THE BEEHIVE
In the year Two Thousand the tides of human travel through Grand
Street had grown beyond all measure. They surged from morn to night
in swaying multitudes in which the admixture of all the races of
the great city were seen and heard. The babel of sound recalled
the thoroughfares of a dozen cities of the world. The East Side,
problem and despair of the twentieth century, remained the enigma of
the twenty-first. Its congestion, at least, had met an approximate
solution. Enormous high tenements had been built there, whose
clustering stories became microcosms of national amalgamation,
wherein were born diverse and blended groups who were endowed with
remarkable pugnacity and a sort of fierce ability to engage in
political argument and metaphysical civics.
They were not devoid of business sense and an inordinate thirst for
money. On the whole they had made a most reputable element in the
public life of the city, but they were prone to excitement, and they
were not American. They responded with Celtic avidity to rhetoric
and poetry, but they were not Irish. They were composed of a mixture
that had outrun the mere boundaries of religious prescription, and
Catholics and Jews in the close companionship of the Russians and the
Italians, Hungarians and Turks had intermarried. These unions had
grown more common, and there was a corresponding drift away from the
orthodox formulas of each church. Socialism as a theory had taken a
remarkable hold upon their imaginations but, though they were poor,
there was no immediate justification for discontent in their lives.
Pauperism was uncommon.
To the resident populations of the East Side, at this point (Grand
Street), and north and south, there were commingled the steady
streams of commerce and industry that crossed the Williamsburgh
bridge at Delancey Street. These converging currents had produced
a vortex of business along Grand Street, and so huge department
stores, a few big and second class theatres, and tailor or clothing
shops with the adventitious association of gregarious restaurants
had grown into a solid wall of many hued occupations. At night the
streets, especially in holiday time, and on the hot nights of summer
swarmed and seethed with the jocund, good natured, and somewhat
highly dressed throngs. The little parkway of the bridge’s approach
on Delancey Street was set with tables and here gathered companies
of friends and fun makers, who were supplied with wine and lager
from the restaurants, while at the entrance of the smaller shops or
stores similar tables had been instituted. The street then assumed
the complexion and the purpose of a great and lengthened caravansary,
or, on such nights when the stores were open, and the side walks
accommodated the warring peddlers, an open air bazaar, or a Kalmuk
fair grounds. The street then blazed with electric lights, and in
front of the theatres and the department stores, the restaurants,
and indeed at every hand, coronas, arches, and surcingles of
lamps, contributed a chaotic confusion of haloes, and reflections
and illuminations, that dispersed the darkness beyond the highest
buildings, and eclipsed the discomforted and neglected moon.
It was in the midst of this multivarious human maelstrom and complex,
that Longtinsky, the Russian, had made his abode, and established his
paper, The Beehive, with which he furthered his insidious agitations
and furnished a not unskillful compound of threats and grievances
with the truth half dressed in fiction, and fiction wearing, a
little stupidly, the mask of truth. The man had ability, and being
unscrupulous, with a tenacious memory and an almost morbid alacrity
in hunting out the peccadilloes of the rich (none of them worse than
his own and his companions) he had gained a clientele, his paper
a sort of subterranean circulation, and himself a modest fortune,
though quite incommensurate with his ambition. Some fancied insults
to him by the organ of the better classes had rankled in his mind,
and he had exceeded propriety and prudence by recent utterances which
were seditious and revolutionary; much more so than usual.
He had been goaded into a blind rage also by the unexpected and most
unwelcome invasion of the district that he thought was peculiarly
fitted for the ripening of his theories of social reform by the
successful propaganda of Helen Lorimer. This had been phenomenally
effective. Its courage fascinated a spirited people, and Miss
Lorimer’s address and personal power, with a well established and
practical commission of mercy was making havoc with Longtinsky’s
reputation and prestige. It drove him to madness, and the fact that
some of his young men-reporters, hired to dog and spy upon the less
wary and more undeserving of the class he hated and plotted against,
had, in their nefarious work encountered the beneficent agencies set
in operation by Helen Lorimer, and having also met that engaging lady
at her own settlement, had been flattered or actually been enslaved
into a sort of devotion, which made of them furious mutineers against
their soi-disant master loosened the last restraint of decency and
caution.
Longtinsky understood well enough his danger. He did not propose
to hang himself for any crime, but he had no hesitation in getting
others into a noose that would have better become his own neck. He
had become depraved to the point of murder, and his selfish and
inflated egotism, provoked beyond endurance into resentment, slowly
degenerated and assumed the worse complexion of brooding, sullen,
hatred, the precursor of the worser incentives to atrocity and
revenge.
The office of The Beehive was behind a clothier’s store not far from
the corner of Pitt Street and Grand. It was entered by a narrow alley
which debouched into Grand Street by a covered shed, and might have
been easily overlooked by any one not accustomed to use it. The alley
threaded, a door, entrenched in the brick wall of a back extension
opened upon a small irregular room which served as the editorial
sanctum, and the council chamber of Longtinsky, and his sympathizers.
Behind this again a small projection shielded the archives and the
printing press of the incendiary sheet.
It was the day after Miss Lorimer had entered her plea for the
reconsideration of the sentence of the convicted Socialists, and
which the Mayor had deferred to with such unction, that a rough and
shaggy looking man, with a slouched hat, half covering features
that might have reasonably craved some such concealment, walked
into the open alley that led to the penetralia of the Longtinsky
establishment. The man showed no hesitation in making his way, and
a shrewd suspicion, that he had been there often before, would
have occurred to any observer who noticed his nonchalant ease, the
half dissimulated scowl with which he turned towards the street,
and scrutinized the passing and oblivious crowds, his slow ingress
through the crooked corridor, and the questioning and companionable
rap that he gave to the inner door which the next instant he pushed
in, and within which he disappeared.
In the furtherance of the ends of this tale we must follow this
figure. The room that the man thus invaded was dark, the few windows
that were intended to help out its interior illumination being
extremely dirty, and in a measure curtained by ragged curtains,
that rivalled in their disarray the neglected panes they partially
covered. A few gas burners had been frequently used to dissipate the
gloom, and the effects of their imperfect combustion were discernible
above them, in sooty patches on the low ceiling. At this particular
moment, although it was almost mid summer, the jets were alight, and
by their helpful aid the visitor, if the matter interested him, could
recognize the two pictures which decorated—or were expected to serve
such a purpose—the walls. One stared him in the face, as he entered
the room. It was a colored chromo of the great Russian novelist
and humanitarian—Tolstoy—depicted in his peasant costume, amid his
ancestral acres, his hat in his hand, and his crumpled and benign
face looking out upon the world he repudiated and failed to save. The
other possessed a less perceptible congruity with the room and the
purposes of its usual occupants. It represented a most commonplace
scene of rurality and domestic peace, and was called Rest at Home.
This pleasing pictorial note in an atmosphere that quite generally
was filled with threats against all such chimerical fancies,
portrayed a farmer’s family, gathered around a hospitably covered
board, in which the artist by a series of conventional imitations
showed the products of the farm, with the ostensible father of the
prosperous and numerous group, standing at one end of the table, his
face upraised, and his hand, in the posture of a blessing, stretched
out over the abundant food; while his sons and daughters in attitudes
of respect or reverence, formed before him a most irreprehensible
assemblage of duty and devotion. The alert mind might have thought
that this unexpected illustration was intended, as an eloquent
reminder, to those assembled below it, of the very thing and things
they were commissioned to upset and prevent.
The remainder of the room’s furnishings requires but a few words.
There was a long narrow table—so narrow as to comfortably allow those
who sat at it to attack their opponents or critics across it—in the
centre of the room, a few chairs, an additional oil lamp on the
table, and in one corner a wooden box of the sturdiest construction,
armed at its corners and along its sides with iron. The door leading
to the editorial precincts beyond was open, and the few operatives
there, could be seen leaning over their tasks or engaged in
conversation which seemed curiously low and timid.
The man whom we thus persistently have followed, overturned a
chair at his entrance, and then striking the table with his fist,
proceeded to reveal his lineaments more completely, by removing
his hat which he threw on the table. He was a short thin man of a
Sicilian type, with black hair which would have abundantly screened
his small head, if it had not been so suspiciously shaven into a crop
of bristling points. His deep set eyes, rather high cheek bones,
prominent nose, regular mouth, shaded by a restrained moustache, a
handsomely chiselled chin, united into a facial whole of properly
noticeable contour and expression. Craft was marked in his face, and
a physiognomist might have been readily led to prognosticate a sum
of evil possibilities in the Italian visage, which again in less
questionable environment might have been mistaken for that of a star
of the opera. So easily do the reflexions of our surroundings lend a
deleterious, or responsible air to our physical personalities!
He wore the clothes of a workingman, somewhat refined by a little
more careful preservation, and by more expensive texture. One
surprising and noticeable feature of his dress was the small shoes
which clothed his feet, made from patent leather, and a scarf and
pin, the former of a brilliant scarlet, and the latter of emerald,
expensive items which shone all the more conspicuously in their plain
and discordant associations. As he rapped the table he flung himself
into a chair, and waited for the response which apparently he fully
understood would quickly follow.
He was not disappointed. A heavy movement of chairs in the
neighboring apartment announced the approach of his host, and the
next instant the broad squat figure of a man filled the doorway,
between the rooms, and the visitor looked lazily up and accosted his
friend.
“Well, Tinsky, have you heard the latest? The Old Man has given a
reprieve and the thing’s to be done over again, and I don’t feel
sure that the nippers won’t get a twist on your wrists this time.
There are some squealers about, and perhaps they are as little
anxious to get the ‘tickler’ as you.”
A curious smile covered the speaker’s face, and at length he raised
his eyes, previously dropped to the floor, and gazed at the editor
of The Beehive with a queer suppressed grin of malice, that was
distinctly irritating.
The man thus accosted was a teuton in type, blond haired, thickly
whiskered, with blue eyes, inconspicuous eyebrows, a short and
heavy frame and a disproportionately developed mouth, and—his most
striking feature—immense ears that protruded from the side of his
head with an unquestionably porcine saliency. For an instant this
aberrant arrangement caught the eye of his observers before they
fully scanned his face. The face itself had a mean look, and this
arose in part from the lowness of the brow and the smallness of the
eyes, but particularly from a misshapen nose, full and drooping
cheeks, and from the formless gap across his face, which served as a
mouth. Had any one unexpectedly encountered him under circumstances
of possible danger they would have instinctively shunned his company
and suspected his intentions. His eyes squinted slightly, and this
added to the sinister and depraved expression of his face. In some
lights, and under the influences of conviviality the editor of The
Beehive might have appeared more reassuring. At this moment pricked
into a momentary aggravation by his remorseless friends, his looks
were disappointing. His eyebrows drew together, his little eyes shone
vindictively, his great mouth twitched with anger, and his malformed
nose, set between them like a red proboscis, displayed its cavernous
nostrils. Longtinsky was distinctively unpleasant to see at that
moment.
“Oh, the jig is not up yet, Pony. I am not afraid of the tyrants. My
arm can wither at my side before I’ll stop the crusade of justice and
liberation I have begun. What about squealers? Do you think I have
anything to fear? Can you or anybody else put any crime at my door.
I don’t want to hear any nonsense and I won’t listen to any threats.
Am I the man to be chased to death by a mad rotten pack of smooth
faced, slick tongued, wine-fed vampires of wealth, men who do the
bidding of that besotted purse-proud boasting wench, Helen Lorimer?
I’ll pull destruction down about their ears. I’ll make this city
Hell-hot for them. If they dare to touch me I’ll burn their roofs
over their heads. Let us see how far the arrogant slaves of money and
gluttonous indulgence dare lift their hands against the sons of toil
and suffering!—”
The speaker had risen in his imprecatory rage, and his body, not
visibly afflicted with any signs of want, pressed against the table,
while the voluble spirit that possessed it glared through the
shrunken blue eyes at the stranger. That person quite imperturbably
waited for the exhaustion of the Socialist leader, and even ventured
to raise an impatient hand as if to check his speech, while at the
few moments when he condescended to look at him at all, something
like a masked grin covered his features. This was not unnoticed by
Longtinsky, upon whom it had an unexpected influence, for, as it
finally forced a loud laugh from his auditor, he stopped and sank
back in his chair with a cowed motion, as if of fear.
“Say!” it was Pony who was talking, “what do you think I am. Perhaps
you had better keep your mouth shut and the tongue in your head
tucked a little closer to your lamb-chops. I don’t want any oratory.
Get that off on your scrubs. I know you, Tinsky, and you know me, or
if you don’t by God, perhaps the time has come for me to show you who
I am. I’ll do it damn quick.
“Now get down to business. Where’s the swag I’m to have for playing
your spy. Don’t you get behind my back and rip me. I know you for a
mean spirited swaggering coward, and I know, Tinsky, as well as you
do, that you did the business for the Settlement House. YOU,” the man
stood up, “put the bombs there YOURSELF; YOU hired the poor wretches
to go in there after you and your fellow—and, damn you, you haven’t
had soul enough to try and save him—Polinck, had started the fuses.
What did you care if they got blown to Hell, as long as you kept your
mouse haired body safe? Well, there’s been a leak somewhere, and that
woman Lorimer has got on to it. She’s wise. Now Tinsky, keep your
soft soap jabber for those who relish it, I want none of it. I’m here
to do you a service. Get out of this. Scuttle the shop and move. The
Mayor and that woman have get their heads together and they’re after
you. The case comes up again next fall and you’re in for it. I want
my money, I want it now, and I want to see the little girl. If it
wasn’t for her I might not have come back. See! Let me see her now,
and let’s start. Get your word twisters off their perches, pull down
your winders, pick up your snacks, tuck some boodle in your breeches,
and get out of this. Canada for us.”
The effect of those adjurations and reproaches upon Tinsky was
remarkable. It only offered another tribute to the force of truthful
words, forcibly uttered. The editor had lost some of his color, some
of which was temper and much of which was beer. His hands nervously
plucked his beard, and he looked at his stormy interlocutor with real
dismay. His bravado had suddenly vanished, and in its place a sullen
discomforting sense of danger overwhelmed him, but it was resisted
by the man’s refractory egotism, and his stolid apathy to advice.
Flight meant surrender, impotence, loss of prestige, it might mean
detection, conviction, and punishment. He could not reconcile himself
to an abject retreat. The danger pictured by his picturesque and
implacable friend was a real one, and yet he shrank from an absolute
disclosure of ineffectiveness and alarm. Under the smarting sense of
guilt his mind, not unfamiliar with labyrinthine devices and coarse
subterfuge, worked fast.
There emerged before him a desperate project, which if successful
would establish his fame, might help him to rid himself of his
embarrassing assistants—such for instance as the man before him—and,
blackened as it was with the aims of murder, might finally light
those fires of insurrection which he fondly thought were latently
glowing in the hearts of the people, would clear the way for his
assumption of power, and—so vividly did the picture work itself
out—lift him into a position of eminence. Once there he might hold
the balance of power and dictate the terms of his own acceptance
and the shape of a future socialist plebiscite. The outlines of
this plan—if plan it could be called which involved many elements
of crime—had been vaguely worked out before in his audacious and
credulous mind, but now at the storming point, when the enemy was
forcing him to bay, when the incredible play of chance seemed to
stretch out to his waiting hand the implement to strike the blow
which would bring him immunity and place, they grew more distinct.
The cerebral convolutions behind that low forehead were intricate;
thought of some inventive force hurried through them with an easy
flow, and designs, pictures, dreams, rose before him with imaginative
poignancy. His fear of danger—a danger which seemed literally
heralded by its messenger before him—his hatred of Helen Lorimer, the
stupid vindictiveness of his nature, which urged him on upon a course
of rapine and disorder, his thirst for wealth, the sudden inner
consciousness that he had been playing false to his own people—though
bribes which he had taken from the “Aristocracy of Wealth” had only
been accepted with hypocrisy and rage—his powerlessness hitherto
before the inertia of the masses, who had failed to raise any
standard of revolt, already broken hearted as they were over the
conviction and condemnation of their companions, his perception that
he had played into the hands of his enemies in doing as he had done,
the residual force of a conviction that he was really working out,
besides his own fortune, a greater destiny for society; all these
considerations drove him to an ultimate step which he often vaguely
realized might be useful.
It now became to his mind a necessity. It was desperate, and like
some tempting demon, it rose before his eyes with beckoning gesture,
though in his hands it carried the weapons of destruction, and its
face was darkened with the shadow of assassination. Longtinsky was
not averse to involving in his plan some steps looking towards the
forcible removal of the unwelcomely candid man who had just entered
his retreat.
Longtinsky had been thinking fast. As his visitor paused Longtinsky
got up, shut the door leading to the inner room more carefully,
and locked it. He moved to the windows and drew down their shades,
then he passed around the head of the table, walked past Pony who
had become a little restive, though he eyed these preparations with
no apparent disturbance, unless a fumbling motion towards his hip
meant anything. Longtinsky closed the outer door—that leading to the
alley—and also locked it. Then he returned to his first seat, leaned
over the table and with a warning finger resting on the corner of his
slovenly lips, looked over curiously to Pony and motioned for him to
come and sit beside him.
[Illustration: “NO FUNNY BUSINESS, OR UP YOU GO IN SMOKE.”
_Page 120._]
That character, hitherto quite indifferent and evidently influenced
by very contemptuous feelings for his friend, whose nature he knew,
as well as some of his subterranean contrivance and plots, had become
by this time aroused into curiosity. He looked at Longtinsky a moment
with a very disagreeable leer, and then he laughed, picked up his
chair and lurched around the table, and put himself at Longtinsky’s
side;
“See here, Whiskers,” Pony’s voice sank to a guttural croak,
“what’s your game now. No funny business, or up you go in smoke,”
and a relevant movement of his right hand brought a six-shooter in
proximity with Longtinsky’s ribs, with such painful effectiveness
that that person’s color vanished, and his deprecatory retreat
backward all but failed to overturn his chair, and deliver him on his
back on the floor of the room. Something humorous shone in Pony’s
eyes, and the next instant after a circular flourish of his weapon at
a variety of objects around the room, he laid it on the table before
him.
“Come Pony,” said Longtinsky, with jocular familiarity, “put it away.
There’s no harm here for you. You’ve known me a long day and there
never was a time when I haven’t been a good friend to you. Put it
away. Jessie might come in here too. It would do you no good with her
to have that iron out.”
The effect of this apostrophe was remarkable. The man grabbed his
revolver, shoved it back in the holster at his hip beneath his coat,
a smile entered his cynical face, as a beam of light might illumine
into seemly grace a patch of darkness; he looked at Longtinsky with
almost a beseeching motion, as he laid his hand caressingly on his
arm:
“Tinsky, is Jessie here? Ah! Tinsky, you’re the father of that girl,
and I _do_ love her! Blast the folly of it, but I’m a child in her
fingers; I’m putty with her. I guess it’s the only thing that makes
me run your errands, and hang at your elbow, like a dangling bell to
a hound’s neck. Come Old Man, what’s your game? Jessie is the prize.
I’m oyster for anything.”
This sudden mollification and surrender was more than gratifying to
the plotting Tinsky. He showed no signs of immediate reassurance,
but he felt the unmistakable power he possessed through the charm of
his daughter for this blackguard’s eyes. Longtinsky laid his hand
on Pony’s shoulders, shrugged his own lightly, and half closing his
little eyes, watching shrewdly his confidant, spoke slowly, in a low
voice, revealing bluntly his nefarious scheme.
“Pony, I’m not going to admit or deny what you’ve said. The high ends
of popular liberation are served by all means the agencies of freedom
find convenient to their hands”—a hostile imprecation, or something
like it intimated to the apostle of the people that that line of
adjustment would hardly be accepted. He continued:
“But we’ll drop that. There is danger for us all in this new move.
That arch contriver Helen Lorimer intends to undermine us by the
hypocrisy of clemency. She is the spring of action behind the Mayor.
She expects to make us suspected by our own people. She is a whited
sepulchre. For her own ends, for her class, for the greed of the
debauched tribe of money-changers she is playing a double part to
catch us in the net of her selfish ends, to thrust down the Eagle of
Liberty—”
“Cut it out! Cut it out! Don’t for God’s sake, don’t cram any more of
that lingo down my throat. What’s your game? Ecco! Out with it. Give
it to me straight. Murder, arson, riot, poison, anything but your
damn rot of fine words and humbug, Tinsky. You’re in this for keeps,
and I’m with you—at least,” and the speaker shoved himself away from
the anxious editor,—“as long as you play fair and game.”
Longtinsky smiled faintly: he knew he must go on. The risk was
considerable, but concealment meant delay—delay, danger, and if this
tool before him turned on him—now that his most faithful henchman
Polinck was languishing in a public jail—there was a slim likelihood
of his accomplishing anything. He was silent for one moment, and
then trying to draw nearer to Pony whose robust criminality always
antagonized his tortuous and deceitful projects, he whispered: “Pony,
_Helen Lorimer must die_.”
This announcement veritably startled his hearer. Pony jumped to
his feet, seized Longtinsky by the shoulders with both hands, and
looked down on him with a ravenous surprise in his eyes, that made
Longtinsky half regret his audacity. But the surprise passed. Pony
had killed his men before. He fell back in his chair, and a kind of
sanguinary unction sounded to Tinsky in his hoarse whisper;
“Good Tinsky—you’re a handsome guy to be plotting murder to save
your own skin, and get a poor devil’s neck, like mine, kinked in
a noose. Work a little quicker, old cut-throat. You know I like
corpses, but just now I’d hate to get into a cold grave myself.”
Encouraged, Longtinsky continued. He dropped the gilded sophistry
of his professional cant, and assumed the prerogatives of an
initiated criminal. His own hatred for the class which constantly
embodied to his eyes his personal enemies, his particular animosity
for Helen Lorimer, whose virtues, goodness, and lofty altruism
were incomprehensible to his sodden nature, except as the mask of
an ulterior ambition, the wretched mess of deception into which
circumstances—largely precipitated by his own waning prestige—had
forced him, his consequent urgent danger, the sudden glimpse afforded
him of a forcible egress into a field of new opportunities, and the
pushing constraint of a kind of feverish despair made him suddenly
truculent, unabashed and reckless.
“Pony,” he began again, “I’ll make a clean breast of it. I blew up
the Settlement House. Polinck and I put the bombs there; Dalzell,
Vinta, Ishpy, Charles Bingo, Fabrizio, Spesca, Rinker, and the rest
were hired to go in, one hour after we lit the fuses. The janitor was
bribed—and—” the speaker grinned diabolically— “it was money from the
Silk Stockings that did it. They sent an agent to him. It was a plot;
that witch Helen Lorimer wanted her House blown up. She meant it to
bring ruin on us. I was fooled. The janitor came to me and promised
to open the place if I wanted him to. He left, the house open, and
went away—and I dropped into the trap. I meant no harm to the men.
Some one had to do it—for the effect—don’t you see—_the effect_. I
thought the East Side would rise,—but the police got wind of it too
soon. The men might have got away, and none the wiser but some one
peached, and that very night when the house burned, and I had started
the revolution—” Longtinsky for an instant looked self-deceived,
as if his aspirations for a New Dispensation, with himself as its
protagonist was a sacred hope, “—that night every reserve in the
city had been doubled, and—you know the rest—six of my men were
nabbed with Polinck; the uprising nipped; locust clubs killed the new
republic.”
By this time Pony was fully interested; he no longer shrank from the
portentous confession. His indolent attention had been replaced by a
very alert ear and eye, and not a word was missed, not a reflexion
of the utterance, in the face of the narrator, escaped him. He had
suspected much of this, some of it he almost could have sworn to.
He felt repugnance for the perfidy of the man who could thus coolly
rehearse all of this with a callous and untouched heart. But it
stimulated his own thoughts, to run rebelliously along a chain of
images, in which he saw Longtinsky dead, and himself with Jessie in
his arms fleeing the country, the demolition of The Beehive, and his
own comfortable existence elsewhere, with a sack of plunder torn from
its vindictive and over credulous editor. The dream pleased him,
and Longtinsky for once shone to him with an interior and native
light of reasonableness, that made him—Pony—urbane and receptive, a
transformation not concealed from Longtinsky, whose perception of it
only made him more communicative and less cautions.
“You see,” continued Longtinsky, “the reprieve will act as a stay to
the execution, of course, and the new trial will not come off until
the fall. That is sure. There is time for me to undo the mischief we
have suffered. I’ll fill The Beehive with storming articles. Careful
you know Pony. I’ll rouse the men we need and I will be bold too;
I’ll let out at that woman again, and she can come back at me. I can
tell her plans to a dot. She will be down on the East Side again; she
will put up some shack and start in with her talks. I’ll bait her
all right, and get her in some sort of an argument and then—with our
men ready—armed, Pony—we do it. _The bomb, Pony, that blows her to
perdition will win you Jessie._”
The speaker paused, watching with a flicker of madness in his
eyes, as he fed by anticipation upon the ruthless sweetness of
his vengeance, and the intoxicating prizes of success, the ardent
countenance of Pony, to whom the offer glittered with all the
radiance of happiness, complete and inexhaustible.
There was a moment’s silence between the men; Longtinsky never lifted
his eyes from the face before him, which responded to an inner
elation, and grew good and wholesome under the gentle influence of
the exultant and comforting thoughts that Jessie’s name aroused.
Longtinsky himself felt the benign touch somehow of his daughter’s
name, and there poured into his lowering glance the restful smile
of a father’s love. Surely Love—thinking of the abused word in
the loftiest sense, as the guerdon of unselfish sacrifice, and
devotion—can work, and it alone, the miracle of Redemption!
Pony extended his hand, and Longtinsky was not slow to grasp it.
“Done. I’m game for the throw, hit or miss. But a bargain’s a
bargain, and _you_ Longtinsky either stick to it, or QUIT BREATHING.”
Again the baleful lights in the eyes of both, and the evanescent ray
of Heaven’s sunshine on their faces faded away with the harvest of
suspicions springing anew in their plotting brains.
There was a light tap on the inner door, which led to the printing
and composing room of the paper, and Longtinsky recognized it; “Here
is Jessie now,” he said, and before he could extricate himself from
the table and chair in whose legs his own had become wound, Pony
leaped to his feet, and opened the door.
How strange are the contrasts of Nature’s works; with what necromantic
art she weaves the dreadful and the harmless, the lovely, together!
How perfectly she contrives—though there is no contrivance, only the
mastery of metempsychosis—to mix her materials, the same material
it would appear, and form from them now a demon, and now an angel.
Or is it in this wise; that a little, Oh! so very little of some
transforming juice of virtue can sway the ferment of a mass of
rougher ruder stuff, making its effect at last beautiful, choice,
and even more exquisite, because forsooth it has risen from its very
opposites. Chemistry in our human arts does such things. Heredity is
a fact, and yet Jessie was Longtinsky’s daughter. There she stood
like some wild and winsome flower, flourishing in the midst of
harshness and commonplaceness and reptilian motives. And so fresh
and lovely! The arch play of her smile like a golden beam falling on
ragged walls and blanched careworn faces, fell on the two men and
their lifted heads bathed in it as if in a benediction.
Jessie Longtinsky—her mother was dead—was Longtinsky’s only child,
and he lavished on her an unselfish care. She had learnt the most
excellent rudiments of an English, German and French education; she
spoke all these tongues; she had musical talent, and she developed
taste and talent. But best of all the graces of an unsullied nature,
a nature so vital and womanly, so confiding, earnest, and hopeful,
so searchingly sincere, so buoyant, and yet very brave, dressed, God
knows how, in the nobility of goodness.
Such graces were hers, and Jessie became them. They became her; it
was an ideality of character and beauty, more piquant and entrancing
because unexpected at first sight. It might have seemed almost
impossible.
Jessie Longtinsky was fair, her hair literally golden, her features
regular and perfectly harmonized, each formed so that it, by the
most delightful collusion with the rest, added to the total witchery
and charm. If hunting for some particular culprit among them all,
that made her win from every one the meed of praise, it might best
be attributed to her eyes, as indeed why not, seeing how joyous and
soulful eyes can be. Jessie’s eyes were indeed most pretty, and they
were not blue, as became convention, in the matter of eyes, with a
fair skin, and the story teller’s golden hair. They were the faintest
green, though that color craved no prominence in them, and often
surrendered its claim, to be considered there at all, to a soft
pearly grayness. And they were such honest eyes! Soft and reminiscent
sometimes they were, and filling unbiddenly with tears, and then the
home of mirth, but perhaps more usually they were tender and grave.
Longtinsky had had great luck in keeping his workmen, because they
were young, and because they could frequently feast their amazed
eyes on Jessie. Some had been ambitious in her regard but none had
been successful, though Jessie managed to make the wound endurable,
being calm and sensible and considerate. Among the habituées of
the Longtinsky establishment—and they were many—Pony, or exactly
Poniatowsky, had proved to be the most formidable suitor. Perhaps
Jessie did not care much for him, but she humored him, she may have
been a little afraid of him, and then her father favored him, _or
seemed to_, and Jessie was a dutiful daughter. Longtinsky, as men
will, even of the roughest, or the worst types, had guarded Jessie
from contact with his own world of men; he did not converse about
the social aims he had, he even kept his own paper out of his house,
not because it was dirty or vile—which it was not—but because it
was violent, sanguinary, maledictory and abusive. Longtinsky knew
that, but these ways were his weapons. Mrs. Longtinsky probably was
an amiable sweet woman, Jessie may have been like her, and so her
father wanted to keep her, feeling too some masculine aversion to a
femininity becoming raucous with debate and policies and doctrines.
As the door opened, Jessie glided past Pony who failed to catch
her, and stood apart from the men turning from one to the other as
if questioning their purpose to be locked up there. Then she looked
around the room, which she seldom entered, in which no trace of that
clean housewifery she practised in the story above the press room,
and where Longtinsky dwelt, was visible. Her glance was furtive and
shrinking, the place was distasteful; its staleness and meanness
oppressed her, there lurked in it an unavoidable meaning of crime.
She somehow felt that.
“Father, do let me change all this. I can. You won’t know it. With
clean windows and curtains, fresh paper, lamps, a new ceiling,
scrubbed floor, and that pretty old furniture in the attic; why it
will be so different, so pleasant!”
“Now Jessie that wouldn’t do at all, not down here. If you made
everything spick and span, we couldn’t think as well. It is hard
enough sometimes to say what we want to say in the style we want, but
because we don’t have to think where we are, and what’s about us, we
do better. Come my girl, leave us. Pony and I have some things to
talk about, which you aren’t interested in. Go up stairs.”
The voice of the speaker had lost its querulous murmur, and was
soothing and even affectionate, with a plausible earnestness that
discovered to the listener a father’s heart. And indeed there
flickered up in Longtinsky, when Jessie was near him, a tenderness
that would have saved him from many unruly and wicked impulses. It
was the psychic radiance of her own excellence that brightened the
dusky souls that came near her, and warmed their sensibilities, such
as they had, into a responsive vigor. Jessie sat down, and a cloud
of some sort of sadness passed over her face. Pony had been intently
watching her, with now and then a perturbed glance at his rumpled
clothes, which were not the habiliments he usually wore when anxious
to move Jessie’s reluctant heart.
Pony considered himself the recognized swain of Jessie, though it
would have been regarded as a mere piece of self flattery, a quite
unsupported assumption, by any one permitted to study Jessie’s
attitude towards him. She frankly did not like him, though Pony was
at his best with her, and really loved her, and because he did,
and was quite willing to go any lengths in supporting his claims,
against all rivals, he, by a rustic and aboriginal force of argument,
concluded she belonged to him, a conclusion not always agreeable to
Longtinsky, and certainly not approved by Jessie herself.
Pony started towards her, with a smile of pleasure in his face,
that intimated the probable intention of an osculatory salute, when
Jessie moved quickly away to the further end of the table. A frown
troubled Pony’s features, and threatened to break out in a stormy
expostulation, when Jessie unexpectedly fixed the attention of the
two men by a raised warning finger.
“Father, there are men outside in the yard watching the house. They
came in through the alley a minute ago. I think they may be there
yet. They may be your enemies!” Jessie of course knew her father was
engaged in a propaganda of a civic nature, and the best sides of a
humanitarian socialism appealed to her quite naturally. These she
heard, and was honestly led to feel that the rich were the enemies
of her class, of her father, of progress. She was cognizant of the
higher types of socialism, as she had become acquainted with it in
the books of Hilquitt, Marx, and others.
The recent riot, deaths, and the arrest of the conspirators, had
been viewed by her with terror, and yet with an exalted conviction
of its necessity. Through the sacrifice of the martyrs, she had been
told, Liberty came into the world, and always would so come. She
saw the sufferings of the very poor, and she exerted a beneficent
influence among them, working with an eager sympathy for their good
and improvement. She had in this wise done much to strengthen her
father’s power, and the affection bestowed on the daughter was an
effectual aid in assisting the projects of the father. But lately
Jessie, unsuspected by Longtinsky, had come under the spell of Miss
Lorimer, and the result threatened to bring about a little alienation
for his schemes. However her love for him was true, and when that
day, looking from the upper windows of the rear tenement, in which
they lived, she saw the usually empty yard invaded by the strangers,
and noticed their equivocal actions, she became alarmed, and had,
for this reason, interrupted the unhealthy machinations of the two
friends.
The two listeners to this startling news, jumped to their feet, and
tiptoed to the window, on the yard side, and cautiously raising the
corner of the shade, peered into the little yard which had been made
into a grass plot, worn irregularly into bare patches, by the feet of
those who frequented it, when, on summer nights, Longtinsky gathered
there his sympathizers and co-workers, to smoke, and drink, and
reform the crooked and nodding earth.
The view obtained under the lifted curtain was a very imperfect and
partial one, but there indeed were the intruders walking towards
the door of the room, where the watchers crouched. Neither Pony
nor Longtinsky stirred, and Jessie behind them, trying to reassure
herself over their shoulders, was quite still. Their common
apprehension that the men would next instant present themselves for
admission, at the door, was relieved when, with a last glance above
them, and a review of the few features of the yard, the new comers
turned into the alley and vanished. Pony stole to the door, opened
it, and creeping outward, saw them disappear into the street, and
the next instant an automobile puffed, shirred, tooted, and moved
away through the throbbing thoroughfare, and in it sat—our former
acquaintances—Mr. Benton Briggs, the mayor’s secretary, and Tom
Ratler.
Now it happened, naturally that Jessie had not detailed the
circumstances of her discovery, but that incident had consequences
that later developed into pleasing importance. When Jessie discovered
Mr. Briggs and his companion in the yard, she was at an open window
engaged in watering some of her flower charges, and her particular
bent attitude or position, had shot a tide of color into her face,
so that when she raised herself and gazed down on the men, the eyes
of Tom Ratler met a vision of beauty, which the rapidly working
appreciation of that susceptible youth, approved as being the
sweetest thing they had ever seen. And—happily let us say—this was
not unreciprocated for, in the nascent powers of her own healthy
observation, Jessie felt aware that the young man underneath her
windows was particularly good-looking.
The immediate consequences of an encounter, fraught with such mutual
pleasure, vary greatly, according to circumstances and temperament,
but with Tom Ratler it produced a strong hope—not shared by Mr.
Briggs—that he might have confided to him further work in the capture
of the Longtinsky household. It seemed to him that his intervention
was necessary, for the security of the defenceless and innocent
maiden connected as he discovered,—from Mr. Briggs—by a filial
relation to the obnoxious Longtinsky. As to the effect of the same
encounter with Jessie herself, it deepened her repugnance for Pony,
and made a fluttering sensation discernible in the neighborhood of
her heart, that, with more sophisticated girls, would have been
indubitably assigned to recondite and tender sympathies.
There was some natural confusion of mind, a little trepidation
perhaps, caused by this interruption, and when Pony had returned,
Longtinsky and he exchanged irresolute glances which finally adjusted
themselves into a settled stare of wonder, while through all this
mute interchange of ocular interrogation Jessie stood apart, with her
own eyes questioning each of the conspirators. At length Pony broke
out;
“I tell you Longtinsky: it’s cut for you. That young chap is the
Mayor’s shover, and the old dog is his secretary. They’re on a spying
trip; looking the ground over, and before you can say Jack Robinson
they’ll have the service men down here, and the whole outfit under
lock and key.”
While he was speaking Longtinsky’s head was, metaphorically, whirring
with the soundless revolutions of all its interior clockwork, wheels,
cogs, and pins. He saw too, that there was a suggestion, in this
sudden visit of inspection on the part of the Mayor’s forces of just
such a predicament and complication as would allow him to reanimate
and reestablish his prestige.
He could now, if the attack was made, the suppression of his paper
attempted, raise an outcry against the tyranny of such suppression,
the danger of Star Chamber proceedings against the freedom of the
press and, sounding the tocsin of alarm over the encroachments of
government upon the Palladium of liberty. He might add recruits to
his cause, drawn from a class usually out of sympathy with him, while
his own followers could be roused into an acute resentment. This
latter fanned into a blaze, might create the kind of conflagration
he needed for his own escape from censure, and for the completion
and execution of his felonious designs. These possibilities rapidly
formed themselves in his mind into a logical chain of events, which
expeditiously utilized, would immensely further his plans.
He turned sharply to his daughter and said: “Jessie go up stairs, and
leave us. You were right to tell us about these spies, and now Pony
and I must talk over the matter. Do go!” He approached his daughter
whom he truly loved, and putting his hand around her neck kissed
her with an ardor that reacted dangerously on Pony’s self-control.
That envious gentleman hurried also to Jessie’s side, and was in the
act of throwing both his arms around her, when she sprang sideways,
escaped him and fled.
Pony’s pursuit was unsuccessful, and he fell over a chair which sent
him sprawling against the wall. He was up in an instant, and furious
with disgust and disappointment. He would have renewed the chase, had
not Longtinsky shut the door past which Jessie had fled, through the
press room to her own quarters, and placed himself in the way of the
infuriated lover.
Pony stopped; it was not Longtinsky’s formidable frame that caused
him to pause; a sudden thought of the handsome Tom Ratler, whom he
had seen before, connected itself with the flight and reluctance of
Jessie to submit to his embraces. The idea suffocated him. It made
him fall back into a chair with a groan and a curse and then his
hands clutched the table, he shook it, as if the desperation of his
jealousy would reek itself upon this insensate object.
“Damn him,” he cried, “let him come between me and Jessie, and I’ll
tear his liver out of his black body. No I’ll do better than that.
I’ll mark him for life; I’ll slash his pretty face into strips, and
break his legs. A monkey on crutches. Ha! Ha! A fine figure he’ll cut
then,” and the fiend gloating over his imaginary revenge drew his
knife and struck the table before him with repeated blows.
Longtinsky watched this outbreak with some satisfaction. His
acrobatic mind saw that through the incentives of this jealousy
on the part of Pony, he could engage that desperate man to do his
bidding. He could involve all his enemies—the antagonists of his
propaganda—in this man’s hate, and when the moment arrived and the
blow was to be struck he could inflame his exasperation to the point
where Helen Lorimer—Longtinsky’s rage against this woman partook of
the nature of a mania—would become confused or identified with his
personal rival, and, relying on his furious love for his daughter,
through Pony’s arm, he might strike her down. At present he must
decamp, but so arrange things that the police should seize the
place—which he would make an empty trophy by its evacuation—and then
he would elsewhere publish his grievances and ring the changes upon
an outraged liberty.
“Listen to me, Pony,” said Longtinsky to the glowering lover, “all
that in time, but now we must get out of this, and save the plant.
To-night you must help me to move. There’s a house up Pitt Street
that I can get into and there we will go, Jessie and all. In spite of
them all we’ll print The Beehive, and we’ll make it hotter than ever.
Understand! Come! there’s no time to lose. Remember you stay with us
and—” it was his decisive stake “—play the game right, and Jessie is
yours.”
Pony leaped to his feet and seized Longtinsky’s hand and the two men
disappeared into the inner sanctum.
That night and for some succeeding nights there was much smothered
activity in the region of the office of The Beehive. Pony and
Longtinsky now banded together in a confirmed partnership wherein
the motives of the second outstripped the merely egotistic designs
of the first, were busy with the removal of the various archives of
the socialistic paper, and engaged too in a wholesale destruction
of the more compromising issues of the past year. They worked
efficiently and Pony derived a gratification from the occasional help
of Jessie who had learned from her father of the impending removal.
The old office was left intact with its signs and furniture but the
presses were taken to a new retreat in Pitt Street, not far from
the site of the ruined Settlement House, and the preparations made
for the continuous printing of the paper, but, under the fear of
some impending blow, their distribution was secretly arranged, and
at the same time the bitterness of their editorials increased. They
instilled insidiously a poisonous venom against society, and they
craftily wove into all their allusions the name of Helen Lorimer as
the embodiment of the wrongs the deluded readers were convinced they
suffered. Yet all this was not unopposed; the contingent which Miss
Lorimer had gathered around her at the Settlement was very faithful,
and Longtinsky regarded with alarm the preparations for rebuilding
the Settlement House. The moment must be soon improvised for his
blow, wherein the purpose of outright murder steadily and grimly
deepened.