Part 4

In an hour he was back, knowing that the Mayor had gone. He sent in for Mr. McDevitt. The secretary appeared.

"Did he say he'd come?" asked H. Rutgers, impetuously.

"I am sorry to say the Mayor has a previous engagement that makes it absolutely impossible for him to be present at your dinner. I've got a letter of regret."

"They'll be awfully disappointed, too. I'll get the blame, of course. _Of_ course!" Mr. Rutgers spoke with a sort of bitter gloom, spiced with vindictiveness.

"Here it is. I had him sign it. I wrote it. It's one of those letters," went on the secretary, inflated with the pride of authorship, "that can be read at any meeting. It contains a dissertation on the beneficent influence of advertising, strengthened by citations from Epictetus, Buddha, George Francis Train, and other great moral teachers of this administration."

"Thank you very much. I appreciate it. But, say, what's the matter with you coming in his place? I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I have a hunch that when it comes to slinging after-dinner oratory you'd do a great deal better."

"Oh," said McDevitt, with a loyal shake of negation and a smile of assent. "No, I couldn't."

"I'm sure--"

"And then I'm going to Philadelphia on Saturday morning to stay over Sunday. I wish you'd asked me earlier."

"So do I," murmured H. Rutgers, with conviction and despair judiciously admixed.

The secretary had meant to quiz H. Rutgers about the association, but H. Rutgers's manner and words disarmed suspicion. It was not that H. Rutgers always bluffed, but that he always bluffed as he did, that makes his subsequent career one of the most interesting chapters of our political history.

"And here's the permit," said the secretary.

H. Rutgers, without looking at it, put it in his pocket as if it were all a matter of course. It strengthened the secretary's belief that non-suspiciousness was justified.

"Thanks, very much," said H. Rutgers. "I am, I still repeat, very sorry that neither you nor the Mayor can come." He paid to the Mayor's eloquent secretary the tribute of a military salute and left the room.

III

The union of the sandwich-men was an assured success. Victory had come to H. Rutgers by the intelligent use of brains. The possession of brains is one of the facts that can always be confirmed at the source.

Next he arranged for the band. He told the band-master what he wished the band to do. The band-master thereupon told him the price.

"Friend," said H. Rutgers, pleasantly, "I do not deal in dreams either as buyer or seller. That's the asking price. Now, how much will you take?" Not having any money, Hendrik added, impressively, "Cash!"

The band-master, being a native-born, repeated the price--unchanged. But he was no match for H. Rutgers, who took a card from his pocket, looked at what the band-master imagined was a list of addresses of other bands, and then said, "Let me see; from here to--" He pulled out his watch and muttered to himself, but audible by the band-master, "It will take me half an hour or more."

H. Rutgers closed his watch with a sharp and angry snap and then determinedly named a sum exactly two-thirds of what the band-master had fixed as the irreducible minimum. It was more than Hendrik could possibly pay.

The band-master shook his head, so H. Rutgers said, irascibly:

"For Heaven's sake, quit talking. I'm nearly crazy with the arrangements. Do you think you're the only band in New York or that I never hired one before? Here's the Mayor's permit." He showed it to the musical director, who was thereby enabled to see _National Street Advertising Men's Association_, and went on: "Now be at Grand Central Station, Lexington Avenue entrance, at 3.45 Saturday afternoon. The train gets in at 4. I'll be there before you are. We'll go from the depot to Weinpusslacher's for dinner."

"Of course, we get our dinners," said the band-master in the tone of voice of a man who has surrendered, but denies it to the reporters.

"Yes. You'll be there sure?"

"Yes. But, say, we ought to get--"

"Not a damned cent more," said H. Rutgers, pugnaciously, in order to forestall requests for part payment in advance.

"I wasn't going to ask you for more money, but for a few--"

"Then why waste my time? Don't fail me!"

Then Hendrik Rutgers put the finishing touches on the work of organization. He rented offices in the Allied Arts Building, sent a sign-painter to decorate the ground-glass doors, and ordered some official stationery in a rush. He promised the agent to return with the president and sign the lease.

Where everybody distrusts everybody else there is nothing like promising to sign documents!

He bought some office furniture on exactly the same plan.

On Friday night the unionized sandwich-men took their signs and boards to the trysting-place, Twenty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, to have new advertisements of Hendrik's composition painted thereon. The boards did not belong to the members, but in a good cause all property is the cause's. Each of the original fourteen brought recruits. The street was almost blocked. The two sign-painters worked like nine beavers, and Hendrik and the young man in steel-rimmed spectacles helped. When the clamor became threatening Hendrik counted his men twice, aloud. There were eighty-four of them. They knew it was eighty-four, having heard him say it, as he intended they should. He then took them to the corner boozery.

He had only two dollars. There were eighty-four thirsty. Therefore, "Eighty beers!" he yelled, majestically.

"_Eighty-four!_" shouted eighty-four voices.

"That's twenty cents more," said Hendrik to himself in the plain hearing of the hitherto distrustful bartender. He had a small green roll in his left hand consisting of two dollars and two clippings. With his right he loudly planked down two large dimes on the counter and shoved them toward the bartender, who took them while Hendrik began to count his greenbacks.

The bartender saw the exact change and began to draw beer. He even yelled for assistance.

Hendrik knew better than to enforce discipline now, but he could not officially countenance disorder.

"Give the other fellows a chance," he said, paternally, to those near by. Then he saw the rear entrance. It inspired him.

He waited until there were about sixty glasses on the bar. Then he yelled in the direction of the front door: "Come in, boys! Everybody gets one!"

The tidal-wave carried him and twenty others to the end of the room. But while the twenty others fought to get back to the schooners, he intelligently went out by the back door.

The police reserves were called. They responded. Then six ambulances.

Those who survived sought Hendrik to complain, but he beat them to it by scolding them angrily. He all but licked them on the spot, so that they forgot their grievance in their haste to defend themselves. He then divided them into squads of five and took them to another saloon--one squad and a quarter of a dollar at a time. He only used one dollar and fifty cents cash that way.

He then promised all of them forty beers a day beginning on Monday. He told them to get recruits, who would not be admitted to the union, but could have the privilege of parading. They must be thirsty men and look it. They would receive two beers apiece.

On Saturday morning there was not a sandwich-man to be seen at work in Greater New York.

At noon the city editors of all the metropolitan dailies received neatly typewritten notices that the sandwich-men had formed a union and would "peacefully strive for higher wages, shorter hours, and reduced peregrinations. The sandwich-men had no desire to precipitate another internecine strife between Labor and Capital." They were "willing to submit their differences to a board of arbitration consisting of John D. Rockefeller, Charles F. Murphy, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Hendrik Rutgers."

These notices were one and all thrown into waste-paper baskets as cheap humor--to be dug up later and used.

IV

On Saturday afternoon at 3.35 the Harlem contingent, carrying their armor under one arm, their tickets given into the conductor's own hand by the lieutenant, Fleming, entrained at the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

Ten minutes later they arrived at the Grand Central Station. And as the first pair of sandwiches descended, the waiting band burst into a joyous welcome.

The exits were crowded. Martial music and parading men always draw crowds. So long as there is no charge, gaping audiences automatically supply themselves in New York.

And so, along Forty-second Street, following the musicians, himself followed by his starving sandwiches, Hendrik Rutgers walked into Fifth Avenue and into history at one and the same time.

The procession turned southward. The band played Chopin's "Funeral March." Hendrik Rutgers at the head of his pauperized cohorts, anger in his heart, light in his soul, defiance in his eyes, marched down Fifth Avenue with an effect as of a man in armor treading on prostrate millionaires as over so many railroad-ties. Men who had money in their pockets for a minute felt the wind squeezed out of them by his foot. And as they saw the led sandwiches they looked thoughtful.

The first of Rutgers's infantry was an old man. His long, gray beard was dirty and ragged, like his clothes and the rest of him. In his eyes you saw the unutterable weariness of a man who has lived fifty suffering years too long. Underneath his eyes were dark rings; from the sidewalk his sockets looked finger-deep. On his cheeks was the pallor of death.

H. Rutgers, fighting for fairness and justice, had justly picked out the old fellow to be his Exhibit "A." Society must see what it did to human beings! Therefore the old man slid one foot along the asphalt and let the other follow it, with a spent, mechanical movement, as an engine, after the power is turned off, keeps on going from the momentum of years. The legs seemed to move from force of habit--a corpse on foot, with a concealed galvanic battery somewhere.

And on the breastplate and backplate of this armored corpse, printed in funereal black, beautiful women and intellectual men on Fifth Avenue, where the unforgivable crime is to be poor and show it, read:

Yesterday I walked 19 miles.

They paid me 35 cents cash

And 2 meal tickets.

He had been well coached as to his gait and, thrilled by the success he was making, the old chap became an artist and limped worse.

Behind him was our friend Mulligan, pale, thin to emaciation. He looked famished. It came from the possession of a tapeworm, as before stated. To him Hendrik Rutgers had given this standard to bear:

They call us Sandwich-men because:

We don't know what a Square Meal is!

He was followed by the raggedest human being that Anthony Comstock ever allowed to exhibit himself in public. On his boards the Fifth Avenue crowd on this fair spring day saw this:

Do you thank God you are alive?

So do we!

And notice the DIFFERENCE!

The shabby-genteel man, ex-Republican, with steel-rimmed spectacles, who now looked for all the world like a bookkeeper out of a job, had this:

I am the Result.

The Cause was not Drink.

It was HUNGER.

A young fellow who looked so much as if he had just left a hospital that thousands of spectators imagined they smelled iodoform carried this:

All men must die.

Knowing this, WE HOPE!

An octogenarian, not over four and one-half feet tall, very frail-looking, was next. To him H. Rutgers had assigned this banner:

If Society won't feed us

We'll feed the Society of Worms--

POTTER'S FIELD

Under a big foot--property of a popular chiropodist on lower Broadway; terms twenty-five cents per, five for a dollar--was this:

We are the World's Unfortunates:

BORN TO BE KICKED!

Then followed a haggard-faced man who looked like an exaggerated picture of poverty. He carried:

There are poorer than we.

HELP THEM!

A man with the stride of a conqueror bore a banner:

AND STILL WE BELIEVE IN GOD!

The crowd looked puzzled. What the dickens did believing in God have to do with anything? To end the bother of thinking they looked at the next one.

Look at Fifth Avenue!

WHY?

See what we are!

WHY?

They obeyed. They saw Fifth Avenue. Why? They did not know why. And then they saw what the sandwich-men were. And they wondered why the sandwich-men asked why. Why not? Pshaw! The placard that followed was:

If you wish to see

One hundred starving men

Follow us.

YOU WILL REMEMBER IT!

Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin: "Haven't I seen my husband?"

Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex; anybody could see they had no money!

And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the machines and the horses, slouched on--almost rubbing valuable varnish on automobiles and carriages, careless beasts!

Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to Chopin's dirge--_slowly! slowly!_--until all Fifth Avenue was a vast funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly! And with the funereal gait other changes came--in the grimace of the over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in rain, shine, or snow.

"What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people.

From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.

They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed, clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what; the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants, who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the eyes of animals.

And the sexless marchers saw also healthy American girls with delicate features and dreadful, price-quoting eyes, and faces not clean and healthy, but dead-white and dead-crimson; they saw not women's faces, but marble tombstones on which the epitaphs were scarlet letters that told what the price was, so that the professional prostitutes no longer wasted time advertising with the same ink, but used downcast eyes as bait.

There was a gap of about thirty feet between the first detachment of Rutgers's marching advertisements and the next. The spectators, seeking explanations, saw a cadaverous-looking man, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, white-lipped, who stepped as though the avenue were full of puddles of nitroglycerine--uncertainly, fearfully! And this death-on-foot carried a white-cloth board black-bordered like a funeral-card. And thereon money-makers and money-spenders, clubmen and waiters, shop-girls and millionairesses--all Fifth Avenue!--saw this:

HAIL, NEW YORK!

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE

SALUTE YOU!

There followed another gap of thirty feet, so that the valedictorian of the doomed might be seen of all. Then came eighty-odd sandwich-bearers, appositely legended. From time to time the valedictorian would stagger as you have seen horses do on their last trip to the glue-factory. Whereupon a couple of the non-descripts behind him would shuffle up and endeavor to uphold him. And the others slouched on, deep-eyed, gaunt, famine-stricken, rum-ravaged, disease-smitten--ex-bookkeepers, and superannuated mechanics, and disgraced yeggmen, and former merchants--and former men, too!

At Thirty-ninth Street a young woman dressed richly but in perfect taste stood on the very corner. Her hair had glints of sunshine and her eyes were like twin heavens, clean, and clear, and blue, and infinitely deep. And the Madonna face saw the Death face, looked at the thing that had been a man, and read his salutation. And in one of the pauses of the "Funeral March" a thousand people heard her laugh, and heard her exclaim with a contagious relish, spiced with undisguised admiration:

"_If that ain't the limit!_"

New York had spoken!

And the chauffeurs near her laughed in sympathy. And gray heads stuck out of limousine windows, and millionaires and their female stood up in their snail-moving touring-cars, and top-hatted coachmen turned impassive heads on neck-hinges long since rusted with the arrogance of menials. And upon their faces and along the ranks that lined both sides of the great avenue a slow grin spread--uncertain, hesitating, dubious! The great American sense of humor was trying to assert itself. Hendrik's joke was not labeled "Joke" plainly enough. Otherwise the spectators would have shown much earlier their ability to laugh at death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, despair--anything, so long as it was the death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, and despair of others.

But at Tiffany's corner the traffic policeman stopped the leader of the band; and he stopped the band; and the band stopped Rutgers; and Rutgers stopped his army; and that stopped all traffic on the Avenue up to Forty-second Street.

Hendrik Rutgers hurried forward and explained, calmly: "Here, officer. I am the secretary of the National Street Advertising Men's Association. We have a permit from the Mayor. Here it is."

"Oh, advertising! I see!" said the policeman, and smiled appreciatively. He had feared they might be starving men.

"Yes," said H. Rutgers, quite loudly, "advertising the fact that a man out of a job in New York, who is too proud to beg and too honest to steal, has to become a sandwich-man and make from twenty-five to forty-five cents for ten hours work--not in China or Mexico, but in New York, to-day; men who are willing to work, but are old or sickly or have no regular trade. You know how the Mayor feels about the rights of citizens who are not rich and the duty of paid officials of this city. He and I are opposed to too much law in the way of clubs. So kindly pass the word down the line, officer."

The big traffic policeman, far more impressed by the delivery than by the speech itself, touched his hand to his cap so very respectfully that the grinning crowd at once became serious. Each woman turned on her neighbor and frowned furiously the unuttered scolding for the other's unseemly levity.

"What does it mean?" asked hundreds. All looked toward Hendrik Rutgers for explanation, for official permission to laugh at a spectacle that was not without humorous suggestions. But he kept them guessing. This is called knowledge of stage effects; also psychological insight; also cheap politics. Historians even refer to it as statesmanship.

Something that makes one hundred thousand New-Yorkers gasp and stare is not necessarily news; an ingenius street-sign or a five-dollar-a-day Steeple Jack could do it. But that not one of one hundred thousand omniscient New-Yorkers knew whether to laugh, to curse, or to weep at what they saw made that sight very decidedly "news." An interrogation marker in one hundred thousand otherwise empty heads loomed gigantic before the hair-trigger minds of the city editors. They sent their star men to get answers to the multitudinous question; and, if possible, also the facts.

Just south of Thirty-fourth Street the _Herald_, _Times_, _Sun_, and _Evening Journal_ reporters overtook H. Rutgers. He made the procession halt. That again made all Fifth Avenue halt. He waited until all the reporters were near him, and then he spoke very slowly, for he guessed that shorthand and literature do not necessarily coexist.

"The sandwich-men have formed a union. It includes sandwich-men from the five boroughs. We are going to have an annual dinner at six o clock--we are not fashionable folk, you know. There will be speeches. Did you ask why we should have a union? I'll tell you why: because we didn't have one; because employers have not thought of us as human beings, but as human derelicts. A starving man who doesn't want to steal and is ashamed to beg will sandwich for thirty cents a day ten hours; and he can't always collect his wages. And who is going to fight for him? When you think of the importance of all advertising, do you consider the peculiar picturesqueness of advertising through sandwiches? In the Middle Ages they had their heralds and their pursuivants--the sandwich-men of feudalism; and later the town criers; and later still, _us_. Do you know in what esteem sandwich-men are held in the south of France and in the Orient? Did you know that sandwich-men take the place of bells on Good Friday in Moldavia? Do you know why there are no commercial sandwich-men in Russia or in Spain? Did you ever read what Confucius wrote about 'Those men who with letters on their garments dispel the ignorance of buyers,' and a lot more? Did you? Did any clergyman ever tell you that sandwich-men are, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alluded to twice in the Old and five times in the New Testament? Don't you think that as intelligent investigators of industrial conditions and of the submerged tenth it would be worth your time to come to our annual dinner and hear our version of it? And also see how starving men eat the first square meal of the year?"

Of course it was pure inspiration and, as such, impressive.

"Yes, sir," respectfully replied the _Evening Journal_ man--a tall, dark chap with gold-rimmed spectacles and a friendly smile. "What's the name of the restaurant?"

"Caspar Weinpusslacher's Colossal Restaurant," said H. Rutgers.

"Spell it!" chorused the reporters; and H. Rutgers did, slowly and patiently. At once the _Evening Journalist_ rushed on to telephone the caption of a story to his paper. That would enable the office to get out an extra; after which would come another edition with the story itself. He was the best head-line reporter in all New York.

Long before the National Street Advertising Men's Association reached the Colossal Restaurant, Caspar Weinpusslacher converted himself into a Teutonic hurricane and changed thirty short tables into three, long ones. On his lips was a smile, and in his heart a hope that glowed like an incandescent twenty-dollar gold piece, for Max Onthemaker had rushed in breathlessly and gasped:

"He _is_ a smart feller, all right. What?" And he gave an _Evening Journal_ to Caspar Weinpusslacher, wherein he read this:

SANDWICH PARADE

PATHETIC PROTEST AGAINST INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

PAUPERS WHO WILL NEITHER STEAL NOR BEG FORCED BY SOCIETY TO STARVE

SANDWICH WAGES, TWO CENTS AN HOUR

MEN ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE NEW YORK

The Sandwich-men's Union will hold their annual meeting at Weinpusslacher's Colossal Restaurant.

They have been saving up for this, their one square meal this year.

They are paid from twenty to forty cents a day and walk from fifteen to thirty miles in the ten hours.

Did you know that twice in the Old and five times in the New Testament mention is made of the sandwich-men?

Do you know why Catholic Spain and anti-Semitic Russia alike permit no sandwich-men to ply their time-honored occupation within their confines?

There the article abruptly ended.