" he insisted.
Hermann's jaw was suddenly set in a rigid line. He remained
motionless.
"Come on, now!" said Mirka.
"Don' maka these treecks," protested Angelelli, dividing his plea
between his hearers, and placing his hand upon the Austrian's
shoulder.
"You shut up!" retorted Mirka, shaking himself free. "And you, you
Dutch fool, give me a drink--quick!"
Hermann did not obey. He saw at last the fellow's condition.
"You've had enough," he said.
"Mind yer own business," snapped the Austrian.
"Dot's what I'm doing," answered Hermann, calmly reaching for the
empty glasses. "You're drunk."
He had hardly spoken before Mirka, his habitual lassitude dropping
from him like a discarded cloak, made a quick leap that brought him
half across the bar. The glasses crashed, the bottle was overturned,
and in the Austrian's waving, clenched right hand there flashed a
knife.
It was a moment of action, but a moment only. From one side of the
bar, Angel had gripped Mirka by the waist and was pulling him
backward; on the other, the powerful German had caught the
threatening fist and now, with a quick twist, sent the knife plunging
into the tub below the beer-spigots.
Spluttering obscenities, the Austrian was dragged to the position
from which he had made his attack.
"You keepa quiet!" commanded Angel of the one combatant, and to the
other: "You getta more fresh with your mouth an' I getta you fired."
Hermann had recovered the knife and was now calmly drying it upon a
bar-towel. Such incidents were not unusual in his occupation and,
now that this one was closed, he could afford to smile his answer to
Rafael.
Mirka, on the other hand, though still tightly embraced by Angel, was
trembling with rage.
"I'll get you for this, Dutchie!" he declared.
"So?" said Hermann. He still smiled, but he was tired of being
called Dutchie, and his tongue ran just a hair's breadth ahead of his
caution. "Try it," he concluded; "try it, you dirty Austrian loafer,
und I'll somevheres go vhere dose names you've been makin' oud vill
get you vhat you deserve."
"Whata you say?" Angel kept his hold upon his friend, but the
reference to their recent occupation brought a glint of anger into
his own eyes.
By way of beginning his reply, Hermann smilingly returned the knife
to its owner, who seized it with a growl of malice.
"Neffer mind vhat I say den," he answered. "Vhat I say now is
'Goot-nighd.' You two get oud."
He raised his thick arm to point to the door, but in the manner of
its raising there was another significance. For a moment Angel and
Mirka met hotly his steady gaze. Then the bar-keeper raised
carelessly his other hand: it held a stout bung-starter.
The two men, with a common impulse, turned and silently left the
place.
Hermann was not afraid of them. He knew that his threat of betrayal
had been idle, for the excellent reason that there was no quarter in
which betrayal would be effective, and he told himself that, as soon
as their anger and their drunkenness had in some measure subsided,
the plotters would recognize this. So he whistled complacently as he
polished the bright surface of the bar and did not hesitate, when he
began at last to wash and put away the glasses, to turn his back to
the swinging door of the saloon. The campaign was not one that was
considered important and, personally, he cared but little about it or
what enmities it might awaken.
The campaigners cared, however, a great deal. There was in no sane
mind any question of the result, but so mighty is custom that there
were few sane minds that did not publicly pretend to be in doubt upon
the issue.
For many days previously, any outsider, reading the newspapers or
attending the mass-meetings in Cooper Union and Carnegie Hall, would
have supposed that a prodigious battle was waging and that the result
would be, until the last shot, in doubt. There were terrible
scareheads, brutal cartoons, and extra editions. As the real problem
was whether one organization of needy men should remain in control,
or whether another should replace it, there were few matters of
policy to be discussed; and so the speechmaking and the printing
resolved themselves into personal investigations, and attacks upon
character. Private defectives were hired, records searched,
neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, and family feuds
revived. Desks were broken open, letters bought, anonymous
communications mailed, boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and women and
men hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap. Whatever was
discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured--whatever truth or falsehood
could be seized by whatever means--was blazoned in the papers,
shrieked by the newsboys, bawled from the cart-tails at the corners
under the campaign banners, in the light of the torches and before
the cheering crowds. It would all be over in a very short while; in
a very short while there would pass one another, with pleasant
smiles, in court, at church, and along Broadway, the distinguished
gentlemen that were now, before big audiences, calling one another
adulterers and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished
gentlemen so to call one another during a manly campaign in this
successful democracy of ours, and it seems to be an engrossing
occupation while the chance endures.
Though he often trembled, Wesley Dyker, perhaps because his records
of any sort were as yet but brief, escaped with a fairly clean skin
this Yahoo discharge, but the downpour continued all about him with
tremendous vigor and at tremendous cost. The Republican leaders,
fully expecting defeat, assessed their supporters just as heavily as
if they were certain to triumph, spent much time and more money and
no end of breath. The Reformers, under varying factional names,
bewildered, sometimes advisedly, the independent voter by here
joining one leading party, there endorsing another, and in a third
place clamoring for a ballot so split and so subdivided that the
average man could in no wise comprehend it when marked. The
Socialists, to be sure, went along calmly enough, confessing their
numerical weakness and securely seeing in the small increase of the
present day the promise of the large majority of the distant morrow.
But all the while the Democratic organization thundered an inch
forward in the light and ran a mile forward in the darkness by
precisely the same powers as were invoked, with so much smaller
results, by the Republicans and the Reformers.
Not that there was any reason to doubt the organization's victory.
There was none. But every organization always insists that, no
matter how easy the skirmish, its leaders must so manage that it
comes out of the fray to all appearances stronger than it came out of
the fray preceding. Each majority must be larger than the last, and
so the lists are padded, and the repeaters imported, and the
lodging-houses colonized, and the organization, like the frog in La
Fontaine's fable, though with less reason, swells and swells against
the hour when it shall finally burst. The saloons were crowded; it
was freely predicted that, the season being prosperous, votes would
go at no lower than two dollars, and, in some quarters and some
instances, as high as five dollars apiece.
There were some points, however, to which the tide of prosperity had
not risen, and one of these was the high tenement of Katie Flanagan.
The Irish girl returned there every night a little more discouraged
than when she had left its precarious shelter in the morning, as
doubtful as ever of Hermann's ability to support a wife, but more
doubtful than ever of her own ability to help, should they marry, in
the support of the home. At the shop, the work and the hours weighed
more and more heavily upon her; they dragged at the heels of her mind
when she endeavored to evade the insulting compliments of the callow
youths and gray men that strolled by her counter, and they were
impedimenta that made it daily more difficult to escape without
offense the oily approaches of the dignified Mr. Porter.
"Sometimes," she said one evening, as she and Carrie sat over their
meager supper, "I begin wonderin' again whether it's worth while
runnin' away."
The striking shirtwaist-maker, who had spent a long day on
picket-duty before a Waverley Place factory, looked up with round
eyes calmly serious.
"That is what I am wondering all the time," she replied.
Katie made an impatient movement of her hand.
"Och, now," she generously protested, "it's all right for me to
growl, because I've got a job. I don't count, an' it's just me
habit. But you mustn't do it, me dear."
"I am not complaining; I am just honestly wondering, that's all."
"But if the worst came, you could go back to work, you know."
Carrie's face was all surprise.
"And turn traitor to my friends striking in my own and all the other
factories?" she asked. "Oh, no; you would be the last to do it
yourself, Katie. I would rather go on the street."
"You don't mean that, darlin'."
"I do mean it. If I went on the street, I would hurt myself, but if
I did the other thing I would hurt all the other girls in the union."
She spoke quietly, but with infinite conviction, and Katie knew the
forces that had brought about this state of mind. The widespread
strike, though it still continued, was a failure. Public sentiment
had never been aroused; the employers had succeeded in securing
non-union labor, whose wages they were, even now, securely reducing,
and whose privileges--granted to entice them to work--they were
curbing; their political powers earned them the armed assistance of
the law; and the strikers' ranks, though but little thinned by
desertion, were steadily decreased by poverty, by the necessity of
the girls to find other sorts of work, by illness, and, now that the
cold autumn had set in, by death. Carrie was underfed, scantily
clothed, penniless, and Katie, remembering these things, found
herself without reply.
Had she needed further example of the pressure of conditions upon her
kind, she could have found it in an incident in the shop on the day
following. A bull-necked young man, with ruddy cheeks and a
certainty of manner that spoke as loudly in his eyes and his
scarf-pin as in his voice, sauntered up to the silk-stocking counter,
where she happened then to be stationed, and began turning over the
wares displayed.
"Have you been waited on?" inquired Katie.
"No," said the young man, looking at her steadily; "but I'd like you
to wait on me. Are you busy?"
Katie said nothing, but stood there. The young man said nothing.
Katie began to finger the boxes before her, but she felt that the
young man was looking only at her.
"What quality would you like me to show you?" she asked.
"Well," parried the customer, "what quality do you like?"
She shot one glance at him: he was still looking at her.
"We have only the best at this counter," she answered, with a slight
flush. "You'll be findin' the cheaper the sixth aisle to your right."
But the young man only laughed with unconcern, and continued to keep
his gaze on her lowered Irish blue eyes.
"I can afford the best of everything," he said.
There was a pause. Katie raised her eyes and met his own without
flinching. He smiled, but he was quite too satisfied with his own
charms to notice that the salesgirl was not smiling.
"What time do you quit work?" he inquired.
"I never quit."
She said this as if she were closing a door, but the young man
proceeded imperturbably to rattle at the knob.
"I thought," he said, "that you might like to eat a little dinner
over at the 'York' with me this evening."
"Thanks," the girl answered, "but I do all me eatin' with me
husband.--Will you, please, be tellin' me what sort of stockin's you
want?"
The young man grinned. He seemed to enjoy what he took to be her
playful repartee.
"Look here," he replied, "my wife is away back home, and I'm all
alone over at that hotel."
He was leaning airily toward her, both hands on the counter. Katie,
standing opposite, leaned toward him. She answered his smile, but he
could not see that her smile was not of his own sort.
"Do you want to buy anything?" she demanded.
"Yes," said the customer, meeting her gaze again. "Will you sell?"
It was no unusual incident, no more unusual than the coming incident
of Mirka's attack upon Hermann, but the girl had reached the end of
her endurance, and what followed across that counter was not unlike
what was to occur across Ludwig Schleger's bar. Katie opened her
firm, pink palm and smacked the young bargain-seeker smartly across
the mouth.
There was no immediate consequence. The aisle was too crowded to
allow any but the nearest employees to witness the blow, and the
crowd was too intent upon its own thousand errands to heed what
happened before its eyes. One or two salesgirls stood still at their
work, petrified by alarm. One or two customers hesitated and
chuckled. And then, as the young man with a face of crimson
shouldered his way into a hurried oblivion from which he never
reappeared, the rush of business sent the clerks whirling about their
own tasks and sent the crowd hurrying about its own purposes.
But Katie knew that more would follow, and that what would follow
would be an interview with Mr. Porter. The shop's system of
surveillance missed nothing, and within a half-hour the girl was
standing in the dark office where she had first been hired.
In his likeness to a Sunday-school superintendent Mr. Porter was
shocked and grieved to hear that any young lady in the Lennox store
would strike a purchaser. In his likeness to a surgeon he promptly
declared that there ought to be no issue short of expulsion. And in
his own hidden character--deep in his own abominable character--he
was wondering whether he could not turn this incident to the
advantage that he had so long sought.
"The viper was insultin' me," said Katie.
"Are you quite sure of that, Miss Flanagan?"
"Sure I'm sure. Do you have to wait for a snake to bite you before
you know what he's up to?"
"You could have called the floor-walker."
"And been fined for me pains, Mr. Porter."
Mr. Porter tapped his desk and kept his eyes on his fingers.
"I find," he said slowly, "that most men do not make approaches
without some encouragement, in either word or manner, on the part of
the girl. I also find that such occurrences as this are very rare in
the experience of most of the girls in our employ."
He stopped, but Katie stood silent by the arm of the desk, her lips
compressed, a frown between her arched black brows. He sent a
crooked glance up at her, and then resumed:
"I scarcely ever have a case of this sort to deal with. I wonder
why, if such things are done by customers, the other girls do not
report them."
He stopped again, and this time Katie answered:
"I suppose they boss their own lives in their own way, Mr. Porter."
A faint spark of color shone in Mr. Porter's white cheek.
"I suppose they do," he answered, gently pulling at his
side-whiskers, and peeping at his victim over the caressing hand.
"In fact, between you and me, Miss Flanagan, I am told that some of
them do that so well that they are practically independent of their
wages in this store."
Again Katie failed to respond.
"Do you understand me, Miss Flanagan?"
Katie thought of her desperate days before she had found her present
employment. She thought of Hermann and what seemed to be the sole
chance of rising to a salary where marriage could be a practical
possibility. She thought of Carrie's plight and of Carrie's
dependence upon her.
"I do that, Mr. Porter," she answered.
He looked up squarely then, and she even managed to torture her face
into an expression of roguery.
"Ah," said Mr. Porter, smiling a paternal smile. He reached out and
patted her hand, and, though her soul revolted, she managed to keep
her hand passive. "Now, my dear young lady, you are at last coming
to your senses. You mustn't take life so seriously."
"I'll try not to, Mr. Porter."
"That's right; that's right. I ought to discharge you, I know. It
may be difficult not to discharge you. But I will do this much: I
will suspend judgment for a few days."
He looked at her fixedly. Her cold lips formed another phrase of
thanks.
"And in the meantime," he continued, "you let me know of some evening
when you can come out to a quiet corner where we can have supper
together, and where we won't be wasting the firm's time. Then we'll
talk this whole thing over, and I'll see what I can do."
The eyes of neither wavered.
"Thank you, Mr. Porter," said Katie again.
With that she left him, but she went away with the knowledge that her
game of hide-and-seek was almost ended. Just when it would end was
beyond all guessing, but that it would end soon and that it would end
in her defiance of her superiors and her prompt expulsion seemed
altogether certain. She reflected that the small delay which she had
gained would profit but lightly those in whose interests she had
attempted to truckle and palliate, and, when, that night, she told
her experience to Carrie, her words fell upon ears that read into
them a portentous meaning.
The homely, brown-haired Lithuanian, whose cheeks were less round now
than they had been, and whose hair that needed no covering in the
summer, was still uncovered, went to her weary picket-duty in
Waverley Place the next morning--the morning, as it happened, that
preceded Hermann's little brush with Mirka--with a slow step and a
heavy heart. She knew the futility of the work she was performing;
she saw it even in the relaxed vigilance of the policemen on the
corners and in the mocking grins of the girls and toughs at the
gloomy factory-door. All day as, sometimes companioned and sometimes
alone, she plodded her eventless round, the irony of the task bit
into her soul. Something she must do, and soon. Already she was
deep in Katie's debt, and Katie was near dismissal.
The early autumn twilight dropped among the grimy buildings. The
evening tide of Broadway rose and roared into Waverley Place. A cold
wind lashed the dust into little whirlpools, wound the girl's cheap
lawn skirt tightly about her aching knees, and ate through that thin
material to the tingling skin. There was no one with her now, and
she felt more than ever alone.
From the shadow of a doorway a man crossed the street and approached
her.
He was a man of uncertain age, of almost any age below the early
thirties. As he bowed to her, the girl saw that his hair was dark
and curly; that the back of his hand, which was not the hand of a
worker, was covered with a black down, and that through the pale
olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks there shone the blue-black
banners of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick
until they smiled, above white teeth, in greeting, and his gray
glance had the character of an appraisement of whatever it looked
upon. Carrie noticed, protruding from his breast-coatpocket, a
purple bordered handkerchief.
"Hello," he said.
She looked at him gravely. She had never seen him before, but with
his kind she had lately grown enough familiar. Wherever there are
women on strike, men of his sort gather, as the vultures gather about
dying animals in a jungle. Yet Carrie said nothing. She was, as she
had expressed it to Katie, still wondering.
"I've been _vatch_in' you," said the man. "I've been vatchin' you
all _tay_."
"Have you?" Carrie was totally incurious.
"Yes, I'd think you'd be pretty tired of sooch _fool_ishness."
"I am tired."
"You can't vin. If you go back it will be _choost_ the same
hell-mill it vas be_fore_."
"I suppose it would."
"Vell then"--his hands spread themselves in protest--"vhy don't you
_qvit_? A pretty, strong girl like you could make _loads_ of money
fer herself."
Carrie was leaning against the factory wall. She did not move.
"How?" she asked.
"Vell, you hafn't got no _od_der trade, eh?"
"No."
"Und you vouldn't vant to be a _ser_vant?"
"Why not?"
"Because that's vorse nor a _shirt_vaist-factory."
"Then I wouldn't want to be a servant."
Again the man extended his hands.
"Vell?" he said.
"But I knew one girl that went into a house," affirmed Carrie, "and I
wouldn't do that for a fortune."
Her practical manner might have disconcerted most men, but this man's
business had accustomed him to all forms of rejoinder. He
immediately began an endeavor to persuade her by economic arguments.
But Carrie interrupted him.
"No," she said, "if I do it, it will be only because I have to, and
then I'll not do it that way. Thank you, just the same. Here comes
my relief: I don't have to wait till the girls come out to-day.
Good-by."
He essayed to protest, but she walked quietly by him, made her brief
report to the oncoming women, and started on her journey homeward.
The man, whose trade imposed patience, said no more. He did not
again approach her, and, though she knew that he was following her,
through the growing crowd that rolled eastward, to mark her
hiding-place, she did not attempt to elude him. She was very tired.
This was the evening that preceded the early morning call of Angel
the Italian and Mirka the Austrian to Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and
it was about eight hours later that Hermann, having seen his
assailants leave, turned his back to the bar-room door and, alone in
the place, set about washing the discarded glasses. Except that he
was sleepy, he was in his usual spirits and he was whistling "Die
Wacht Am Rhein." He was whistling so loudly that he did not hear the
door reopen.
There was a flash as of a thousand blinding lights, a roar as if a
train had fallen from the elevated road overhead, and Hermann, in the
smoke-filled saloon, himself fell crashing behind the bar, and lay
there, huddled and still.
Mirka quietly reclosed the door and darted around the corner.