Part 20

"I won't need none, Mr. Beekman."

"I--I think I've got fifty dollars somewhere in my clothes."

"I was paid my wages only this mornin'."

He looked at her in gray-eyed amazement.

"But I say," he began, "you aren't going to--you don't mean you won't----"

She did not answer. She moved slowly and quietly away. She went to the kitchen, got her shabby beaver hat and her long coat.

Philip, in the pantry, remained as she had left him, erect, eyes and mouth wide.

A moment later he heard the area door open and close.

XXI

AN ANCIENT PROBLEM

"An twent' from Rosie Légère's," said Angel, "maka two hundre'."

Hermann Hoffmann, alone behind the bar in Schleger's saloon, and half asleep as he bent over a thumbed and stained copy of the last evening's paper, scarcely raised his head. It was half-past one o'clock in the morning. Except for Angelelli and the man to whom he was talking at a table by the door, the place was empty of customers, and so unconcerned were these two late-comers that, had he wished it, every word of their conversation could have been taken down by the bar-keeper.

But the bar-keeper did not wish it. He knew both the men, and had heard something of the character of each, as every good bar-keeper comes to know and to hear about most of the regular patrons of the establishment that employs him. With Angel he had even had a nodding acquaintance in the days of the brewery-wagon, and since he had donned the white jacket he had seen often the narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, slouching Austrian now in conference with the dapper Rafael. He had been told that this Austrian, with his bristling brown hair, pale face, and thin mouth, pulled downward at one corner by an ugly scar, made his regular living by appropriating the wages of a girl that he nightly drove forth to scour the dark streets, earning what money she could from what looks were left her and stealing what she could not earn. And Hermann knew that, now an election was near, both of these proud possessors of the suffrage were doing their exacted duty for the powers that permitted them to thrive, and were, like the army of others in their own profession, through all New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, through the tenderloin of every American city, providing for the voting of repeaters, of dead men, of men that never were, in the interests of whichever of the two great political parties happens to be in control of the city where such votes are needed.

"Mirka," said Angel, laying down his gold-rimmed fountain-pen and looking up from the back of the envelope on which he had been making his calculations, "we weell need a hundre' more."

Mirka, the Austrian, tried to smile, but that ugly scar at the corner of his mouth caught the smile in the making and pulled it down into a sinister sneer.

"I can smoke out fifty if you can," he said.

"Da sama kind?"

"Yes."

Hermann, behind the bar, frankly yawned. He remembered, with a slow smile, how, when he had first come across such practices, years ago, he had gone to the ward-leader of that party in whose interests the work was being done. He remembered how this potentate had first assured him that he had "heard wrong," and finally met his persistence with a warning that he had better keep his mouth shut. He remembered how, at the rival headquarters, he had been told that there was always a mass of such evidence, none of which could be effectively used before election, and how, when he had ventured to suggest that an election-offense was punishable after election-day, he had been ridiculed. And lastly, he knew that his own Socialist friends had already all the information that he had now obtained, but could do no more at the polls than lodge protests that would be overruled by the election-judges and subsequently pigeon-holed by the courts.

"All right," Angel was saying, as he pocketed his pen and tore the envelope into small bits, which he tossed deftly across the room into the gutter beneath the bar. "I feexa heem. I geta da rest."

The two men rose and stepped to the bar for a nightcap of whiskey.

Already the Austrian had drunk more than was good for his temper, but Hermann, whose eye was usually exact in discerning such matters, was sleepy to-night, and did not notice this. Angel poured a bountiful portion from the cool metal-stoppered bottle that Hoffmann shoved clanking toward him. Mirka decanted even more, and then momentarily released his hold of the bottle to speak to his companion. Hermann, thinking both men satisfied, reached for the liquor.

"Keep your dirty fingers off of that!" cried Mirka, with no trace of his nationality in his speech. "Can't you wait till I pour a real man's drink?"

Hermann flushed.

"It's a bath, den, you're goin' to dake?" he asked.

"I will if I like, you damned fool!" rejoined Mirka, his eyes warming.

Hermann's blue glance surveyed the uncouth, slouching figure.

"All righd," he said; "you need von."

The Austrian glowered. Then, tilting back his bristling head, he tossed the liquor down his long throat.

"Give me another, you Dutchie," he ordered, pushing his glass across the bar.

Angel began a quieting word, but Mirka broke in, still addressing Hermann.

"Get a move on, or I'll break yer face, Dutchie!" he insisted.

Hermann's jaw was suddenly set in a rigid line. He remained motionless.

"Come on, now!" said Mirka.

"Don' maka these treecks," protested Angelelli, dividing his plea between his hearers, and placing his hand upon the Austrian's shoulder.

"You shut up!" retorted Mirka, shaking himself free. "And you, you Dutch fool, give me a drink--quick!"

Hermann did not obey. He saw at last the fellow's condition.

"You've had enough," he said.

"Mind yer own business," snapped the Austrian.

"Dot's what I'm doing," answered Hermann, calmly reaching for the empty glasses. "You're drunk."

He had hardly spoken before Mirka, his habitual lassitude dropping from him like a discarded cloak, made a quick leap that brought him half across the bar. The glasses crashed, the bottle was overturned, and in the Austrian's waving, clenched right hand there flashed a knife.

It was a moment of action, but a moment only. From one side of the bar, Angel had gripped Mirka by the waist and was pulling him backward; on the other, the powerful German had caught the threatening fist and now, with a quick twist, sent the knife plunging into the tub below the beer-spigots.

Spluttering obscenities, the Austrian was dragged to the position from which he had made his attack.

"You keepa quiet!" commanded Angel of the one combatant, and to the other: "You getta more fresh with your mouth an' I getta you fired."

Hermann had recovered the knife and was now calmly drying it upon a bar-towel. Such incidents were not unusual in his occupation and, now that this one was closed, he could afford to smile his answer to Rafael.

Mirka, on the other hand, though still tightly embraced by Angel, was trembling with rage.

"I'll get you for this, Dutchie!" he declared.

"So?" said Hermann. He still smiled, but he was tired of being called Dutchie, and his tongue ran just a hair's breadth ahead of his caution. "Try it," he concluded; "try it, you dirty Austrian loafer, und I'll somevheres go vhere dose names you've been makin' oud vill get you vhat you deserve."

"Whata you say?" Angel kept his hold upon his friend, but the reference to their recent occupation brought a glint of anger into his own eyes.

By way of beginning his reply, Hermann smilingly returned the knife to its owner, who seized it with a growl of malice.

"Neffer mind vhat I say den," he answered. "Vhat I say now is 'Goot-nighd.' You two get oud."

He raised his thick arm to point to the door, but in the manner of its raising there was another significance. For a moment Angel and Mirka met hotly his steady gaze. Then the bar-keeper raised carelessly his other hand: it held a stout bung-starter.

The two men, with a common impulse, turned and silently left the place.

Hermann was not afraid of them. He knew that his threat of betrayal had been idle, for the excellent reason that there was no quarter in which betrayal would be effective, and he told himself that, as soon as their anger and their drunkenness had in some measure subsided, the plotters would recognize this. So he whistled complacently as he polished the bright surface of the bar and did not hesitate, when he began at last to wash and put away the glasses, to turn his back to the swinging door of the saloon. The campaign was not one that was considered important and, personally, he cared but little about it or what enmities it might awaken.

The campaigners cared, however, a great deal. There was in no sane mind any question of the result, but so mighty is custom that there were few sane minds that did not publicly pretend to be in doubt upon the issue.

For many days previously, any outsider, reading the newspapers or attending the mass-meetings in Cooper Union and Carnegie Hall, would have supposed that a prodigious battle was waging and that the result would be, until the last shot, in doubt. There were terrible scareheads, brutal cartoons, and extra editions. As the real problem was whether one organization of needy men should remain in control, or whether another should replace it, there were few matters of policy to be discussed; and so the speechmaking and the printing resolved themselves into personal investigations, and attacks upon character. Private defectives were hired, records searched, neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, and family feuds revived. Desks were broken open, letters bought, anonymous communications mailed, boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and women and men hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap. Whatever was discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured--whatever truth or falsehood could be seized by whatever means--was blazoned in the papers, shrieked by the newsboys, bawled from the cart-tails at the corners under the campaign banners, in the light of the torches and before the cheering crowds. It would all be over in a very short while; in a very short while there would pass one another, with pleasant smiles, in court, at church, and along Broadway, the distinguished gentlemen that were now, before big audiences, calling one another adulterers and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished gentlemen so to call one another during a manly campaign in this successful democracy of ours, and it seems to be an engrossing occupation while the chance endures.

Though he often trembled, Wesley Dyker, perhaps because his records of any sort were as yet but brief, escaped with a fairly clean skin this Yahoo discharge, but the downpour continued all about him with tremendous vigor and at tremendous cost. The Republican leaders, fully expecting defeat, assessed their supporters just as heavily as if they were certain to triumph, spent much time and more money and no end of breath. The Reformers, under varying factional names, bewildered, sometimes advisedly, the independent voter by here joining one leading party, there endorsing another, and in a third place clamoring for a ballot so split and so subdivided that the average man could in no wise comprehend it when marked. The Socialists, to be sure, went along calmly enough, confessing their numerical weakness and securely seeing in the small increase of the present day the promise of the large majority of the distant morrow. But all the while the Democratic organization thundered an inch forward in the light and ran a mile forward in the darkness by precisely the same powers as were invoked, with so much smaller results, by the Republicans and the Reformers.

Not that there was any reason to doubt the organization's victory. There was none. But every organization always insists that, no matter how easy the skirmish, its leaders must so manage that it comes out of the fray to all appearances stronger than it came out of the fray preceding. Each majority must be larger than the last, and so the lists are padded, and the repeaters imported, and the lodging-houses colonized, and the organization, like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, though with less reason, swells and swells against the hour when it shall finally burst. The saloons were crowded; it was freely predicted that, the season being prosperous, votes would go at no lower than two dollars, and, in some quarters and some instances, as high as five dollars apiece.

There were some points, however, to which the tide of prosperity had not risen, and one of these was the high tenement of Katie Flanagan. The Irish girl returned there every night a little more discouraged than when she had left its precarious shelter in the morning, as doubtful as ever of Hermann's ability to support a wife, but more doubtful than ever of her own ability to help, should they marry, in the support of the home. At the shop, the work and the hours weighed more and more heavily upon her; they dragged at the heels of her mind when she endeavored to evade the insulting compliments of the callow youths and gray men that strolled by her counter, and they were impedimenta that made it daily more difficult to escape without offense the oily approaches of the dignified Mr. Porter.

"Sometimes," she said one evening, as she and Carrie sat over their meager supper, "I begin wonderin' again whether it's worth while runnin' away."

The striking shirtwaist-maker, who had spent a long day on picket-duty before a Waverley Place factory, looked up with round eyes calmly serious.

"That is what I am wondering all the time," she replied.

Katie made an impatient movement of her hand.

"Och, now," she generously protested, "it's all right for me to growl, because I've got a job. I don't count, an' it's just me habit. But you mustn't do it, me dear."

"I am not complaining; I am just honestly wondering, that's all."

"But if the worst came, you could go back to work, you know."

Carrie's face was all surprise.

"And turn traitor to my friends striking in my own and all the other factories?" she asked. "Oh, no; you would be the last to do it yourself, Katie. I would rather go on the street."

"You don't mean that, darlin'."

"I do mean it. If I went on the street, I would hurt myself, but if I did the other thing I would hurt all the other girls in the union."

She spoke quietly, but with infinite conviction, and Katie knew the forces that had brought about this state of mind. The widespread strike, though it still continued, was a failure. Public sentiment had never been aroused; the employers had succeeded in securing non-union labor, whose wages they were, even now, securely reducing, and whose privileges--granted to entice them to work--they were curbing; their political powers earned them the armed assistance of the law; and the strikers' ranks, though but little thinned by desertion, were steadily decreased by poverty, by the necessity of the girls to find other sorts of work, by illness, and, now that the cold autumn had set in, by death. Carrie was underfed, scantily clothed, penniless, and Katie, remembering these things, found herself without reply.

Had she needed further example of the pressure of conditions upon her kind, she could have found it in an incident in the shop on the day following. A bull-necked young man, with ruddy cheeks and a certainty of manner that spoke as loudly in his eyes and his scarf-pin as in his voice, sauntered up to the silk-stocking counter, where she happened then to be stationed, and began turning over the wares displayed.

"Have you been waited on?" inquired Katie.

"No," said the young man, looking at her steadily; "but I'd like you to wait on me. Are you busy?"

Katie said nothing, but stood there. The young man said nothing. Katie began to finger the boxes before her, but she felt that the young man was looking only at her.

"What quality would you like me to show you?" she asked.

"Well," parried the customer, "what quality do you like?"

She shot one glance at him: he was still looking at her.

"We have only the best at this counter," she answered, with a slight flush. "You'll be findin' the cheaper the sixth aisle to your right."

But the young man only laughed with unconcern, and continued to keep his gaze on her lowered Irish blue eyes.

"I can afford the best of everything," he said.

There was a pause. Katie raised her eyes and met his own without flinching. He smiled, but he was quite too satisfied with his own charms to notice that the salesgirl was not smiling.

"What time do you quit work?" he inquired.

"I never quit."

She said this as if she were closing a door, but the young man proceeded imperturbably to rattle at the knob.

"I thought," he said, "that you might like to eat a little dinner over at the 'York' with me this evening."

"Thanks," the girl answered, "but I do all me eatin' with me husband.--Will you, please, be tellin' me what sort of stockin's you want?"

The young man grinned. He seemed to enjoy what he took to be her playful repartee.

"Look here," he replied, "my wife is away back home, and I'm all alone over at that hotel."

He was leaning airily toward her, both hands on the counter. Katie, standing opposite, leaned toward him. She answered his smile, but he could not see that her smile was not of his own sort.

"Do you want to buy anything?" she demanded.

"Yes," said the customer, meeting her gaze again. "Will you sell?"

It was no unusual incident, no more unusual than the coming incident of Mirka's attack upon Hermann, but the girl had reached the end of her endurance, and what followed across that counter was not unlike what was to occur across Ludwig Schleger's bar. Katie opened her firm, pink palm and smacked the young bargain-seeker smartly across the mouth.

There was no immediate consequence. The aisle was too crowded to allow any but the nearest employees to witness the blow, and the crowd was too intent upon its own thousand errands to heed what happened before its eyes. One or two salesgirls stood still at their work, petrified by alarm. One or two customers hesitated and chuckled. And then, as the young man with a face of crimson shouldered his way into a hurried oblivion from which he never reappeared, the rush of business sent the clerks whirling about their own tasks and sent the crowd hurrying about its own purposes.

But Katie knew that more would follow, and that what would follow would be an interview with Mr. Porter. The shop's system of surveillance missed nothing, and within a half-hour the girl was standing in the dark office where she had first been hired.

In his likeness to a Sunday-school superintendent Mr. Porter was shocked and grieved to hear that any young lady in the Lennox store would strike a purchaser. In his likeness to a surgeon he promptly declared that there ought to be no issue short of expulsion. And in his own hidden character--deep in his own abominable character--he was wondering whether he could not turn this incident to the advantage that he had so long sought.

"The viper was insultin' me," said Katie.

"Are you quite sure of that, Miss Flanagan?"

"Sure I'm sure. Do you have to wait for a snake to bite you before you know what he's up to?"

"You could have called the floor-walker."

"And been fined for me pains, Mr. Porter."

Mr. Porter tapped his desk and kept his eyes on his fingers.

"I find," he said slowly, "that most men do not make approaches without some encouragement, in either word or manner, on the part of the girl. I also find that such occurrences as this are very rare in the experience of most of the girls in our employ."

He stopped, but Katie stood silent by the arm of the desk, her lips compressed, a frown between her arched black brows. He sent a crooked glance up at her, and then resumed:

"I scarcely ever have a case of this sort to deal with. I wonder why, if such things are done by customers, the other girls do not report them."

He stopped again, and this time Katie answered:

"I suppose they boss their own lives in their own way, Mr. Porter."

A faint spark of color shone in Mr. Porter's white cheek.

"I suppose they do," he answered, gently pulling at his side-whiskers, and peeping at his victim over the caressing hand. "In fact, between you and me, Miss Flanagan, I am told that some of them do that so well that they are practically independent of their wages in this store."

Again Katie failed to respond.

"Do you understand me, Miss Flanagan?"

Katie thought of her desperate days before she had found her present employment. She thought of Hermann and what seemed to be the sole chance of rising to a salary where marriage could be a practical possibility. She thought of Carrie's plight and of Carrie's dependence upon her.

"I do that, Mr. Porter," she answered.

He looked up squarely then, and she even managed to torture her face into an expression of roguery.

"Ah," said Mr. Porter, smiling a paternal smile. He reached out and patted her hand, and, though her soul revolted, she managed to keep her hand passive. "Now, my dear young lady, you are at last coming to your senses. You mustn't take life so seriously."

"I'll try not to, Mr. Porter."

"That's right; that's right. I ought to discharge you, I know. It may be difficult not to discharge you. But I will do this much: I will suspend judgment for a few days."

He looked at her fixedly. Her cold lips formed another phrase of thanks.

"And in the meantime," he continued, "you let me know of some evening when you can come out to a quiet corner where we can have supper together, and where we won't be wasting the firm's time. Then we'll talk this whole thing over, and I'll see what I can do."

The eyes of neither wavered.

"Thank you, Mr. Porter," said Katie again.

With that she left him, but she went away with the knowledge that her game of hide-and-seek was almost ended. Just when it would end was beyond all guessing, but that it would end soon and that it would end in her defiance of her superiors and her prompt expulsion seemed altogether certain. She reflected that the small delay which she had gained would profit but lightly those in whose interests she had attempted to truckle and palliate, and, when, that night, she told her experience to Carrie, her words fell upon ears that read into them a portentous meaning.