JOHN ROGERS
David flung himself at the story as though it were a city to be taken by
storm. He was full of power, of creative fury. His long-disused pen at
first was stubborn, but gradually he re-broke it to work; and he wrote
with an ease, a surety of touch, a fire, that he had never felt before.
He had half-a-dozen separate incentives, and the sum of these was a vast
energy that drove him conqueringly through obstacle after obstacle of
the story.
These early days of the story were high days with him. He forgot, when
writing, his basement room, his janitor's work, his dishonour. Infinity
lay between the end of December and the end of January; in a month his
spirits had risen from nadir to zenith. The world was his; nothing
seemed beyond him. He even dared dream of passing Allen upon some
mid-level and winning to the highest place in Helen Chambers's regard.
The exhaustion of spirit at the end of each day's writing quenched this
dream; but it was nevertheless enrapturing while it lasted, and at times
David came near believing in it.
David had asked both Rogers and the Mayor to aid him in securing Tom a
_bona-fide_ position, and after the boy had been running the
Pan-American Café for a month, a place was found. Tom's wages had been
a heavy drain upon David's meagre income, and it was with a feeling of
relief that David announced the coming change one night as they were
preparing for bed.
"I've got some great news for you, Tom," he began.
"What's dat?" asked the boy, dropping the shoe he had just taken off.
"A new job!" cried David, trying to infect Tom with enthusiasm.
"Delivery-boy on a wagon. You're to get four dollars a week--a dollar
more than you're getting. Think of that! You're in luck, my boy--you're
getting rich!"
But David's enthusiasm did not take. There came no sparkle into the
boy's eyes, no eagerness into his manner. He looked thoughtfully at
David a moment, then shook his head.
"I don't t'ink I'll take it."
"What!" cried David. The possibility of refusal had not occurred to him.
He plunged into a fervent portrayal of the advantages of the new place.
"Mebbe you're right," Tom said, when the picture had been painted. "But
I'm gettin' used to t'ings at de Pan-American; I likes de boss an' I
likes de woik. An' I don't need de extry dollar. No, I don't want no
better job dan what I got. It suits me right up to de chin."
He walked, in one shoe and in one stocking, across to David and held out
his hand. "But, pard"--a note of huskiness was in his voice--"pard, I
appreciate dat you was tryin' to do de fine t'ing by me. Shake."
There was nothing more to be said. Tom went back to the Mayor, and David
continued dropping in Saturdays an hour before pay-time.
One evening in early February, just after David had coaled the furnace
and settled down to his story, he had a call from Bill Halpin, whom he
had not seen since their first meeting. Halpin leaned against the door,
after it had been closed, and silently regarded David, a sneering smile
upon his face.
"Honest!" he shot out at length, with a short, dry laugh. It was his
first word since entering.
David stared at the sarcastic, saturnine figure.
"What do you mean?"
"Honest! And I half believed you!" Again the short laugh. "You almost
fooled Bill Halpin--which is sayin' you're pretty smooth." He jerked his
head upward. "What's your game?--yours and this man _Rogers_?"
"See here, Halpin, what are you talking about?"
"Oh, I suppose you'll say you don't know him. But since I met you on the
Bowery I've been around here twice, and both times I saw you two with
your noses together. You're a smooth pair. Come, what's your game?"
"I don't understand you!"
"Don't try to fool me, Aldrich," he drawled. "You can't. But don't tell
me the game unless you want to. You know I wouldn't squeal if you did.
All I want is for you to know you can't throw that honesty 'con' into
me."
David strode forward and laid sharp hold of Halpin's shoulders.
"See here, Bill Halpin, what the devil do you mean?" he demanded.
Halpin looked cynical, good-humoured disbelief back into David's eyes,
and again let out a dry cackle.
"Drop that actor business with me, Aldrich. I don't know what your game
is--but I know there is a game. If you want to find out how much I know,
come on. Let's go out and have a drink."
An hour later David stepped from the rear room of a Bowery saloon, and
walked dazedly through the spattering slush back to his house. He paused
before it, and looked irresolutely at Rogers's office window, whose
shade was faintly aglow. He began to pace up and down the block, his
eyes constantly turning to the window, his mind trying to determine his
honourable course. At length he crossed the street, entered the house,
and knocked at Rogers's door.
Rogers admitted him with a look of quiet surprise and led the way across
his office into the living-room behind, whose one window opened upon the
air shaft. In this room were two easy chairs, a couch on which Rogers
slept, a table with a green-shaded reading-lamp, two or three
prints--all utterly without taste. Everything was in keeping with the
surface commonplaceness of the man except a row of shelves containing a
couple of hundred well-selected books.
Rogers motioned David to a chair and he himself leaned against his
table, his hands folded across the copy of "Père Goriot" he had been
reading.
"I'm very glad you came in," he said, in his low, even voice.
David gazed at Rogers in his attitude of waiting ease, and he suddenly
felt that to speak to this unsuspecting man was impossible. It did not
occur to him that perhaps Rogers had caught his strained look, and that
perhaps this ease might be the mask of an agitation as great as his own.
He dropped his eyes. But it was his duty to speak--and, in a way, his
desire. He forced himself to look up. Rogers had the same look and
attitude of quiet waiting.
"Mr. Rogers," David began, with an effort, "I have just been told
something that I think I am bound to tell you. You hired me, befriended
me, in the belief that I knew nothing about you. I feel it would not be
honourable in me to remain your employe, in a sense your friend, if I
concealed from you that I know what may be your secret. And there is
another reason why I want you to know that I know: if the story is true,
I want to tell you how much I sympathise."
"Go on," said Rogers in his even voice.
"It's doubtless all a mistake," said David, hurriedly, feeling that it
was not. "I've just had a talk with a man I knew in prison--Bill Halpin.
He's called to see me several times. He happened to see you. Something
about you struck him at once as familiar, but he could not recognise
you. He saw you again, and he thought he placed you. He called here, had
a talk with you, and on going away purposely shook hands. There was no
grip in your little finger--you could only half bend it. He said he
placed you by that."
Rogers still leaned against the table, his figure quiet as before--but
David could see that the quiet was the quiet of a bow drawn to the
arrow's head. The tendons of his hands, still holding the book, were
like little tent-ridges, and his yellowish face was now like paper.
"And who did he say I am?" his low voice asked.
"He told me that fifteen years ago you and he were friends, pals--that
you were a famous safe-breaker--that you were 'Red Thorpe.'"
Instantly Rogers was another man--tense, slightly crouching as though
about to spring, his eyes blazing, on his face the fierce look of the
haunted creature that knows it is cornered and that intends to fight to
the last. A swift hand jerked open a drawer of the table, and stretched
toward David. In it was a revolver.
David sprang to his feet and stepped back. Rogers glared at him for a
moment, and for that moment David expected anything. Then suddenly
Rogers said, "What a fool!--to be thinking of that!" and tossed the
pistol into the open drawer.
Defiantly erect, he folded his arms, his fierce pallor suggestive of
white heat, his eyes open furnace-doors of passion.
"Well, you've got me!" he said, with strange guttural harshness. "I've
been expecting this minute for ten years. What're you going to do?
Expose me, or blackmail me?"
David got back his breath. "I don't understand. Halpin told me he didn't
think the police were after you."
"They're not. I don't owe the State a minute."
"Then why do you talk of exposure?"
"You understand--perfectly!" His words were a blast of furnace-hot
ferocity. "You know what would happen if my clients learned I'm an
ex-convict. They'd take every house from me--I'd again be an outcast.
You know this; you know you've got your teeth in my throat. Well--I'll
pay blood-money. I have paid it. A police captain found me out, and for
five years sucked my blood--every cent I made--till he died. I'll pay
again--I can't help myself. How much do you want?--blood-sucker!"
These hot words, filled with supremest rage and despair, thrilled David
infinitely; he felt the long struggle, the tragedy, behind them.
"You mistake me," he cried. "I've told you what I have because I thought
to tell was my duty to you. Betray you, or accept money for silence--I
never could! Surely you know I never could!"
"For ten years I've touched no man's penny but my own," he said
fiercely. "In money matters, I've been as honest as God!"
The rage was dying out of his face, and despair was growing--the despair
that sees nothing but defeat, failure. He looked unbelief at David.
"But what difference does that make to you?" he asked bitterly.
"Well--how much is it to be?"
The piercing brothership that had been surging up in David for this
desperate, defiant, suspicious man, swept suddenly to the flood.
"Don't you see that we're making the same fight?" he cried with
passionate earnestness. "I admire you! I honour you! Your secret is as
safe with me as in your own heart."
David stretched out his hand. "I honour you!" he said.
For several moments Rogers's gaze searched David's soul. "You're
speaking the truth--man?" he asked in a slow, harsh whisper.
"I am."
He continued staring at David's open face, flushed with its fervid
kinship. "If you're lying to me--!" he whispered. Then he held out his
hand, and his thin fingers gripped about David's hand like tight-drawn
wires.
"During the month I've known you, you've seemed a white man. I think I
believe you. But, man! don't play with me!" he burst out with sudden
appeal. "If there's any trick in you, out with it now!"
"If there was, now would be my time, wouldn't it?"
They stood so for a moment, hands gripped, eyes pointed steadily into
eyes.
"Yes, I believe you!" Rogers breathed, and sank into a chair and let his
head fall into his hand. David also sat down.
Presently Rogers looked up.
"I guess I was very harsh," he said weakly. "But you can't guess what I
was going through. It was the moment I had feared for ten years. It
seemed that the world had fallen from beneath me."
"I understand," said David.
"But you cannot understand the ten years of fear, of suspense--of fear
and suspense that walk with you, eat with you, sleep with you."
He sat looking back into the years. After a space, the hunger for
sympathy, the instinct to speak his decade of repressed bitterness,
prompted him on.
"I was one of those thousands and thousands that never had a chance when
boys. I had no very clear idea between right and wrong; there was no one
to show me the difference. I was full of life and energy, and I had
brains. I could easily have been turned into the right way--but there
was no one. So I turned into the wrong. About that part of my life
Halpin told you."
"He said you were the cleverest man in your line."
Rogers seemed not to hear the praise. "A man may begin to think while
he is still a boy; if he has spirit and animal energy, he doesn't
begin to think till later. I was twenty-seven. I had been two years
in Sing Sing and had three more years to serve. It wasn't the warden's
words that started me thinking, nor the chaplain's sermons.
Chaplains!--bah!--frocked phonographs! It was two old men I happened to
see there--mere cinders of men. The thought shot into me, 'There's what
you're going to be at sixty-five!'
"I couldn't get away from that thought. My mind forced me to study my
friends; there was not one old man among them who was living a peaceful,
comfortable life. That burnt-out, hunted old age--I revolted from it! I
did a lot of thinking. I decided that, when I got out, prison gates
should never have reason to close on me again.
"Finally, I was discharged. I knew it was hard for an ex-convict to get
work, but I thought it would be easy for me. I was willing, clever,
adaptable. But--oh, God! you know what the fight is, Aldrich!"
"I do!" said David.
Rogers was on his feet now, his eyes once more glowing. He began to pace
the floor excitedly.
"Your fight was easy to mine. But I'll skip it--you know what the
fight's like. It's enough to say that I found the world would not
receive me as my old self. I changed my name; I grew a beard; I began to
wear glasses; I dyed my red hair brown; I smothered down my spirit. I
became John Rogers.
"A friend of mine in a Chicago real estate office, in which I once
worked for a couple of weeks as a clerk, sent me an envelope and a sheet
of paper of the firm. On the paper I wrote a letter of recommendation
from the firm. I had told my story to the Mayor of Avenue A--it was
because he knew I would sympathise with you that he brought you to
me--and he helped me. I got my first job.
"Think of that, Aldrich!" He held a trembling fist in David's face, and
laughed harshly. "I had to become a disguise, I had to lie, I had to
commit forgery, to get a chance to be honest! Oh, isn't this a sweet
world we're living in!
"And ever since, my life has been one great lie! A lie for honesty! But
the lie has done for me what truth could not do. I'm respected in a
small way. I'm successful in a small way. But, man, how that smallness
chafes me! How I am shackled! I should be respected, be successful, in a
large way. I'm cleverer than most of the men in my line. I have brains.
I see big business opportunities. But I dare not take them. I must
always be pulling back at the reins. If I let myself out, I should
become prominent. Men would begin to ask, 'Who is that fellow Rogers?'
and pretty soon some one would be sure to find out. And down I'd go! I
must keep myself so small that I'll not be noticed--that's my only
safety!"
He paused. David could say nothing.
"And always the lie that saved me is threatening to destroy me," Rogers
went on, in a lower voice. "God, how I've worked to get to this poor
place! How I want to live peacefully, honestly! But some day someone
will find out I'm an ex-convict. A breath, and this poor house of cards
I've worked so hard to build and protect will go flat! And I cannot
begin all over again. I cannot! I haven't the strength. This is going to
happen--I feel it! And how I fear it! How I've feared it for ten long
years! Man, man, how I fear it!"
He dropped exhausted into a chair, and almost at once a cough began to
shake him by the shoulders.
"And this disease"--a hand pressed itself upon his chest--"it's another
prison gift!" he gasped, bitterly.
There was not a word in David. He reached out and gathered one of
Rogers's thin hands in both of his; gathered it in the clasp of his
soul. The cough ceased its shaking and Rogers looked up. He gazed at the
tears, at the quivering brothership, in David's face. Thus he sat,
silent, gripping David's hands; then, slowly, his own tears started.
"Man, dear," he whispered brokenly, "I think I'm going to be glad you
found me out!"