Part 7

"But why not?"--Celeste raised her heavy brows. "'e ees 'er sweed'eart."

"He is?" repeated Violet, who could not yet understand the masculine lover that would batten upon his conquest. "I notice he pretty nearly lives here, an' he never pays out a cent, an' never seems to work at anything, an' he always wears good clothes."

"My child, truly! That is the reason that I have tol' you: 'e ees 'er sweed'eart."

"Well, it's queer," said Violet, remembering another caller to whom, though he was a less frequent visitor, Rose was equally attentive. "I don't think he's half as nice as that fellow who comes here in a taxi--the one that always wears a dress-suit an' sits in the back parlor. He's a swell."

But at this Celeste grew enigmatic.

"Oh," she said, "that ees deeferent"--and would say no more.

Nevertheless, it happened, not long afterward, when the black Cassie was absent on her "evening out," that Violet, descending the back stair in unshod feet to steal from the ice-chest--as was her companions' custom--a quiet bottle of the beer that she had come to like, was brought to a palpitating stop by the sound, just then, of Rose's and Angel's voices from the kitchen but a few steps below her. The pair were plainly engaged in an important conversation, the woman hurried and frightened, the man cold and obdurate.

"Naw," said the Neapolitan; "I maka naw move out o' deesa house."

"But he's coming in now, I tell you," Rose almost supplicated. "He'll be in the back-parlor in half a minute, an' I've got to go in an' talk to him."

"Olla righta; you go; I go alonga you."

"You can't do that; you know you can't. You know how things are without my tellin' you. What makes you so stubborn all of a sudden?"

"I don' lika dees Meesta Wesley Dyker."

"That's no reason why you should double-cross me."

"'E's too mucha de fina gentleman."

"I don't care what he is; you ought to know what I am. Do you want to tear up your own meal-ticket and throw down your easy money?"

"Easy mon'? You maka de joke!"

The woman's voice noticeably changed.

"Do you mean you want some more coin?" she asked.

The Italian did not answer.

"Because I won't give it to you," Rose continued, anger darting into her still cautiously lowered voice. "I know what you're doing with it. I know you had a girl from a department store out at shows twice last week, an' the second time she had a new dress on."

Somewhere in the front of the house a door closed heavily.

"'E's comin'," the Italian coolly commented. "Do you wanta that I go along in with you?"

As quickly as it had entered, all the anger fled from Rose's voice, and Violet, accustomed to it in command or at satisfied ease, was amazed now to hear it swaying between terror and genuine affection.

"I didn't mean it!" Rose pleaded. "I didn't believe it when I heard it an' I don't believe it now, I know how much it costs a fellow to live. Here's another ten-spot. I--I--you know how I hate Dyker, and Angel, you know that I love you!"

The listener heard Angelelli rise and heard even his voice soften, though probably less with affection than with gratification.

"Now you talka lika de person witha gooda sense," he said. "Don' you listen to de beega lie no more. I lika you--nobody but only you. You are de gooda girl."

There was a whispered word more, and then the kitchen door was softly shut and Violet heard Rose, going into the next room, welcome that Wesley Dyker who, Violet had, to Celeste, so favorably compared with Angel.

The woman on the stairs hesitated. She wanted to pursue her eavesdropping, and she knew that she could regain her room, should the doorbell ring, before she was likely to be missed; but she was afraid that, in the maid's absence, Rose might return to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and discover her. Accordingly she waited the few minutes that were required for the first of such errands, and, those over, crept forward to the lighted keyhole, ready to retreat at the first intimation of danger.

She gave her eye precedence over her ear, and, as it chanced that Dyker was sitting directly in the limited shaft of her vision, she was enabled to get what was her first careful view of him.

A man but little beyond thirty, Wesley Dyker's face, which might once well have been handsome, was beginning to show that flaccid whiteness which must later light to red and glow to purple. What his mouth might have told, a crisp, short, brown mustache concealed, but the regularity of his other features lost much of its effect because of eyes that, though large and steel gray, were heavy-lidded and calculating. Nevertheless, Violet's estimate of the man was not without justification. He spoke easily and well in the voice of education; his excellently made evening clothes displayed a figure that had not yet lost its admirable lines, and even the face--to one that either had known it during its gradual changes, or to one that lacked a fund of experience for purposes of comparison--was not wanting in attraction.

To the sturdy Rose, whose hand he held and who was looking at him with what she patently believed to be a tender expression, he was speaking with a certain formal politeness that was novel in the ears of the listener.

"You think you can get it?" Rose was asking.

"I think that I have something more than a fighting chance," replied Dyker.

"What does O'Malley say?"

"He is at least as liberal in his promise to me as he is in his promise to the other man."

"And the big chief doesn't yip?"

"My dear Rose, you should know, by this time, enough of New York politics to realize that the first qualification of a big boss is to hold his tongue, and that the present incumbent, whatever his other shortcomings, can always keep quiet as long as he has no pen in his hand."

Rose freed her hand to pour the wine.

"May I smoke?" asked Dyker.

"You always ask me that, and you always know you can."

He bowed and, drawing a cigarette from a plain gun-metal case, lighted it.

"Of course," he pursued, "I expect to win--I always expect to win, because failure may fight its way to a perch on any man's banner, but it's sure to lodge on the standard of the man that sits and waits for it. But I can't be sure of O'Malley."

"I guess whatever headquarters orders will go with him, all right."

"On the surface, perhaps; but, if he wants to, he can have his own candidate run on an independent ticket, and then he can quietly knife me at the polls."

"Would he have the nerve?"

"It is precisely what he did election before last. I am sure of that, and yet nobody has ever been able to prove it. That is where I look for your help."

Rose took his hand again, and pressed it reassuringly.

"I always take care of my friends," she smiled, "and you sure have been good to me. Where do I come in on this game?"

"Just yet you don't have to come in at all. It may be that everything will be honest and above-board--I trust it will--and in that case you need not disturb yourself."

"But if it ain't?"

"If it isn't,"--he looked at her kindly, but keenly, from under his heavy lids--"I shall want you to let me know just as soon as O'Malley begins to make preparations for registering voters from this house."

Rose bent forward and kissed him lightly on his flaccid cheek.

"That's easy," she laughed.

"Perhaps, but if you have to go so far at first, you will have to go farther afterward."

"An' now?"

"Just now I want you to keep your ears open for gossip. You are in a position to hear a lot: in this house men talk that are dumb outside."

"Who are you thinkin' of?"

"Several people, friends of O'Malley's. There's one cheap little camp-follower who, I am told, gets around here rather frequently. I don't suppose that he's of enough importance to know much, but he would be worth watching."

"What's his name?"

Dyker filled Rose's glass, and poured more wine for himself.

"Angelelli," he answered.

From the darkened kitchen, Violet, her eye now fast to the keyhole, drew a short breath, and watched Rose as the sophisticated spectator watches an emotional actress when she approaches her "big scene." But Rose, still the primitive Teuton of the brewery-calendar, never quavered.

"Rafael Angelelli?" she inquired.

"I think so. He is a little Italian loafer with no work and plenty of money. You know him, of course?"

"Sure I know him. He's in an' out of here all the time. We call him 'Angel'."

"Hum. Well, there are angels and angels, so that name may fit him as well as any other. There may be nothing to it, but he does hang about O'Malley a good deal, and it might be worth your while to find out what, if anything, he knows."

"That's easy," purred Rose. "Here's success."

The pair clinked their glasses, and drained them.

"And--Rose?" began Dyker.

"Yes?"

"Neither this little fellow nor any of his crowd knows about--us?"

Rose's placid smile was eminently convincing.

"I guess I know my business," she said.

"I dare say you do. Only don't let him know that you know mine."

"Trust me for that, Wes' dear."

"Because, if O'Malley could get hold of it, he would have a rather formidable weapon."

"He doesn't know I ever set my lamps on you."

"Good," said Dyker; "and he mustn't know it for a good many months to come. Now, then, let's have just one pint more between us--only a pint--my dear--and----"

But the woman at the keyhole waited to hear no more.

IX

THE COURT OF A MERCHANT-PRINCE

When that injudicious grasping of the third-rail had snuffed out the low, but stubborn, flame that a foreman had known as "Number 12," and a few score of human beings had called Michael Flanagan, his wife, Bridget, had looked up from her washtub long enough to refuse the offer of a hundred dollars, made by the company's claim-adjuster as full payment for whatever inconvenience she might have been occasioned by her husband's demise. One of those very modern young lawyers, whose livelihood depends upon their study of the newspapers, and the speed of their feet, had arrived at the Flanagan tenement ahead of the adjuster. He had accepted a contingent fee of ten dollars, and thereafter, being defeated by the company's expert attorneys in a lower court, refused, as usual, to appeal unless the widow handed him a further amount of money that was wholly beyond her reach. So Irish-eyed Katie was put to work, as she should in any case have been put, and Mrs. Flanagan went on with her washing.

The girl's first position was in a second-hand clothing shop on Sixth Avenue, where she went to work at eight in the morning and quit at half-past ten at night. The stock-in-trade of this place was largely revived ball-gowns and opera cloaks, bought, for the most part, from women of so much means as to pretend, at least, that they never wore the same gown twice, and yet of too much thrift to give their discarded clothes to charity. Its patrons were persons that the original wearers of the gowns would have blushed to meet. And its proprietress was a little lynx-eyed, hook-nosed person whose sole object in life was to induce the former class to sell for less than they had intended and to persuade the latter class to buy for more than they could afford.

The virtue of this method she impressed, by precept and example, upon her six girl-clerks, and she raised their profits as they raised their prices of sale. She told, with a fine pride, how she had once so conducted a negotiation that a Riverside Drive husband had paid her nearly as much for a dress that he was buying for a Forty-seventh Street acquaintance as he had first paid for the same dress when it was made for his wife.

But, commissions to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Katie nor her companions could earn anything beyond a bare living wage. The lure of clothes was always before them; their work was the handling and the praising of beautiful fabrics beautifully arranged. They were told that they might themselves buy of these at what the proprietress called a mere nothing above the cost price, but what was really a considerable increase over it; they wanted to look their best among their friends, and their employer insisted that they look their best to her patrons; there was not one of the half-dozen clerks that was not continually from fifteen to a hundred dollars in her mistress's debt.

That Katie, like many another making the same fight, escaped further contamination, that the contrast between the oppression of the hook-nosed owner on the one hand and the apparent ease and luxury of her customers on the other, did not tempt her,--for opportunities were plenty,--from the station of clerk to purchaser, was due in part to her own sturdy character and to the accident of her own Celtic temper. Other girls there were who were not so destined, but Mrs. Flanagan's weary feet one day refused to support their possessor, and Katie, knowing well the need of ready money for the doctor and the druggist, neglected to purchase, even on credit, an expensive black walking-suit that was repeatedly called to her attention.

"Say, you'd look just grand in this," said the psittacidic proprietress, Mrs. Binks.

She held the dress extended, putting its best points to the light. And all the other clerks echoed:

"You'd look just grand in it, Miss Flanagan!"

"I would that," replied Katie, who was as taciturn to her employer as she was loquacious to everybody else.

"Why don't you take it?" asked Mrs. Binks.

"I don't just like it," lied Katie.

Mrs. Binks blinked her bead-like eyes. That the girl's reply could be true was inconceivable.

"Try it on," she suggested.

"Where's the use? I don't want it."

"Oh, try it on anyway."

"I'll be too busy, Mrs. Binks. The customers 're startin' to pour in this very minute."

"Then try it on at your lunch time. I'll leave it handy here, over this chair."

She did leave it there all day long. Katie, whose one dress was now, in spite of endless feminine make-shifts, beginning to show wear, had to go through her task with the baited hook constantly dangling before her. Nevertheless, when the long-delayed closing hour arrived, the suit was just where Mrs. Binks had left it. Katie carefully abstained from touching it; she would not even put it away.

"What's this?" asked the mildly surprised owner, as she stumbled over the garment. "I declare it's that handsome walking-suit I wanted you to have, Miss Flanagan."

Katie turned and regarded the neglected garment precisely as Mrs. Binks was regarding it.

"Well, well," she said, "and is it, now?"

Her mistress looked at her, again blinking suspiciously.

"Did you try it on?" she demanded.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't think I want it."

"It's a fine suit."

"It's grand."

"But you don't want it?"

"I don't think I do."

"I told you that you could have it for a third off."

"I know you did that, Mrs. Binks, and it's thank you I do for your kindness."

"Hum--hum. I'll take off a dollar more--for you."

"Thank you, no, Mrs. Binks. Good-night, Mrs. Binks."

This sort of thing went on, with variations, for three days, at the end of which time Mrs. Binks, as she would have phrased the occurrence, "came right out with it"; and for this ceremony she chose that morning hour when the other girls in the shop had the greatest amount of leisure to observe what happened.

"Miss Flanagan," said she, marching up to the thoroughly prepared Katie, and peering hard into the serene Irish eyes of her selected victim, "I like my clerks to look well."

"So I've been noticin'," said Katie.

"An' I don't like to speak about it when they don't," continued Mrs. Binks.

"You're just that tender-hearted!"

"But if you girls don't wear good clothes, my customers'll think I don't treat you right."

"How could they now, Mrs. Binks?"

"And," concluded Mrs. Binks, overlooking these interruptions in view of the crushing climax she was approaching, "as you've made up your mind not to take the hints I've been givin' you, or the fine offers I've made you, I've got to say it plainly that you're looking too shabby to work any more for me."

Katie smiled her warmest smile.

"Mrs. Binks," she replied, resorting again to prevarication, and presenting the greedily seized money that she still owed her employer, "I'd begun to be afraid that maybe them was your feelin's, an' so yesterd'y at lunch time I bought me the exact duplicate of that walking-suit you've been tryin' to thrust upon me--only I got it next door an' for half your price."

Saying this she had walked to the shallow closet in the fitting-room, taken down her hat and coat, put them on, sung "Good-by" to her consternated fellow-workers, and strolled away forever from that place of employment. She went smiling, but, instead of the curt word that she generally employed, she administered a hand-slap with her open palm to a stranger that accosted her on her journey homeward.

She got work, after some searching, in a candy shop on Eighth Street, but this she had to relinquish when her mother's speedy illness developed into a brief and fatal disease. It was not until the last nursing, relieved by Hermann's assistance, and the funeral were over, that she could again think of labor, and then it was only to get, in a Fourth Street necktie factory, a small position that she lost because she had the effrontery to resent the rather frank overtures of the foreman.

Now, although she had told her cheerful lover nothing about it, she had come to the last ditch. She had been deceived by advertisements, cheated by employment agencies, denied work by the superintendents of scores of shops and manufactories. She was not a skilled laborer, and she had, at first, nothing in the matter of recommendation; she belonged to no trade union; the rent for her little room was dangerously overdue; so, also, were the bills of the baker and the milk dealer upon whom alone she was depending for food; all that she could pledge was in pawn, and, with the soles of her shoes worn through almost to her feet, the elaborate mourning costume that she had been unable to resist was her only badge of material prosperity.

Two avenues of escape were open, were even persistently presented, yet she would regard neither. To take what Hermann pleaded with her to accept, though her hungry heart and her underfed body cried out for it, would have been, she felt well assured, unfairly to handicap her best friend, and, as for turning into that other way--a way into which the streets on every hand seemed so easily to open, she was too wise to consider.

"No thanks," she answered in her soul, as she walked by the leering satyrs, with her black head erect and her lips compressed--"not yet, if you please: not yet, nor never, I think, for starvin' seems some easier and a deal quicker, too."

She had to repeat the words pretty often, for they had come to be a sort of incantation, almost a pious ejaculation, against the enemy, and, as her poverty grew and her chances decreased in inverse ratio, the enemy, like vultures flocking to the fatally wounded, seemed startlingly to increase in force. At first it was a well-dressed corps strayed from Broadway or the Avenue; then it was the bank-clerk hurrying to work and the master mechanic hurrying from it; but finally, so plain are the signs of distress shown upon our faces by the selves that are besieged, it had become the professionally employing, professedly unemployed.

Yet at every dawn she renewed her quest, with a glass of blue milk and a bite of bread for breakfast. Every day and all day she tramped the long, aching streets. And every night, despairing but resolute, she came home for her supper of bread and milk and for the sleep of the hungry and distressed.

It was now a Thursday morning. The milkman had pounded at her door and, receiving no answer, had left no milk. Still gnawing her crust, Katie slunk out of the tenement, and, at the step, was waylaid by the rent-collector, a little man with a sharp, white face that told plainly of his own struggle. He blocked the exit.

"Good-day to you, Miss Flanagan," he said, touching his dirty cap.

"Good-mornin', Mr. Woods," she answered, aware that the hour for the last engagement was approaching.

The man was one whose business forced him to mince nothing.

"I was comin' up to git yer rent," he continued. "It's three weeks overdue."

"I'm afraid I'll have to be askin' you to let it run a bit longer," said Katie, and her voice, in spite of all resolution, trembled.

"But I've been an' done that twice fer you, Miss Flanagan. The boss is after me as hard as I'm after you--an' harder."

"I know it. I--you can't stand him off another week, Mr. Woods?"

"Nix on the stand-off, miss."

"You see, I'm--I'm out of a job."

"I know that, but then you've been out o' one fer a good while now."

"Yes, only I rather expect--indeed, I've been promised one beginnin' to-morrow."

The little man coughed behind a dirty hand.

"That's Friday?" he asked.

"It is that."

"Well, ain't you got your dates mixed? You told me last week you had a job promised for that Friday."

Katie surprised even herself: she laughed.

"So I did!" she said. "An' of course I was lyin' an' of course you knowed it. Oh, well, Woods, man, hold 'em off for forty-eight hours, an' if I don't get work then, I'll--well, I won't bother you no more."

In the shadowy hallway, she felt his eyes studying her less with evil than with wonder.

"There ain't many girls with your looks, Miss Flanagan, as'd be out of a job as long as you've been."

Katie shrugged her shoulders: she was beyond resentment.

"The more pity to 'em," she said.

"Not many," repeated Mr. Woods.

There was an awkward silence. The collector paused because he wanted her fully to weigh an implication that he honestly considered to contain sound advice, and Katie refrained from further comment for the excellent reason that she had nothing to say. It was Woods that at last took up the broken thread.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Miss Flanagan," he not unkindly concluded; "I'll hold 'em off till to-morrow evenin', an' if by then you can pay me a chunk on account, it'll be all right; if you can't----"

He stood aside, and Katie clapped him warmly on the shoulder.

"You're doin' your best, Woods," she said, "an' I thank you for it. I'll get the job someways, but not the way you think, an'--an' I thank you."

Only half-way to the corner she met the girl that lived across the hall from her, Carrie Berkowicz, a homely, round-cheeked, brown-haired Lithuanian Jewess, who worked in a shirtwaist factory on Tenth Street.

"Say, Katie"--Carrie prided herself on her colloquial English, as she learned it in the night-classes in the Rand School--"were you still looking for a job?"

Katie nodded.

"Well, say, I just this minute passed Emma Schrem, an' she says Cora Costigan is quitting her job at the Lennox store to-day to be married to-morrow. Why don't you pull up there and try for it?"

Try for it? Katie could scarcely stop to thank her rescuer before she had turned northward. There was no longer left her even the five cents necessary for carfare, and, though she was faint with hunger and shaking with fear lest her tardiness should lose her this slim opportunity, she was forced to walk. Facing a fine rain blown in from the Sound, she walked up Second Avenue, and finally, turning westward to the shopping quarter now crowded with salesgirls on their hurried way to work, she entered, by the dark employés' door, the large department-store of Joshua N. Lennox, merchant and philanthropist.