Part 8

A dozen quick inquiries rushed her, wet and weary, but flushed by her walk and radiant with the excitement of the race, into the presence of the frock-coated, pale-faced, suave-mouthed Mr. Porter, the tall, thin man, with the precision of a surgeon and the gravity of a Sunday-school superintendent, to whose attention, it appeared, such pleas as hers must be brought. Mr. Porter, who had gray side-whiskers, which he stroked with white hands, listened in judicial calm to what she had to say.

"Just fill out this application-blank," he remarked as, breathless, Katie ended her little speech.

They were in a dim, bare office under the street, the man at a roll-top desk lighted by a green-shaded incandescent lamp, the girl standing beside him. Mr. Porter indicated a writing-shelf along the opposite wall, where Katie found a pile of the blanks, and pen and ink. While she struggled with the task assigned her, Mr. Porter verified, by brief, sharp inquiries through a telephone, her statement of the approaching marriage of Miss Cora Costigan.

Katie, meanwhile, was giving her age, her parentage, her birthplace, the name of the firm that had last employed her--she mentioned the candy-shop for that,--was cheerfully agreeing to join the "Employés' Mutual Benefit Association," and was putting a "Yes," which she intended promptly to forget, to the question that asked her to become a spy on her co-workers: "If you saw a fellow-employé doing anything detrimental to the interests of the firm, would you consider it your duty to report the same?" It was only at one of the last questions that she hesitated.

"Please what does that mean?" she asked.

Mr. Porter deigned to walk across the room and, close to her shoulder, examined the question. It was the simple one: "Do you live with your parents?"

"That," said Mr. Porter, "is inserted because the firm wishes to have only nice girls here, and those with good home influences are considered--most trustworthy."

Mr. Porter had the type of emotionless eyes that can say one sort of thing far better than the eyes of more temperamental people, and he now met Katie's steady gaze with a stare of considerable significance.

Katie was rather sure that she understood.

"So that," she said, "if I didn't live with my people, I couldn't have the job?"

"So that," Mr. Porter corrected, "if a girl does get a position and lives with her family, she will be better cared for, and we will know that she is safe at home evenings."

Katie hesitated no longer. She took the pen and, opposite the query, wrote a quick "Yes." To be sure she was, on that account, obliged to invent the kind of work done by her father and the amount of the family wage; but she so needed the position that her active wit at once supplied the answers. More or less truthfully, she put a word in reply to the remaining questions, signed her name, and wrote her address.

Mr. Porter took the paper in his white fingers, read it slowly, folded it, indorsed it with several hieroglyphics, and placed it in a pigeon-hole.

"I am filing this with our other applications," he said. "As soon as your name is reached, I will see that you are notified."

Katie's jaw dropped.

"But I thought," she began, "I thought I was to get the job now. I--isn't Cora leavin', thin, after all?"

"Miss Costigan is leaving us, I understand," said Mr. Porter, stroking his whiskers; "but there are others--nearly a hundred--on the list ahead of you."

Katie was hungry, and hunger finds it hard to think of justice. She had borne all that she could bear. The waiting, the walking, the hope and the hopelessness had gnawed the string of her courage. Something snapped inside of her, and she began to sob with Irish unrestraint.

Mr. Porter was embarrassed. He frequently had to deal harshly with other employés of his philanthropic employer--it was, in fact, upon the performance of such duties that his living almost depended--but he did not like to have tears shed in his office: it did not look well for the reputation of the establishment.

"My dear Miss--Miss Flanagan," said he, first consulting the application-blank for the forgotten name, and putting one of his white hands toward the face now hidden in a crumpled handkerchief.

"You mustn't--really, you must not!"

"But everything depends on me gettin' this job!" sobbed Katie in an Irish wail. "The rent's due; me family's all sick; the milkman won't leave no more milk, an' I've eaten nothin' for Heaven knows how long!"

In a rush of words her story, including that of her resurrected father, leaped from her. What effect it would have had upon Mr. Porter had it been calmly told is beyond guessing; but it was told by no means calmly, and Katie's voice rose to a pitch that forced him to surrender out of mere fear of a prolonged scene. Grudgingly, but unconditionally, he laid down his arms. He took the telephone and called again Miss Isaacs, the buyer of the women's hosiery department, which Miss Costigan was to leave on the following day, told as much of Katie's story as he thought necessary, and obtained consent to a trial of the girl. He informed Katie that she might take, on the next morning, the place to be vacated by Miss Costigan, but he took care to impress upon her mind the fact that he was doing her an exceptional favor, which she was not to mention to her friends, who might try to profit by her unusual experience.

Katie was on the point of calling all the saints to bless him when she bethought her of a practical inquiry theretofore, in her eagerness to secure any sort of work, neglected.

"An' what's the pay?" she inquired.

"You will receive," replied Mr. Porter in the tones in which his employer announced the gift of a small fortune to a large college, "four dollars and fifty cents a week."

Katie forgot the saints.

"Four--" she began. "But, Mr. Porter," she concluded, "will you be tellin' me how I'm to be livin' on all that?"

Mr. Porter's calm eyes came again into significant play.

"You have said in your application, you may recall," he dryly remarked, as he reached for that document, "you have said that you lived with your father."

For a moment her glance probed his.

"But for all that," she said, "I have to support meself entirely."

Mr. Porter was still looking at her with his emotionless, appraising gaze. He saw a girl with pretty, piquant features, with glossy black hair, with cheeks that bloomed even in privation and blue eyes that were beautiful even in tears.

"Miss Flanagan," said he, "most of the girls that start at these wages in department-stores are partly supported by their family or have some friend to help them out."

Katie flushed, but she kept her outward calm.

"An' what if they haven't got a friend?" she inquired.

Porter's cold eye never wavered.

"They find one," he said; "and I may add, Miss Flanagan, that you should experience no difficulty in that direction."

Poverty will do much for most of us. For Katie it succeeded in curbing a temper that, in better times, was never docile. Beggars, she reflected, cannot afford to look too closely into the source or significance of the alms they have asked. She swallowed her wrath.

"Will you advance one week's salary now?" she asked.

Mr. Porter was distinctly surprised.

"I--why, certainly I won't!" he stammered.

"Why not?"

"But, my dear Miss Flanagan, I have nothing to do with the payment of the salaries. Besides, this firm doesn't know you; it does not even know that you will come to-morrow; it does not know that, if you do come, you will remain."

Katie smiled insidiously, and Katie smiling through her tear-curled lashes was insidious indeed.

"Och, now, Mr. Porter," she protested. "That's all well enough for the green girls; but you an' I know that you're the boss in matters of this sort. Lend me two an' a quarter."

Mr. Porter, pleased in spite of himself by her flattery, protested, but Katie remained unconvinced. She declared that she knew he was the real authority and that she could not bear to hear him underestimate himself. And the upshot of the discussion was that, though Mr. Porter could, in his official capacity, do nothing so unbusinesslike as to make her an advance, he would, personally, be glad to oblige her with a dollar and a half, and oblige her, adding a fatherly pat to her pink cheek, he ultimately did.

"Thanks," Katie responded as she took the money, and turned to go. "I'll report to-morrow, then, at a quarter of eight, Mr. Porter."

"At quarter to eight," repeated Mr. Porter, slowly closing the door behind her.

But, out in the wet street, Katie was saying what she had refrained from saying in the darkened office.

"An' as for the pay," she concluded, "I can't buy no automobiles with me loose change; but I think you'll find, you limb of Satan, that I can keep body an' soul together without a friend in the wor'rld!"

X

ANOTHER SPHERE

That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.

There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment, a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide, broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.

"Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir," said the servant. "May I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?"

Wesley shook his well-shaped head.

"No, thank you, Charles," he answered, and then, nodding to a decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner table: "Irish?" he asked.

Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.

"That is all, Charles," said Dyker, and the servant silently left him alone.

Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be diplomatic.

Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the seneschal's gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original and of every syllable of the English translation.

It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class, the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:

"Good-evening, Mr. Dyker."

Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.

The man before him was the perfection of that noble work of Heaven, a Prominent Citizen. Joshua Lennox endowed Bowery chapels with organs and meat-supplies; he contributed heavily to missions among the benighted Japanese; he assisted in arbitrating strikes wherein his fellow-employers were concerned; he always served on memorial committees; and he regularly subscribed to the campaign funds of all movements toward municipal political reform.

If his climbing wife insisted upon having liquor in the house, Mr. Lennox never touched it. If she served tobacco, he did not smoke. If she took in a Sunday paper, written and printed on Saturday, he would read no news until the appearance of the Monday journal merely written and printed on Sunday. And if his mercantile establishment sold poker-chips under the pseudonym of "counters," he was aware only that it did not sell playing-cards. The business he considered as his creation had grown beyond the limits of his power, and though, a good man and sincere, he might have done something by keeping a closer eye upon his work, he was in reality as much the creature of conditions as his worst-paid cash-boy. The great Frederick complained that a monarch could not know all the evil done in his kingdom: Joshua Lennox was so busy benefiting mankind that he had no leisure to observe in his own shop the state of affairs that made his philanthropy financially possible.

"I hope you are going with us to the opera, Mr. Lennox," said Dyker.

The old man shook his silvered head.

"No," said he in the slow, deliberate utterance that he had acquired with his first million of dollars; "I am on my way farther down town than that."

"But you had better come," urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was certain. "This is the last performance of the season."

"On the contrary," the merchant chuckled kindly, "I think you had better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am going to the first performance of a new season."

"Where's that?"

"To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union."

That made it Dyker's turn to smile.

"Oh, but I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm on the other side, you know."

"Against good government?" The elder man manifestly enjoyed this mild thrust.

"Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us from the street."

The merchant's cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker's lowered lids betrayed nothing.

"Yes," replied Lennox, dryly; "I heard that when Tammany Hall first came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take an older man's advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time."

Wesley's reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter it, Marian Lennox came into the room.

Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what she was certain were opinions of her own.

She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.

She caught her father's concluding words.

"While there is yet time," she paraphrased, "Mr. Dyker will withdraw from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire."

She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker's entrance into her waiting limousine with almost no delay whatever.

"There," she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their drive; "I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon."

Dyker laughed shortly.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I esteem your father so much that I should like him to like me."

"But you think that he doesn't like you?"

"I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest men."

"And may they?" bantered Marian.

"Well," he lightly accepted the challenge, "I shall take the specific case. There is no doubting your father's sincerity; there is no doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him, to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks at last."

"And on the other hand," said the girl, "I suppose I must generously refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?"

"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed."

"Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon."

"Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to another human being--and you should know that I am not to be suspected."

There was a ring in his voice that touched her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime."

"I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles."

"He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors."

"But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?"

"He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing--something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long--and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it."

Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued.

"If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a very terrible thing."

"Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work."

Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.

"Of course you're joking," he said.

"I am in cold earnest," she assured him.

"But that's absurd. You've--why you don't know what settlement-work means!"

"I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters."

"And you really mean----"

"I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is music to listen to."

Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.

Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.

He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in the _entr'actes_, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was "Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored.

His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.

One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week's work to his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that contractor learned of Wesley's service. At the ensuing trial the client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his patron's district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.