Part 14

"But you can't!" he protested. "It is impossible that you should. It's inconceivable that a woman of your delicacy should go into such coarse work!"

"Is it better that it should be left to coarse women? It seems to me that there has been enough of coarseness in it already."

"But this--why, it's something that one can't even speak about!"

"Yes, something that we are not permitted even to mention, Wesley; and because we aren't permitted even to mention it, the thing grows and grows, night by night. It thrives in the shadow of our silence. They tell me that the liquor laws are broken, because nobody will mention it; that bestial men get rich in it, because nobody will mention it; that in this city alone there are three hundred saloon dance-halls intended to furnish its supply, because nobody will mention it!"

Figuratively, Dyker threw up his hands in horror, but actually, like all desperate men, he seized at the straws of detail.

"Now, that just shows how wrong your view of the whole subject happens to be," he declared. "My work has put me in a position to know something about these dance-halls, and I know that they exist simply because the girls that go to them want them to exist--the girls, mark you; not the men. Why, the girls aren't taken to such places; they go of themselves, they pay their own admission, and it is the usual thing for a girl earning six dollars a week in a store to save fifty cents out of every salary-envelope for the dance-halls."

"Then you want me to conclude that the fact that they want to do the thing makes the thing right?"

"You don't understand----"

"Precisely; and so I mean to learn."

"You can't learn. No matter how closely you study this whole matter, you can't learn, Marian. How can a clean-hearted, clean-lived American girl ever get the point of view of these low-down, low-browed foreigners? It's the sort of thing they're used to."

"Before they begin it?"

"It's the survival of the fittest."

"Then can't some be made more fit to survive?"

"It's the law of life, and it can't be stopped."

"So was negro slavery the law of life. It couldn't be stopped either--until we stopped it."

"That is all theory, Marian; it won't work out in practice. The great point is that these unfortunate women, whether they become unfortunate through the dance-halls or anywhere else, are simply not our sort of clay: they're not Americans."

"They are human beings."

"A pretty low example."

"And they are more Americans than your ancestors or mine were three hundred years ago."

"Nonsense. They're different, I tell you--different. Seriously, I know what I am talking about: I speak from systematic investigations, reports, statistics. The very latest investigation shows that all but about thirteen per cent. of these women were either born abroad or else are the children of foreign parents. It is always the newest immigrants that swell the ranks, and of course the newest immigrants are our lowest type."

"I don't see that all this alters the question."

"Well, it does."

"The lower they are, the more plainly it is our duty to raise them."

"My dear Marian, how can you raise them when you don't understand them?"

Marian shook her handsome head.

"You _will_ come back to that," she said; "and all that I can answer is that, not being utterly stupid, and having come to understand a few abstract problems, I have hopes of mastering something so close at hand to me and so concrete as a fellow human being."

"What, for instance?" asked Wesley, "can you understand of the typical Jewish girl of the East Side?"

"A good deal, I think. They were talking about that type at the settlement this evening. We were looking from the front windows at an endless stream of Jewish girls tramping home from the factories where they worked to the tenements where they slept. Somebody said there are nearly four hundred thousand Jews living east of the Bowery; that in most Jewish families the ambition to which every comfort must be sacrificed is the education of the boys; that for this reason the girls must work and are worked until there is nowhere else in the world where so much labor is got out of young women, and yet that the Jewess that is not married and a mother before she is twenty is regarded as a family disgrace. It seems to me, Wesley, that the case of those girls is pretty easy to understand. It seems to me that they are on the horns of a rather ugly dilemma."

Dyker's cane whipped the air as if it were striking at the heads of opposing arguments.

"You accept as gospel," he said, "everything that is told you by anybody but me. It isn't a pleasant subject, but, if you insist upon facts, let me tell you that there are troops of Jewesses who come down here from the upper Ghetto and walk the streets for no other purpose than to get money for their wedding trousseaus."

It was a blow at her conventions, and she shuddered; but she stood by her guns. They had crossed down Twenty-sixth Street now and they turned into the quiet of Madison Avenue, among comfortable houses and silent churches, as she answered.

"If they do that," she said, "it is because they have to."

"Have to? Why on earth should they have to?"

"I don't know, but I know that the very use they make of the money shows what they do is only a means and not an end."

"Are trousseaus so necessary that these girls have to sell their souls for them?"

"Souls have been sold for less. Even you and I make considerable sacrifices for things that other people in other classes would not think needful at all."

He had done his best to bridle his annoyance, but now he could bridle it no longer. He was wholly sincere in his inability to take seriously either the girl or her point of view, and now, though he felt as if he were riding a hunter at a butterfly, he charged blindly.

"Oh, please don't let us jump at sentiment and theory," he remonstrated; "let us keep our feet on figures and fact. The figures grow with the population; they always have so grown and they always will so grow. And the plain fact is that, though a few good people have been trying to stop this thing for four thousand years, they have never succeeded in doing anything but soiling themselves in the attempt."

"I know that," she frankly acknowledged, "and I don't know what it is that's to blame; but I know that there isn't any evil that hasn't some cure if we can only find it out."

"Then why not leave the search for a cure to the experienced?"

"I shall; but I propose to become one of the experienced. I mean to give my time, at least for a while, to first-hand study. Perhaps then I shall learn enough to know that it's useless for me to go on, but I shall keep trying to go on until I am convinced that there isn't any use in the trying."

"That's absurd, Marian--simply absurd. The condition is, after all, one that must be dealt with by the law, and I tell you honestly that, as yet, even the law is helpless."

"Has the law really tried? Has it ever attempted, for instance, to do anything to the men that take these immigrant girls at the dock and make slaves of them?"

"Yes, it has; it has tried just that. In Chicago two men were arrested for taking a couple of such girls--they had brought them from New York--and when the case was appealed, the United States Supreme Court found that, though importation of girls was a violation of federal law, yet the federal law providing a punishment for merely _harboring_ such girls after their arrival was unconstitutional."

Marian's voice faltered.

"Is--is that true?" she asked.

"Absolutely," said Dyker. Like most lawyers of his generation, his ideas of what was right were limited only by the final decisions of what was legal, and if the Supreme Court of the United States had, by even a majority of one, declared that the sun moved around the earth, Dyker would have first denied and then forgotten all previous astronomy.

"Absolutely," he repeated, and awaited her capitulation.

But Marian did not capitulate. She merely drew a long breath and answered:

"After all, that, of course, is just a small portion of the big question, and the only way it moves me is to lessen my opinion of the Supreme Court."

It was Wesley's turn to gasp, and he did so. He had always suspected that these college-settlements were hotbeds of Socialism and Anarchy--two theories that, to Dyker, were one and the same--and now he had his confirmation.

He was too cynically wrong upon one side of their subject to realize how emotionally wrong she, in her hope of accomplishment through personal appeal, might be upon the other. But here was a concrete denial of his one sincere conviction, and, though he was at last calm enough to see that he must not allow this conviction to wreck his suit, he was not so calm as to maintain a clear judgment. It was plain that Marian would not be turned from her experiment. His best course was, he then reasoned, immediately to put on record his opinion of its futility, even to quarrel with her in defense of that opinion, and then, when experience brought the awakening upon which his own worldly experience counted, to stand ready to profit by the inevitable reaction that would most likely show the perfidy of the women whom Marian hoped to help, detract from the credibility of any gossip they might recount concerning him, and end by winning him his wife.

"All right," he said sharply, "it is perfectly useless to talk reasonably to anybody that can take such a view of so simple a matter. Here is Thirty-fourth Street. I think we had better walk over to Broadway and get that taxi."

The worst thing that a man can impute to a handsome woman is a lack of intellect. Marian's cheeks flushed.

"I quite agree with you," she replied. "I am utterly incapable of arguing with anybody that so confuses law and justice."

"Very well," said Dyker; "but I want you to remember what I have said upon the subject as a whole. When you have trusted these women and been betrayed by them, when they have poisoned your mind against all the principles you have been brought up to believe, when you have left the world of sentiment and bruised your poor hands with hammering at the door of fact, then you will acknowledge that I have been right. I am not angry----"

"Oh, of course not!"

"I am not angry, but I am firm. I only ask you to believe that I shall never be far away from the settlement, and that you have only to telephone for me when you have need of me."

Marian compressed her lips to a more severe firmness, and the ride from Thirty-fourth Street to Riverside Drive was made in silence; but the following Monday found her, against all parental protests, enlisted as a settlement-worker in Rivington Street.

XV

IMPARTIAL JUSTICE

Michael M. O'Malley, political boss, held his court, that next morning, in the back room of Ludwig Schleger's saloon on Second Avenue, and, because it was to be a busy day and there were many pleas to be made and many petitions to be received, he came early to his post.

As he swung majestically up the street toward his destination, his carefully pressed light gray suit flapping in the warm breeze about a figure so tall and so thin that any suit approaching "a fit" would have achieved only a caricature, his progress was almost regal. Pedestrians stepped to one side as if the bulk of his unseen dignity demanded a far wider strip of the paved channel than was required by his visible physique. Workingmen touched their grimy caps, the overseers of the street-repairing gangs bowed respectfully, children on their way to school bobbed their heads, and, at a corner, Officer Riley, concluding a substitute week "on the day turn," offered his best military salute. The keeper of every news-stand received a nod; the bootblacks outside of each saloon were given a brief word of greeting; there was not a beggar but got some largess, and of the several men that hurried up with a request, hinted or expressed, all were permitted to walk a few steps in the august presence, all received a brief, civil phrase of agreement, postponement, or consideration.

"Trouble about your place?" It was thus that O'Malley interrupted the voluble plea of a saloon-keeper that approached him. "I'll have that cop, Conners, looked into. His eyes are too new; they see more'n they're paid to see. Who's tendin' day-bar for you? Johnny Mager? All right, if they take the thing up front, I'll see that you get your license transferred in his name. Keep your shirt on an' leave it to me."

He had not paused in his walk; he had not raised his quiet voice or quickened his slow speech; but the suppliant retired satisfied, reassured.

Indeed, O'Malley's face was one that, if it would not inspire confidence in a stranger unacquainted with the man's reputation for guarding the interests of his dependents, at least bore the unmistakable stamp of that knowledge of life which is power. It was sallow and long, with a long thin nose and long thin lips, and cold eyes that thrust as swiftly and as deeply as the stilettos of Mr. O'Malley's Italian constituents. He smiled often and his smile was bitter; he spoke little and his words were short; but his servants had early learned that he was as sure to keep his promise as he was ready to give it, and that, so long as his tasks were well done, he was an indulgent master.

He entered "Schleger's place" with the air of an owner, nodded to the white-jacketed man behind the polished counter and before the polished mirror, and gave a quick, firm pressure to the plump, outstretched hand of the fat and grinning proprietor.

"All well with the family?" he asked, smiling his wry smile.

Ludwig Schleger beamed assent.

"Anything doing last night?"

"Nothin'," replied Ludwig. "'Ceptin' Mr. Dyker called you on the telephone. Wouldn't say what he wanted."

"I know that. Haven't had any more roughhousing?"

"No," grinned Schleger, wisely; "the boys are all got wise that they can't meddle with my new night-man."

"I see. Name's Hermann Hoffmann, ain't it?"

"That's right."

"Hum. Well, he may be useful. You must get him to move into this precinct, or else register him from here. Votes right, of course?"

"I ain't asked him yet."

"Do it to-night."

O'Malley walked to the dimly lighted back-room, hung with racing prints and framed lithographs advertising a wide variety of whiskeys. He drew a wicker-bottomed chair to a stained round table, and sat down.

The proprietor brought him a glass and a syphon of seltzer--the boss's only drink--and disappeared. The bar-keeper came with a handful of black cigars for which O'Malley paid with a bill, refusing the change, and also disappeared. Then the door of communication was shut and guarded, admission being denied to all persons not properly accredited, and the quiet, thin man in the light gray suit, now sipping his seltzer, now reflectively adjusting his bright blue tie, which bore a brilliant diamond pin, and always slowly smoking, began his conference with such callers as he had granted appointments.

They came in force--alone and in groups--all manner of men by the main entrance and a woman or two ushered through a side door. This one was promised a reward for duty to be done, that one assigned to the performance of a delicate piece of diplomacy. Now and then a short, sharp, cold reprimand for negligence or failure sent away a caller whipped, penitent, trembling; and here and there release was promised for a wayward son sent to "The Island," or a line of credit written for use at a grocer's shop.

Wesley Dyker came early. He paused at the bar for a drink to stiffen his courage, lingered a little longer until a predecessor had been dismissed, and then, his lids lowered, entered, alone, with a succinct account of Rose's attempt to play a double game.

When he had finished the narrative, O'Malley sat for a while gazing unconcernedly at the blackened ceiling, and smoking quietly.

"Well?" he said at last, and turned the sharp thrust of his gaze upon his caller.

Dyker, who was sitting opposite and who had been served with a drink of whiskey, tossed off the liquor in order to gain time to muster an answer for this unexpected query.

"Well," he at length replied, annoyed at thus being put into a position where he must make his proposition in the form of a request, "are you going to stand for that sort of thing?"

"I dunno."

"_I_ wouldn't stand for it," said Dyker.

"If you had my job you might have to."

There was another pause. The long fingers of O'Malley tapped gently on the table. Dyker shifted uneasily in his seat.

"I wouldn't stand for it a minute!" he at last broke forth. "And what's more, you can have her up for something worse than the disorderly-house charge. She has one kidnapped girl in her house now, and I've got another that escaped from her, and who's ready to testify."

An instant later he was sorry that he had spoken so readily.

O'Malley tilted back against the wall until the front legs of his chair rose six inches from the floor. He blew an easy ring of smoke.

"You seem to have come here with your case all prepared," he remarked.

Wesley flushed and stammered.

"You see," he began, "I mean that I got hot at this, and I said to myself that it was only right to let you know this woman wasn't to be depended upon."

The forward legs of O'Malley's chair came down with a loud thump. Wesley started, but the boss only impaled him with another cold glance.

"See here," said he, "before we can do business we'd better altogether understand each other. Just what is it you want?"

"I--I think I've made that clear."

"_I_ think not."

"I want this Légère woman pinched for running a white-slave place. I want to see her taught a lesson that the other women down her way will profit by."

"Of course you do. But what do you want for yourself?"

The issue was too conclusively joined to permit of further evasion. Wesley took his courage in his hands.

"Why, I've not made any secret of that," he said, "and neither has headquarters. I want the next election for magistrate. I told you that long ago."

He launched his declaration with the bravado of weakness at bay, and then breathlessly awaited the answer.

Michael O'Malley leaned back again in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and closed his keen eyes, reflecting.

His was an hereditary office, but, unlike most men that inherit power, he had inherited also the abilities that had gained the power. His father, who had begun life as a policeman, had been a great exemplar of the political uses of an element fully realized only by the expert politician: the human element. The name of O'Malley had now for a generation been, south of Fourteenth Street, a magic title. To a legion of men, women, and children, it stood for a sort of substitute, and very near and practical, Providence. It implied contact, fellow-feeling, the personal relation. Acting upon the politician's axiom that whatever is acquired is right, the elder O'Malley had risen from the street force until, after zealous party-work, he had been promoted, in the palmy days of policy and the pool-rooms, to the "Gambling Squad," where he had performed the astounding financial feat of saving eight times his monthly salary, had retired, and grown annually richer and stronger through politics, without once losing the esteem of his voting underlings, or once seeming to cease being one of them. Since his father's death, now that gambling had declined and prostitution had risen as political material, Michael, who had been brought up to the business, had filled the place of that genuinely mourned parent. Without any publicly acknowledged means of support, even with no headquarters save the daily shifted back-rooms of saloons, he had extended and increased the power and the fortune that had been left to him. He was known as the friend of the distressed; he was recognized as benefiting with his left hand the poor whom he unimpededly robbed with his right. To those who were without money or without assistance he was always accessible. He made festival with the merry and was readily sympathetic with them that mourned. By small gifts at all times and large gifts in days of emergency, by acting as the adviser, the employment-agent, the defender, from the law, of the people whom he exploited and upon whose weaknesses and vices he throve, he won and held fast both the tribute and the allegiance of the vicious and the weak.

It was a mighty position and yet one that, in moments like the present, was inherently delicate, one in which the fortunate man must move warily lest in gaining a new friend he lose an old. It is all very well to be temperate and profit by drunkenness, to be abstemious and take money from prostitution; it is easy to give presents at Christmas and picnics in summer when the giving is in reality only paying a small rebate to wives for drunken husbands, to mothers for daughters stolen. It is easy to find a place in the municipal government for the man that stuffs a ballot-box for you, or the procurer that registers your fraudulent votes from the houses of his customers; but it is fatal to punish, for what may be a passing disloyalty, anyone that your world, perhaps ignorant that offense has been committed, regards as having been placed by a careless Heaven under your protecting wing,--fatal, that is to say, unless you acquire something more than you throw away.

Of all this, though scarcely with such frankness of phrase, Michael O'Malley made thought before he gave Dyker the reply for which that clever young lawyer was waiting. Behind his closed eyes he weighed the chances carefully: the things to be gained against the things that might be lost.

Then he thoughtfully lit another black cigar.

"You've got to keep out of personal relations with these women," he yawned.

Dyker bit his lip.

"I don't have them," he replied.

"Yes, you do. Cut 'em out. Understand?"

Surprisedly, angrily, Dyker found himself bowing obedience, like a school-urchin detected in some breach of academic discipline.

"A woman with a past," continued O'Malley, "is all right for the present, but a slow mare in the futurity."

"I dare say you're correct," said Wesley Dyker. With a single blow of the whip, the master had demonstrated his mastery.

O'Malley smoked a while longer in silence.

"Now then," he at last pursued, "about this magistracy. You think the boys'll stand for you?"

"I think they will," Wesley replied, with humble mien, but rising assurance. "And I think it ought to make the ticket look better to the uptown people to have--if you will pardon my saying so--my sort of name on it."

O'Malley grunted.