Part 13

They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles, cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless, their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:

"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."

Dyker knew the place by reputation. He had always scorned it for its own sake, and now he had come to hate it for Marian's. For want of a better term, it may be repeated that he was in love with Marian. Moreover, he wished the assistance that an early marriage with the daughter of a wealthy department-store owner would give him in the coming campaign. And, finally, his peculiar legal activities were already well enough known on the East Side to make it probable that any young woman entering the settlement would speedily learn of them.

After the night of the opera his cooler reflection had rejected Marian's plan of joining the Rivington Street colony as a fervently girlish dream destined to fade before the reality of action. He had decided that the best way to aid its dissipation was no longer to combat it, and he had even, during the months that had followed, seen Marian but rarely, and never alone. Occupied with politics and knowing the tactical value of restraint, he had not so much as pressed his wooing. He had relied upon what he chose to describe as his sweetheart's basic commonsense to work out their common salvation, and had decided that, this commonsense being what he esteemed it, Marian was a woman more likely to be won by a Fabian campaign than by a Varric attack.

The point wherein these calculations erred was their underestimation of the momentum of a girlish impulse. That method of consideration which makes one slow to reach convictions works beyond the convictions and retards one from action upon them, once they are achieved, but the impulsive mind that bolts a creed unmasticated straightway drives its owner, in the creed's behalf, to the thumbscrews or the wrack. It is from the pods of half-baked opinions that there is shaken the seed of the church: Marian meant to keep to her purpose.

Perhaps Wesley's silence and the subtle sense of pique that it awakened played a part in this; perhaps the purpose was self-sufficient; but, in either case, Marian missed scarcely an evening at the settlement. Two of her former classmates were knee-deep in the work there, and what she saw and what they told her served only to confirm her. It thus happened that, anxious again to see him alone, and more anxious to let him know the endurance of her resolution, she had, on this evening, telephoned on the chance of finding him late at his office.

"Good heavens!" he gasped as she met him at the settlement's door. "What on earth are you doing in this part of town at this hour of the night? Let me 'phone for a taxi."

What, as a matter of fact, she had been doing was to listen to slim little Luigi Malatesta and fat little Morris Binderwitz respectively attacking and defending the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a greater American than George Washington; but what she thought she had been doing was assisting in raising the lower half of society. Under this impression, her fine brown eyes shone with the consciousness of moral rectitude, her mouth was even more than usually firm, and her head even more than usually like some delicate cameo.

"One thing at a time, please," she imperturbably answered. "First, no taxicab. It isn't far to Second Avenue, which is quiet enough, and I want to walk for a few blocks."

She took the arm that he grimly offered, and he began to break his way through the noisy crowd under the flaring gasoline lamps of the push-carts. Coherent conversation was at first impossible, but Dyker felt a glow of pride as, with her fingers closed in tight trust upon him, he shouldered a passage for her, and Marian herself was not insusceptible to the thrill inherent in the situation. Nevertheless, the girl, as soon as they had turned northward, reverted to her former attitude; and the man, knowing well that all this meant that she was still determined upon a course necessarily delaying his wooing and perhaps resulting in his discovery, frankly resumed his opposition. He did more and worse: he swept aside all his method of silence, all his plans of conquest through non-resistance.

"Now," he said, continuing their interrupted talk, "I should really like to know what you, of all people in the world, were doing on Rivington Street."

"I was there," she announced serenely, "because I have made up my mind that it is I, of all people in the world, who ought to be there."

"Marian,"--he almost stopped as he said it--"are you really in earnest about this fancy? Do you honestly mean that you are seriously considering any such chimerical course?"

He had, naturally, chosen precisely the tone that, were any additional incentive required, would have compelled her to resolution. Her mind, as it chanced, was, however, made up, and what he now said served only to turn her toward that feminine logic which assumes as done that which is determined.

"I am past consideration," she said. "I have already virtually begun."

"Marian! You're joking."

"I am simply stating a fact. Why do you suppose I have been staying in town this summer? I begin my real work at the settlement with the first of next week."

Her classmates in Rivington Street, could they have heard this, would have been pleased, but they would also have been surprised. Nevertheless, she at once mentally decided to make good her declaration.

In the darkness Dyker bit the lip that, under his short, crisp mustache, trembled with vexation.

"You really mean that?"

She bowed a brief assent.

"Then what, if you please, do you propose to do when you get there?"

As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain.

"You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you ought to know how the girls--hundreds and hundreds of them--are every week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to stop them."

It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of action and not enough to prove how little individual action individually directed can be worth.

For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would not admit them.

"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.