The election came, and went in just the way that everybody expected
it to go. Wesley Dyker's political craft, along with many others,
was carried on the inrushing waves of his party's success to the
haven where he had desired it to rest, and the prosperity that had
raised the price of votes to five dollars apiece immediately resumed
its unostentatious levy upon the voters against the next election.
The defeated candidates forgot their so recent denunciations and
congratulated their victorious opponents; the victorious opponents
forgot their tinsel pledges and resumed the safe and sure business of
government for revenue only, and the population of New York, like the
population of most cities, forgot all the good things that had been
pledged it, and turned its energies to the everyday task of taking
what it could get.
Meanwhile Carrie Berkowicz, homely and hopeless, pursued, with a
dogged earnestness, the path that conditions had hewn for her, and
always she pursued it not alone. As the waiting beast prowls behind
the slowly weakening traveler lost in a jungle, as the bird of prey
circles calmly above the wounded man in the forest, as both beast and
bird stand by until there comes the moment when strength can no
longer oppose them, so, day after day, rarely speaking, but always
watching, there followed in this girl's footsteps the dark young man
with curling hair and shining teeth, who had accosted her on Waverley
Place. He seemed to watch for her morning entrance upon the street,
and to be the last to see her when she dragged her wasting body into
the tenement at night. Much of the time he dogged her like a foul
shadow. She would pass him in a doorway, she would see him lounging
at a corner, she would catch glimpses of him across a crowded street.
There were times when she feared to look up lest she should have to
answer that prosperous leer and ornate bow; there were others, at
last, when, as his well-fed body brushed by her, she almost plucked
at his sleeve with her hungry hands. He never stopped, but sometime,
she knew, he would stop; he never said more than "Good-morning" or
"Good-evening,", but sometime, sometime soon, he would, she knew, say
more.
And meanwhile, too, the politically unaffected routine of the Lennox
department-store began gradually to provide for one of its victims at
least the sense of approaching variety: Katie Flanagan realized that
the end of her usefulness--as that phrase is termed by employers,
boarding-school principals, and others in authority--was rapidly
nearing. She managed to avoid the immaculate Mr. Porter for one
week, and, but for her worry over the condition of the wounded
Hermann, would have had moments when the sport was amusing. As the
taskmaster paused at her counter one time during the second week, she
achieved a sick aunt, who sufficed to account for her occupied
evenings. But when the days and the nights dragged by with no change
for either the better or the worse in the condition of this
bed-ridden relative, and when the girl's invention began to flag, and
her spirit to tire, Mr. Porter's glance grew more and more searching,
his manner less and less warm, and Katie knew that she must soon
retreat or surrender.
"I have not seen much of you lately, Miss Flanagan," remarked Mr.
Porter as, late one afternoon, he came mincing to the counter where
she stood.
"I've been here pretty regular, Mr. Porter," answered Katie.
Mr. Porter caressed a gray side-whisker.
"Um," said he. "I presume, then, that your grandmother is no worse."
"It's me aunt, sir," rejoined Katie, with the mental addition: "You
didn't catch me that time, you ould tom-cat." And she added: "The
good woman's some better, thanks."
"I see," said Mr. Porter, and, indeed, his cold gaze seemed to see a
great deal more than he was inclined to mention. "At this rate of
improvement, I hope you will soon find time to consider the matter we
discussed that day in my office."
"I hope that, Mr. Porter," smiled Katie.
"Yes," concluded Mr. Porter, turning from her--he always turned away
when he was most significant. "I hope so, too, for I can't well keep
your case under advisement much longer."
Several of the salesgirls nearby laughed openly, and Katie, when he
was out of sight, looked at them with a grimace half sad, half
mocking.
The next morning she was transferred to a bargain-counter for the day.
What the outcome might have been there is no imagining. What it was
depended, at any rate in part, upon the fact that, on what proved to
be her last day at the shop, she had come to work with a tired body
and an aching head. She had sat up half the night in a long endeavor
to persuade Carrie to leave the futile battle of the strikers and
turn to other employment; and, when Carrie had rejected all proposals
on the ground that, though the fight was lost, she knew no other sort
of work, Katie had spent about all the remainder of the dark hours in
an attempt to convince her roommate that the Irish girl's wages were
enough to support both of them for some time to come. The result, so
far as went her conduct at the store, was a temper ready to explode
with the first spark, and that spark came when, in midafternoon, a
nervous woman, who persisted in examining everything and buying
nothing, interpreted Katie's lassitude as indifference and so
reported it to the floor-walker.
Katie was sent for to come to Mr. Porter's office.
Mr. Porter looked up from the light at his desk, and then down again.
He stroked a whisker.
"Sit down, Miss Flanagan," he said.
"Thanks," replied Katie, "I can take it just as well standin'."
"Take what?" asked Mr. Porter.
"Anythin' at all you have to say," said Katie.
Mr. Porter continued to look at his desk and, by the name of "Miss
Flanagan," addressed it severely.
"Miss Flanagan," he said, "you have again been reported to me for
discourtesy to a customer. The other case had not yet been adjusted.
It might have been adjusted had not your cousin----"
"Me aunt," prompted Katie.
"Your aunt," frowned Mr. Porter to his desk, "had not your aunt been
so disinclined to recover."
"She was gettin' absent treatment from a bad doctor."
"I know nothing of that----"
"I think meself it was Malicious Animal Magnetism."
"Please do not interrupt," said Mr. Porter, shaking his whiskers at
the desk. "I say that the previous case was not adjusted, though it
might have been, if your mother had not remained so ill."
"Me aunt."
"Your aunt, if you prefer it. Now comes this second case, and
really, I am curious to know whether you can suggest anything that
will make me regard it with the smallest degree of lenience."
He looked again at the desk, as if the desk were the case he had
referred to, but neither the desk nor Katie answered.
"If you cannot," he at last concluded, "I see no course but one for
me to pursue."
Katie folded her arms across her breast and tossed her black head.
"There's only one thing I can think of," said she, and waited.
Mr. Porter breathed hard.
"And what," he inquired, still without looking at her, "is that?"
Katie took a soft step forward. She rested her hands upon the arm of
his desk and leaned her face toward him.
"Don't you know?" she asked in a low voice.
Mr. Porter shot, from the corner of his eyes, one of his crooked
glances at her.
"I am not quite sure," he said.
"Then," replied Katie, "I'll tell you. The only one thing I can
think of that'd get you to let me off is the only one you can think
of yourself--_an' that's the one I won't do!_"
Her voice, which had begun so softly, ended in a loud note. Her
hands, which had been open, clinched. Her body, which had been
relaxed, stiffened.
Mr. Porter sprang back from her, looked at her with hot fright in his
usually cool eyes, and then shrank as far away as his desk-armchair
would permit.
"Miss Flanagan," he spluttered, "not so loud, please! You will alarm
the store."
"I wish I could alarm it!" said Katie.
"But what--what--I don't understand----"
"Yes, you do understand, all right, all right, Mr. Porter. I know
what you want; I've known it all along, an' if I hadn't liked to make
a fool of you, I'd have told you long since what I tell you now: _You
won't get it!_"
If it were possible for Mr. Porter to grow whiter than his habit, he
grew whiter then.
"I shall--I shall ring for assistance!" he protested.
"No you won't; you won't dare; you'll sit there, an' write me out a
recommendation an' an order for me pay--if your hand ain't shakin'
too much, an' if it is, I'll write it for you."
And he did write it. After one look at her, he wrote it without a
word, and "without," as Katie carefully stipulated, "any dockin' for
the last offense," and as she left him she delivered one Parthian
bolt.
"Remember me to the girl you start after in the mornin'," she said;
"an' when you go home to-night, just give me
grandmother-mother-aunt-cousin's best regards to your grown-up
great-grandchildren."
The taste in which her revolution expressed itself may have been as
doubtful as the courage that inspired it was certain; but, had Mr.
Porter been able to see into her mind as she hurried homeward, he
would have been gratified at what he found there. The excitement had
gone, and with it the bravery. She had preserved her individual
ideals, but she now realized at what a cost she had preserved them.
Against masculine attack it was sometimes inspiriting to defend
herself, but to the slow and continuous advance of penury she well
knew that, at last, she must succumb.
She passed her ugly little parish-church, and, remembering that she
had missed her last confession, entered its forbidding doors.
The swinging portal closed softly behind her. It shut out the glare
of the day, it shut out the noises of the street, and it seemed to
shut out the entire malicious power of the world. Inside the cruel
sunshine became kindly shade and comforting candle-light; the only
sound was the occasional footfall of an unseen suppliant, and on the
distant high altar, shimmering and white at the end of the long
perspective of the empty aisle, there rested the power she believed
more powerful than all on earth beside.
She made her confession--not the easy and formal confession of the
strong, who need it most, but the frank probing question and full
reply of the weak, who can profit by it least--and at its end she
received not only the benediction that she traced to Heaven, but the
shrewd advice that came direct from the big heart of a worldly-wise
and beneficent man.
"Thank you, father," she added to the words of the ritual, as she
rose to go, "I'll do me best to stick it out, but times be when it's
powerful hard."
The experience had encouraged her, but, when she came at last into
her barren home, there fell a blow that shook to its foundations the
structure of hope which she had so briefly reared. On the bare table
was a single sheet of paper, and on the paper was written:
"Dear Katie:--I have gone away. There was no use in saying good-by,
for that would only have hurt both of us, and I could not have made
you see that I was right not to board here any longer at your
expense, any more than you could make me see last night that you were
right on your side. Pretty soon I'll come to see you and bring the
money I owe you, but I can't ever pay you back all your other
goodness, although I would give my right arm to do it.
"Another thing. By the time you get this letter Hermann will be to
see you at the store. I was around to Bellevue yesterday, and we
kept it as a surprise for you that he was coming out to-day. I hope
by this time you two will have fixed it all up; but if you haven't,
well, I never talked to you about it much before, but I feel I must
say something now, because I seem to know more about life than I used
to: take him, Katie dear, for there are only horrors ahead for any
girls like you and me if we don't marry. He's a fine man and you
love him, and the two of you will do better together than you can do
apart.
"Now, good-by. Don't please bother to hunt for me--I won't be on
picket-duty any more, but _I am all right_.
"Lovingly,
"CARRIE."
Katie Flanagan put down the note. She went to the narrow window and
gazed blindly at the unsightly wing of the tenement across the narrow
court outside.
"All right?" she said, the paper crumpling in her tightened hand.
"All right? The poor girl's got no money an' no job. I know what
she's thinking an' there's no good followin'. 'All right,' she says!
Dear God, pity her: she means, 'all wrong'!"
Katie felt too deeply for her lost comrade to think much, if at all,
of that portion of the note which touched her own interest. Her eyes
clouded; her shoulders shook; she fell upon her knees before the
window-sill, and it was there that Hermann's strong arms went about
her neck.
Even then, glad as she was to have him back again, she could do
little but sob brokenly with her cheek against his breast, while he
told her how he had gone to the store, learned of her dismissal, and
come at once to the tenement, not pausing to knock when he heard her
sobs. He comforted her as best he could, but it was some time before
any comfort availed.
All had ended well for Hermann, but all had not easily so ended. His
wound had proved relatively slight, and he was sound and whole again:
but, the day before his dismissal from the hospital, Schleger had
waited upon him shamefacedly to confess that the rulers of the ward,
dissatisfied with the bar-keeper's Laodicean attitude toward their
political labors, and urged by Mirka's friends, had forbidden his
re-engagement in the saloon. Ludwig had been sorry, but helpless,
and then, after exacting a score of promises, had disclosed his plan
to open incognito a grocery-store on the West Side, himself remaining
in charge of the saloon and Hoffmann appearing, on a good salary, as
the owner of the new venture.
Katie looked up at him with eyes shining blue through a dispersing
mist of tears.
"An' what about the dirty Dago that shot you?" she inquired.
Hermann smiled broadly. His face was thinner and not so ruddy as
once, but it was cheerful still and more determined than of old.
"The Austrian?" he asked.
"'Tis the same thing," said she.
"Ach, vell, I guess ve von't do nussing about him."
"You won't be lettin' him go?"
"Vhy not? Dere's none to swear fur me and a hun'red to swear fur
him. I kind of belief Schleger gif me de new blace as brice fur
keepin' quiet, so dere's nussing to gain und efferysing to lose."
At first she would not hear of it, and she used her opposition to
this dropping of the charge against Mirka as if it were an argument
properly formed to oppose the next scheme that he proposed to her.
But he had found her in her moment of weakness when he had come to
her in his hour of strength renewed.
"No," he said firmly, "und dis evenin' ve'll be married. I got der
license; I stopped at der church; Father Kelly's vatin'--dis evenin',
Katie."
The world was slipping from beneath her feet. She did not answer.
"In two year'," he went on, "one part of dot store ve'll own. Katie,
it's our chance; und in de meanvhile, if der Herr Gott sends der
babies--und pray Gott he vill--dey von't at least do no vorse as ve
hof done."
He drew her tighter, but she twisted in his arms and got free, so
that he held only one of her firm hands. They stood there face to
face, between them the unfathomable chasm of sex, their feet
trembling at its brink.
Across the areaway the straight shafts of the setting sun caught the
dirty little window-panes of the nearby squalid rooms and turned them
to a shining glory. The rays were reflected into Katie's own room;
they burnished the cheap paper into cloth of gold, they touched the
floor and gilded it, they made of the rickety table a thing of
splendor, and of the worn chairs fairy thrones. Hermann's blonde
head was crowned with a halo, and as he looked at the girl, against
the background of those yellow windows like a Madonna against the
background that the Etruscan painters loved, he saw in her eyes what
he had never seen before.
In the momentary struggle the coils of her black hair had loosened
and fallen below her waist. They framed a face no longer strong with
restraint, handsome from the flush of battle against the world, no
longer set and self-reliant, but a face through which shone the light
of the life-force, the motive-power of the universe, a beautiful
face, white, frightened, wonderful.
"Can--can you really love me?"
She scarcely said the words. Rather her lips formed them with no
voice behind. But he had heard her before her lips so much as moved.
"Ach," he cried, "I hof alvays lofed you, Katie, but now it is
somesing new und more. Katie, I sink--I belief sings I neffer belief
before, und I sink it must be der blessing of Gott dot I can _see_ in
you."
"An' there won't be anny other woman?"
"You are _all_ vomen, Katie."
She raised her head.
"Yes, Hermann," she said, "I think I will be all women for you. I
will be all you want. I will work an' share, good luck an' bad. I
never before was glad I knew how to work, but now I _will_ be all you
want--all, _all_!"
He put her hand to his lips, and held it there an instant: Fifth
Avenue does these things, casually, no better than the Bowery, when
the Bowery has a mind for them.
"Katie," he whispered.
She took her hand away. She tried to laugh a little, but the
laughter, clear and silvery, caught suddenly in her throat. Her
mouth twisted, and she raised the hand and put her lips where his had
been.
Reeling with the tremor of that sight, his arms recaptured her, and
this time held her fast. She swayed and yielded. Her own arms
answered his, and his lips met, for the first time freely, the lips
she had so bravely kept for him.
The case against Mirka was then and there dismissed, and the High
Court handed down a final decision _in re_ Hoffmann _vs._ Flanagan.