CHAPTER IXIN WHICH SOME OF CHICAGO’S BEST PEOPLEESSAY A TASK TOO BIG FOR THEM
Lucas Randall inserted his key into the door and let himself into his Michigan boulevard residence. The butler, busy in one of the reception rooms, looked up merely to nod a welcome as he entered. Mr. Randall turned to the mirror in the hallway. He saw the reflection of a man sixty years of age, gray but well preserved, intelligent but not forceful.
As he turned from the glass he saw his wife descending the broad stairs. She was small and fragile. In her youth she had had a delicate pink and gold beauty. The years had worn away the pink and the gold but had left a spirituality that seemed even finer.
“I’m glad you’re home early, Luke dear,” he heard her saying. Then noticing his air ofabstraction she added: “Did you forget after all, Luke?”
“Forget,” he repeated blankly, “forget what, Lucy?”
“Oh you man!” replied his wife as if man were a word of reproach. “The church committee is to be here this afternoon to formulate its report on vice conditions.”
“Oh, that!” Mr. Randall chuckled. “Yes, I had forgotten, but anyhow I made it, you see. How’s Mary?”
“Very well—” Mrs. Randall broke off suddenly. There was a troubled look in her eyes. Then she added lightly almost to herself: “What a queer child!”
“Queer?”
“Yes, Luke, queer,” returned Mrs. Randall. Again that troubled look. “Luke, dear, I want to make a confession. I don’t understand Mary. After your brother Henry died, when we insisted that Mary come and live with us, it seemed wicked to leave her in that great house alone—and we have no children. Now, there are times I am almost sorry we did it. It isn’t that I want to criticise Mary”—noticingher husband’s look of surprise—“I know she loves us both and yet—well, I have the feeling that we don’t really know her. The intimacy I had longed for hasn’t developed. She seems to live a part of her time in another world than ours.” She broke off again, laughing nervously. “Do you know,” she said, “I sometimes have the feeling that Mary lives a sort of double life—nothing evil, you know—but uncanny. She’s not unkind nor lacking in affection for either of us, but often when we are together it seems to me that her mind is miles away.”
“Queer, eh?” said Mr. Randall, sympathetically. “Well, her father was like that.”
“It’s not strange if she is like her father,” charged Mrs. Randall. “He brought her up like a boy. After her mother died she was more like a chum to him than a daughter.”
Lucas Randall became meditative.
“The church work, now,” he asked, “does she seem interested?”
“At first I think she was. I took her on some of my regular poor people calls. She seemed interested—too interested. Why, oneday I lost her in a tenement on Kosciusko street. I had to come home without her, half wild with anxiety. She rushed in an hour later and when I questioned her as to where she had been she replied that she had found a poor Scotch family and had been so interested that she had forgotten me. ‘Forgotten’—that’s the very word she used. She said she had been ‘seeking the causes of poverty.’ I told her poverty came from people being poor, but that did not seem to satisfy her. She asked me why they were poor. I answered that often it was because they were shiftless. ‘Not always,’ she replied, ‘these Scotch people, aunt, dear, were strangely like you and me.’ She spoke as if I were the one who did not understand.”
“And since then?”
“Well, she has seemed to prefer going alone.” Mrs. Randall paused on the verge of a new confession. “Luke, dear,” she went on hurriedly, “Mary goes into sections of the city you have warned me not to visit!”
“Not the Levee?”
“Just that.”
“Good Lord,” ejaculated Mr. Randall, “surely she doesn’t go alone?”
“Yes, except for her maid.”
“That girl she took from the Refuge?”
“Anna.”
“Where is Mary now?”
“In her room.”
“She’ll come down to the committee meeting, I suppose?”
“I asked her and she replied that of course she would come.”
“Has she been out today, Lucy?”
“Nearly all day.”
“Calls, I suppose.”
“No, she’s been attending the hearings of the vice commission.”
“In God’s name, why?” Mr. Randall was really disturbed.
“I asked her that very question. She replied that the proceedings interested her.”
“Heavens!” Mr. Randall paced the room. “‘Interested’ her! A girl with an income she can’t possibly spend, a girl who might have anything, do anything, go anywhere, marry any man—”
He broke off suddenly. “Lucy,” he demanded, “is there any man Mary might care for? That good looking young curate, for instance?”
Mrs. Randall shook her head emphatically. “No, Luke,” she said. “If you were to ask me to name the two things Mary never gives a thought to I’d say men and matrimony. And that’s another thing about her I cannot fathom.”
Further confidences were cut short by the entrance of the butler announcing the Rev. Thomas Brattle, a clergyman of sixty with an old fashioned flowing white beard, small white hands and shiny gold-bowed spectacles, and Marvin Lattimer, a business man with a turn for religious activities. Desultory conversation followed broken by the entrance of Mrs. Sumnet-Ives, a well preserved woman of forty and a social power, and Miss Emma Laforth, slender, dark, intelligent looking and gifted with a political acumen that had given her an unassailable position in women’s club circles. They were escorted by Grove Evans, plump, wealthy, well born, mildly interestedin reform because reform was the proper thing, and Wyat Carp, a lawyer with literary tendencies.
Greetings and small talk; then Lucas Randall led the way to the library. There the Rev. Mr. Brattle, clearing his throat in an official manner, established himself before a priceless seventeenth century table of carved mahogany.
“The meeting will come to order,” he announced.
A circle of chairs had been drawn up before the table. The committee members occupied them with a subdued rustle of garments. The Rev. Mr. Brattle watched the circle benignly, waiting for a moment of total silence. When he spoke his voice was smooth, finely modulated, pitched in the right key. His manner, in fact, was perfect. Indeed, in the spacious luxury of Lucas Randall’s fine library no one could have appeared to better advantage.
“Dear friends,” he said, beaming about him, “we are gathered here, as you know, to formulate the report of our investigation into vice conditions. You have labored long and faithfully.Now the time has come to put forth the fruit of your labors in a form at once concrete and illuminating.”
He paused, then continued:
“The problem we are approaching is world-old. Mankind has struggled with it intermittently since civilization began. Apparently we have made no progress. The twentieth century, in fact, with its terrific congestion in cities, its vast consumption of nervous energy and its universal commercialism, has complicated our problem. But with these new complications have come new means for warring against the evil. Intelligence on the subject is more general. Fine minds everywhere are addressing themselves to the riddle. Thus it seems that humanity is at last coming to grips with the traffic in women. Who knows but that out of this little gathering may not be evolved some theory which, injected into the circulation of modern life, shall immunize us against this social malady.”
There was subdued applause.
“As my time has been somewhat occupied,” the clergyman went on, “I have asked Mr.Carp to employ his well known literary gift in formulating our report. Let me add that I have read our brother’s resumé of our investigations and endorse it fully as to the facts found.”
Meanwhile Wyat Carp, with his best poet’s air, had arisen and bowed to the little circle. He laid a terrifying number of manuscript sheets on the table and polished his glasses with his silk handkerchief. His was the subdued manner of a surgeon about to perform an operation and, it must be confessed, his audience felt some of the sensations of the patient.
“My friends,” began Wyat Carp, “in putting before you what I trust you may see fit to adopt as our united report I am naturally moved by a feeling of delicacy—”
He paused, for directly behind the little circle of hearers the heavy curtains had been pushed aside, and a girl stood framed there against the dull red of the draperies. She was rather above medium height, with a figure rounded by exercise, a face oval and lighted by deep blue eyes underneath masses of burnished,coppery hair. Her personality seemed to fill the room. She breathed wholesomeness, vigor, sincerity and purpose.
As Lucas Randall half started from his chair the girl put out her hand and checked him.
“No, Uncle Luke,” she said, “don’t disturb yourself. I’ve been standing just outside the door for several minutes waiting for a moment to slip in quietly.”
She bowed to them all, and seated herself near the window overlooking the boulevard.
“Just go on with the report, Mr. Carp,” she said, “I assure you I am most eager to hear it.”
Wyat Carp coughed gently and picked up his manuscript.
“Thank you, Miss Randall,” he began gravely, “I—I—”
“You were saying that you were moved by a feeling of delicacy,” prompted the girl.
“Thank you, Miss Randall.” Mr. Carp bowed. “I—er—am experiencing a feeling of embarrassment because this is a meeting of both sexes and the subject is one which, only recently, has been discussed in mixed company.When one so young as yourself is present—”
“Oh,” replied the girl, a shade of amusement in her voice, “please don’t let my youth interfere with our deliberations. I assure you that, young as I may appear to be, I am quite familiar with the matter we have under consideration.”
This remarkable declaration caused something of a real sensation. Mrs. Sumnet-Ives mentally put the speaker down as “a pert little chit.” Grove Evans was amused, for he disliked Carp. Mrs. Randall catalogued it as another ebullition of Mary’s queerness; even her uncle, despite an affection that accepted everything Mary did as right and proper, felt himself a little shocked. As for Miss Laforth, she favored Miss Randall with a long, inventorying inspection. Here, she reflected, might be a future political rival.
Mr. Carp began to read slowly with here and there a pause to enable his audience to catch a subtle turn of phrase or the flowing rhythm of his periods. He read while the light grew fainter and the fire glowed morebrightly, read until Lucas Randall leaned across the table and switched on the light in the great brass lamp.
Mary Randall, deep in her easy chair beside the window and lulled by the soporific monotone of Mr. Carp’s voice, saw the afternoon darken into dusk and the dusk deepen into night. Before her half-closed eyes the city, slowly but purposefully, began to throw off the habiliments of day and don the tinsel of evening. One by one, from far down the spacious avenue, the street lamps glowed into bulbs of color which the wet asphalt, like a winding black mirror, caught up and flung against the polished finishings of a swift and silent train of automobiles and the windows of the nearby mansions.
And still Wyat Carp read on and on, skirting the outer circle of forbidden subjects, leading up to closed doors he made no attempt to open, expatiating voluminously on conditions that all the world knew, elucidating the obvious, ranging from one platitude to another—and avoiding the vital and concrete as though it were poisonous. And as Mr. Carpread Mary became oppressed with his total futility.
Mrs. Ives risked a hasty glance at her jeweled wrist watch.
“Doesn’t the man know it’s nearly time to dine?” she wondered.
Grove Evans, with a dinner engagement at the club and a place bespoken in a quiet poker game afterward, squirmed in his chair and cursed Wyat Carp silently. Finally, with a last rhetorical flourish, Mr. Carp quite suddenly ended. He sat down amid a murmur of applause.
“Wonderful,” exclaimed Mrs. Ives. She was agreeably astonished that Mr. Carp should ever have finished.
“Very full, concise and to the point,” was Miss Laforth’s verdict.
“Great!” announced Grove Evans, really delighted, for he would be in time for dinner at the club after all.
The Rev. Thomas Brattle gazed about the circle with a bland smile. “I am glad,” he said, “to have my judgment indorsed by such excellent critics.”
Then, rapping gently on the table, he glanced about him. “A motion is in order before we adjourn, my friends,” he stated, expectantly.
“I move Mr. Carp’s report be adopted as it stands,” said Marvin Lattimer breathlessly. He had waited patiently all afternoon to speak just those words. His business judgment, as applied to social affairs, had taught him the wisdom of getting into the record. He was only a recent confidant of this inner circle of All Souls and he aspired to remain where he was. Besides, it would be something to tell the socially ambitious Mrs. Lattimer when he got home. There was a second from Miss Laforth.
“You hear the motion,” breathed the reverend chairman. “Those in favor will please say ‘aye.’” As they all responded he beamed upon them. He turned with a deprecatory glance to Carp. “And as a matter of form, those contrary minded will please signify by saying ‘no.’”
He waited a moment. Quite clearly and distinctly Mary Randall spoke:
“No!”
The tiny monosyllable seemed to echo and reecho through the high-ceiled room. There was a most embarrassing silence.
“Mary,” faltered Mrs. Randall.
Mary came over and pressed her hand against her aunt’s shoulder. “Believe me,” she said, “I don’t mean to wound you. You don’t understand.” Then turning to the Rev. Mr. Brattle, she went on: “But I must insist that my vote in the negative be recorded in the minutes of this meeting.”
“May I inquire the cause of your—er—peculiar attitude?” asked the clergyman.
“Do you think that fair, Dr. Brattle?”
“Possibly not fair, but perhaps our curiosity is pardonable.” There was suppressed sarcasm in his retort.
“In your little speech of introduction, my dear doctor,” said the girl, “you advanced the suggestion that this meeting might evolve some theory that would rid society of the social evil. The great trouble with this report is that it is all theory. I have no quarrel with the facts that Mr. Carp has given us, exceptthat they are old—‘world old,’ as I think you said. Weeks have been spent on this investigation and yet there is not one word—not a single word—that answers the appeal going up in this city day after day from thousands of unfortunate women. We sit here, after weeks of investigation, and listen to a homily. The time is past in Chicago for homilies. The question is: What are we going to do about it? Helpless thousands are asking us that question and we answer it with a treatise full of ‘world-old’ truth and full of ‘theory.’ Mr. Carp speaks of the resorts on Dunkirk street being ‘questionable’—”
“They are questionable,” defended Mr. Carp stoutly.
“Questionable, Mr. Carp,” replied Mary, “is a gentle word. These resorts are a shrieking infamy. They are markets in which young girls are sold like cattle.”
“How do you know that?” demanded Grove Evans, almost rudely. He felt his club appointment slipping away from him and the poker game owed him two hundred dollars.
Mary looked from her aunt to her uncle.
“I know,” she replied, “because I have been there. I know because I myself bought four girls there!”
The company gasped its surprise.
“I told them I was ‘in the business’ in Seattle,” the speaker continued. “I told them I wanted to buy. I asked for four girls—four young girls. They sold me four for one hundred dollars each.”
There was a silence for a long moment. It was broken by Marvin Lattimer.
“Impossible!” he exclaimed.
Mary looked at him sadly. “There is one fact more impossible than that, Mr. Lattimer,” she said. “It is that men of the world like you—men who, above all others, should make it their business to know these things,—cry out ‘Impossible!’ when such a fact is exhibited before you in all its hideousness.”
“You should have had the man who sold those girls arrested,” blurted Grove Evans.
“I did,” replied Mary quietly, “andThe Reporter, in which you are a part owner, suppressed publication of the fact. I had the man arrested and Jim Edwards, the politicianwho holds the district in the hollow of his hand, prevented the case from going to trial. That man walks the streets of Chicago free and without bond.”
The girl turned to Dr. Brattle again.
“Doctor,” she said, “you are a clergyman. You are the shepherd of the flock. Are you, too, deaf to the appeal that goes up daily from the sinks of this city,—from hundreds of ruined girls? Do you, too, stand by while wolves rend the lambs? Do you deny the existence of the wolf?”
“We can only strive to educate these women, to teach them the error of their way,” pleaded the shepherd.
“But, doctor, while you are educating one, the wolves are tearing down twenty. They ‘educate,’ too, and their facilities are better than yours.”
The girl stopped breathlessly and, stooping swiftly, kissed her aunt. There were tears in her eyes.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said.
Then suddenly she crossed the room and threw open the door. The maid, Anna, stoodthere with a satchel at her feet and Mary’s cloak upon her arm. Mary picked up the satchel and turned toward the street door.
“The time for theory alone is over,” she said, addressing the company. “Someone has got to go into action against the wolves.”
The door swung behind her and she stepped out into the boulevard.
CHAPTER XTHE ADVENTURES OF A NEWSPAPER STORY
Great cities thrive on sensations. The yellow journal with its blatant enthusiasms and its brazen effrontery finds a congenial habitat there, not because it is brazen, nor even because it is enthusiastic, but because it supplies a community need. The screaming headline is a mental cocktail. Bellowed forth by a trombone-lunged newsboy, it crashes against the eye, the ear and the brain simultaneously. It whips up tired nerves. It keys the crowd to the keen tension necessary for the doing of the city’s business. And the crowd likes it. Fed hourly on mental stimulants, it becomes a slave to its newspapers.
On the morning after Mary Randall’s dramatic exit from her uncle’s mansion Chicago awoke and clutched at the morning papers with all the eagerness of a drunkardreaching for his dram. A hint of a powerful new thrill lay in the half disclosed first pages. Black headings and “freaked” makeup meant but one thing—a big story.
And Chicago was not disappointed. Occupying the place of honor on the first pages of all of the morning sheets was the announcement of a new assault upon the Vice Trust. To the crowd the name Mary Randall meant nothing. It knew little of her and cared less. But the idea of a young girl, beautiful, socially prominent, immensely wealthy in her own right, declaring war single-handed on a monster so mightily armored and intrenched and so brutally strong as the Vice Trust appealed instantly to the crowd’s imagination. In the crowd’s thought, at least, the girl became a heroine. And though the man in the street openly wearing an air of cheap cynicism spoke of her as “another crazy reformer” or as a “notoriety-hunting crank,” secretly he responded to the enthusiasm of the headline writer who announced her as a “modern Joan of Arc.”
Mary had given out the story herself. Asimple letter from her to the city editors announcing that she had left her home and all the luxuries that such a home implied and, accompanied only by a maid, had set forth on a war of extermination against the “vice ring” had been sufficient to set every local room in the city in a frenzy. Re-write men and head writers had done the rest. Every newspaper recorded the launching of her adventure with a luxuriance of illustration and a variety of detail that left nothing more to be said on the subject. Mary had counted rather shrewdly on this. She possessed, among her other natural gifts, a keen judgment of news values. She knew, too, the immense power of the press. By enlisting the agencies of publicity behind her she had multiplied her forces a thousand-fold. At the end of her letter Mary had written a modest appeal to the public. Every newspaper printed it under display type. It read as follows:
“TO THE MEN AND WOMEN OF CHICAGO.
“TO THE MEN AND WOMEN OF CHICAGO.
“Our city, which should be the heart of American honor, is in the grip of a hideous System. So quietly and surely has this monster worked that our civic blood is poisoned. It feeds upon youth, innocence and purity—all that we as decent citizens love best. I call upon you all to stand by me now in my fight to kill the White Slave Traffic.
“Mary Randall.”
“Mary Randall.”
Grove Evans read that appeal through and smiled at its naïveté. Then he looked across his office to his partner, William Brierly, a younger man with pompadour hair and an habitual air of immense self-satisfaction. Brierly was reading the same story in another newspaper. He, too, looked up and smiled.
“You know this girl, don’t you, Grove?” Brierly asked. “By George, she must be interesting. A new kind of female maniac, eh?”
“You’ve met her,” responded Evans. “She was at the Country Club during trophy matchlast fall. Carries herself like a queen. I remember your raving about her.”
“Ah,” Brierly’s derisive smile faded. “That girl, eh? Say, I saw her make the ninth hole in three. That girl! Say, look here, Grove,” he struck the open paper with his palm, “does she mean this stuff?”
Evans lighted a cigarette before replying. “She sure does,” he stated finally. “I was at the Randalls when she delivered her ultimatum and took to the war path. Talk about a jolt! After she left us, you could hear the shades of night falling. For ten minutes we sat there exhibiting all the vivacity of a deaf and dumb man at a Quaker prayer-meeting.”
Brierly laughed. “Oh, well,” he said. “She’ll do what all these suffragettes do—run around in a circle, yell herself tired, then marry some fellow and forget it.”
He yawned. Evans turned to the huge safe and got out a heavy packet of papers.
“What are you doing, Grove?” Brierly demanded lazily.
“Nothing,” responded Evans curtly. “Just looking over some of our shady leases.”
“Hello!” said Brierly, getting on his feet. “Are you taking this thing seriously?”
Evans turned with a folded paper in his hand.
“You bet your life I am,” he replied. “I know this girl. There’s a strain of wild Irish in her and it’s my opinion that she’s going to raise merry hell!”
The dreamer who had visited the Millville Button Works with the owner of the mill lunched with his friend in the city that day. Quite casually, among other items of interest, Mary Randall’s adventure came up for discussion.
“I don’t know the girl,” said the mill-owner, “but her announcement gives me a fairly good mental picture of her.”
“What’s your picture?” inquired the journalist.
“A rag and a bone and a hank of hair, one of these raving suffragettes. Since bomb-throwing and burning are not fashionable over here, she’s chosen this means of expending her surplus energy.”
“My dear friend, you’re entirely wrong!”
“What! You’ve seen her?”
“Oh, no, but I have quite a different mental picture of her. You remember Joan of Arc? Mount her on a charger, hand her a sword of fire and send her forth to fight for Mary Magdalene. That’s my idea.”
“You’ve borrowed that from the headline writers,” the mill-owner said.
“Not at all. I know the type. A thoughtful young girl, healthy, cultivated and, by the modern miracle, taught how to think. She studies vice conditions in Chicago at first hand and what she sees turns her into a crusader. This girl has spirit. Brought face to face with a great evil, moved by the appeal of helpless womanhood, she throws aside her veneer of false education.”
“Unsexed!”
“Yes, if you would say that the crisis in her life unsexed Portia. Or the crisis in France’s history unsexed Charlotte Corday.”
“You’re fond of historical allusions,” chided the practical man. “Always the literary man, always the dreamer. This girl is a disturber. She’ll unsettle business.”
“Ah, there you are. ‘Unsettles business.’ Did it ever strike you business men that you take yourselves too damn seriously? Any movement, any agitation that ‘unsettles business’ is ipse facto wrong. You business men have had a hand in the martyring of most of the saints and all of the reformers since time began. And, invariably, you are wrong. Why, you’re wrong even about yourselves. You firmly believe that the foundations of the country rest upon you. As a matter of fact, not one per cent of you are producers. You’re middlemen, profit shavers, parasites.”
“My dear fellow,” asked his friend, “where would you be if business men—publishers—didn’t buy your wares?”
“Ha,” answered the writer, “and where would the publishers be if I and others didn’t produce the wares to market? It won’t do. The reason the newspapers and magazines of this country are so bad is because most of the publishers are not newspaper men and magazine writers, but merely business men.”
“Well, I suppose your Joan of Arc will have to have her fling. Then life will swingback to its same old channels and we’ll forget her.”
“Yes, she will have her fling and perhaps we’ll forget her, but life will not swing back to the same old channel. She’ll make a new channel, forgotten though she may be, and it will be a better channel.”
Captain Shammer of the Eighth police district read Mary Randall’s open letter through slowly and carefully. When he had finished he lighted a long black cigar from a box that had been sent him by a world famous confidence man. He smoked thoughtfully for some time. Then he put out a heavy hand and, without looking, pressed a white button at the side of his desk.
A sharp-eyed young man opened the captain’s door.
“Nick,” said the captain, “shut that door a minute and come over here.” He pointed to the black newspaper headline.
“Get that?” he demanded.
“Sure, first thing this morning, Captain.”
“Well?”
“We should worry.”
Captain Shammer rolled his cigar in his mouth. He wasn’t exactly satisfied with the answer.
“All right,” he agreed finally, “but Nick—”
“Yes, Captain.” Nick paused alertly, one hand on the door knob.
“Easy for a while until we see how things break on this.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Curtains drawn, you know, and back rooms quiet. Tell the girls to go slow on the piano playing. Did Ike, the dip, come across?”
“Not yet, Captain.”
“Pinch him today and give him the cooler. Get me?”
“It’s done, cap.”
“Close in on the stuss games. Pass the word to go easy.”
“I get you.”
“Mary Randall, eh?” asked Captain Shammer of vacancy when his aid had gone. “Mary Randall! Well, Mary, you sure have got your nerve with you.”
Senator Barker was a member of the Governor’s vice investigating committee. The committee had been appointed to frame a minimum wage law for women. He was a person of ponderous bulk and mental equipment. He had slipped into office, not because the people yearned for him, but because there had happened to be a battle on between two factions of his natural political opponents in the fortunate hour he had selected for aspiring to office. Like most other American officeholders he spent his days and nights scheming out ways to continue living at the public’s expense. He perused Mary Randall’s screed as he sat over his morning grape-fruit.
In an intermission in the committee meeting Senator Barker leaned across the heavy oak table and pointed out the letter to the Rev. Wallace Stillwell.
“Did you see that?” he inquired huskily.
Mr. Stillwell nodded and drew his thin lips together. He was quite young and just now carried the burden of having been called from an obscure country pulpit to a fashionable church in Chicago. He knew that the wealthyman who was his sponsor in this new position was interested in whole blocks of houses whose curtains were always drawn. He had never forgotten a certain phrase that great man had used when he came in his own automobile to bear the young pastor to the new field of his labors.
“We want you, Mr. Stillwell,” he had said, “because we believe you to be a safe and sane man, one who will not be swept off his feet by wild-eyed reformers and the anarchistic tendencies of the times.”
Mr. Stillwell, therefore, knew why he was wanted in Chicago. The knowledge made him cautious in all things. He thought Senator Barker’s question over carefully. Then he nodded calmly.
“Why, yes, Senator,” he answered. “One could hardly avoid reading it.”
“Well, what about it?”
“Just what do you mean, Senator?”
“You know. What do you think of it, eh?”
“It seems to me,” purred the Rev. Wallace Stillwell, “that the whole exploit is worse than fantastic. It is hardly in good taste. Investigationsof the kind this girl has undertaken ought to be left to the men.”
“That’s all right,” put in the Senator, gloomily, “but I’ve noticed lately that the women don’t seem to be willing to do that. They want to take a hand in such matters themselves.” He leaned back in his chair sadly. “It certainly makes it hard for us politicians.”
A woman of ample girth and a handmade complexion pushed her coffee cup away and lighted a fresh cigarette. She had just finished reading Mary Randall’s manifesto. Nature had made her beautiful, but advancing years and too much art had all but destroyed Nature’s handicraft. She inhaled the acrid smoke deeply and then raising her voice, called:
“Celeste! You, Celeste!”
A mulatto girl threw open the door, crying:
“Yes, madame?”
“What you doing?”
“Cleaning up.”
“Get a bottle of wine. Or did those highrollers guzzle it all last night, the drunken beasts?”
“No, madame. I’ve saved one for you.” She opened the bottle and placed the effervescent liquid before her mistress.
“All right, Celeste. Anybody up yet?”
“I hardly think so, madame.”
“Well, I’m up and I wish I wasn’t,” announced a girl who appeared at that moment coming down the broad staircase. She entered the room.
“Got a head this morning, eh, Nellie?” said the madame, knowingly.
“Yes, I’ve got a head,” replied Nellie sullenly, “and a grouch.”
“Make it two, Celeste,” said the madame promptly, indicating the bottle. The colored maid poured out another glass of the liquor. Madame threw the paper across the table to the girl.
“There,” she said, “that’s something that will make you worse.”
“Where?” asked the girl, as she caught up the paper.
“Front page, big headlines. You can’t miss it.”
The girl stepped to the window and pushed aside the heavy curtain. In the morning light she was revealed there petite and charming, despite penciled eyebrows and carmined lips. Her figure was daintily proportioned. There was grace in every line. Her deep brown eyes glowed as she read the words Mary Randall had written.
When she finished reading the girl crumpled the paper in her hand and filled another glass. She lifted the wine slowly.
“Here’s to you, Mary Randall,” she said.
“That’s a rotten toast,” said the madame.
“Is it?” replied the girl. “Well, let me tell you something. I’d like to go straight out of this house and find Mary Randall and say to her: ‘I’m with you, Mary Randall, and I hope to God you win out.’”
“You don’t think of me,” whined the older woman. “Look what a knock that reform stuff gives business.”
“You!” Nellie’s temper flared into a flame. “Say, you ought to be in jail! Now don’t startanything you can’t finish—” The older woman had got to her feet menacingly. “You don’t deserve no pity. You got into this”—she indicated the gaudily furnished house by a gesture, “with your eyes wide open. You picked out this business for yourself. But with me it’s different.” She leaned across the table defiantly. “Yes, how about me? How about Lottie and Emma—and that poor kid that came here happy because she thought she’d found a decent job? Did we pick out this business? Did we? Not on your life. We walked into a trap and we can’t get out. Yes, and there’s thousands like us all over this country.” She snatched up the bottle and poured more wine. “I’m for you, Mary Randall,” she said, raising the glass to the sunlight. “More power to your elbow!”
Mary Randall read the newspapers in a garret room of a tall lodging house. A pile of letters, in a peculiar shade of dark blue, sealed, stamped and ready for the postoffice, lay in a heap before her. She went through each newspaper carefully, noting the display andstudying the “features” of her story that had impressed the newspaper men. At last she laid them down.
“Well, Anna,” she said, smiling, addressing her maid. “We’ve made a good beginning. The town, you see, is interested in us.”
Anna’s ordinarily impassive face smiled back at her mistress’ enthusiasm. Her blue eyes lighted with admiring loyalty. She was blonde, big boned and so strongly built as to look actually formidable. Competency and reserve power fairly radiated from her. Her voice betrayed her Scandinavian ancestry.
“Ya-as,” she said, “and in another week they’ll be fighting for us.”
Mary got up from her chair and went to the window, threw it wide open and looked out on the city. She saw its myriad lights rimming the shore of the inland sea. She heard its roar—deep, passionate, powerful. In her imagination she laid her ear close to the city’s heart and she heard it beat strong and true. The smile had left her face and a prayer formed itself silently on her lips. The revery lasted only a moment.
“And now,” she said, “for the next movement in the battle.” She indicated the letters. “There’s our ammunition, Anna,” she said. “Mail them. I’ve picked you for a great honor. You’re to open the engagement with a fusillade of bombshells.”
CHAPTER XIA BOMB FOR MR. GROGAN
The telephone in the outer office of the Lake City Telephone Company rang insistently. Miss Masters, the stenographer, after the fashion of stenographers, let it ring. At length the telephone gave vent to a long, shrill, despairing appeal and was silent. Then, and then only, did Miss Masters lay aside the bundle of letters she was sorting and pick up the receiver.
“Yes?” she said. “Well, what is it?”
Apparently a voice responded.
“Speak a little louder, please,” the girl said impersonally. “I can’t hear a single word you’re saying.”
More words from the outside poured through the receiver.
“Yes.” Miss Masters nodded mechanically. “Yes, this is the main office of the Lake City Electrical Company. What?”
There was another pause.
“This is Miss Masters at the ’phone,—yes—yes—I’m the stenographer. What’s that? Private secretary? Yes, I am Mr. John Boland’s private secretary. No, our president, Mr. Harry Boland, has not come downtown yet. We are expecting him at any moment.”
A red-headed office boy stuck an inquisitive head through the door.
“Who’s that,” he demanded, “someone for the boss?”
Miss Masters merely motioned him to silence.
“Yes,” she went on, “his father, Mr. John Boland, will be in some time during the morning. Who shall I say called?”
The girl waited for the answer and hung up the receiver.
“Who is it, Miss Masters?” inquired the boy.
“Well, Dickey, I don’t think it’s any of your business,” retorted Miss Masters good-naturedly. “But, for fear you’ll burst with curiosity, I’ll say that it’s Mr. Martin Druce.”
“Happy as a crab this morning, ain’t you?” jeered the boy. “Well, you want to look out for that geezer, Druce. He’s a devil with the girls.”
Miss Masters made a face at him and the boy, whistling derisively, disappeared through the door, not failing to slam it loudly after him.
Miss Masters resumed her letter sorting. The door opened slowly. A man entered with his hat over his eyes. His hands were deep in his pockets and he chewed a despondent looking cigar. Had the reader been present he would have recognized him instantly, despite his unaccustomed air of lugubriousness, as our old friend, Mr. Michael Grogan.
“Good morning, Mr. Grogan,” said Miss Masters cordially.
Grogan made no reply. The girl went on with her work. Then as if communing with herself she said: “And yet they say the Irish are always polite.”
“Eh?” said Grogan, rousing himself, “what’s that?”
Miss Masters vouchsafed no reply. Shemerely laughed. Grogan, conscious that he was being chaffed, stared at her. He was pleased with what he saw. He found Miss Masters handsome. Her office dress, slit at the bottom and displaying at this moment a neat ankle, was ruched about the neck and sleeves. It was a rather elaborate dress for a stenographer, but John Boland was a vain man and liked to have the employes he kept close about him maintain the appearance of prosperity. In fact, he paid these particular employes well with the explicit understanding that they would keep their appearance up to his standard.
“You’re making light of me gray hairs, I see,” said Mr. Grogan, smiling.
“Well,” said the girl, “I said good morning to you and you didn’t even grunt in reply.”
“The top of the morning to you, Miss Masters,” said Grogan, hastening to remedy his oversight and removing his hat with an ornate bow.
“Sure, and I’m wishing you the same and many of them,” replied the girl.
Mr. Grogan bowed again and added:
“And, if I have failed in the politeness due a lady, I begs yer pardon.”
“You’re forgiven, Mr. Grogan,” replied Miss Masters, resuming her work.
Grogan returned to his meditations. He was regarding his mutilated cigar ruefully when Miss Masters observed:
“If all of the millionaires were as thorough gentlemen as you are, Mr. Grogan, we wouldn’t have any labor unions.”
The word millionaire seemed to sting Grogan.
“I’ll thank you,” he said abruptly, “to leave me out of the millionaire class.”
“Why, Mr. Grogan,” said the girl, surprised, “I thought you’d like that!”
“So would I—wanst,” retorted Grogan, “but now when any one says ‘you millionaire,’ faith, I get ready to dodge a brick.”
“I should think it would be pleasant to know you had a million dollars.” There was a note of envy in the girl’s voice.
Grogan rose slowly, walked to the desk and leaned across it confidentially.
“So it always was,” he said sententiously,“but now they’re beginning to ask, ‘Where did you get it?’”
“Oh,” said the girl.
“It’s not ‘Oh,’ I’m saying,” said Grogan, “it’s ‘Ouch!’”
“Something’s disturbing you, eh?”
“Something—and somebody. ’Tis a girl.”
“Oh, Mr. Grogan!”
“Whist!” retorted Mr. Grogan, “You don’t get me meaning. It’s not the kind you buy ice cream sodies for. No! This lady has a club in her fist and a punch in both elbows.”
“For you?”
“I suspicion so, and I’m oneasy in me mind.”
“It’s silly to worry, Mr. Grogan,” said Miss Masters, “sit down and look over the papers.” She extended a morning newspaper, smiling.
“I may as well.” Grogan took up the paper and selected a chair.
“Stirring times in Chicago, just now,” said the young woman.
“They’re stirring, all right,” Grogan agreed. “They’re too stirring. What I want is peace. I’d like to pass the rest of my days in quiet—quiet—and—”
The sentence expired on his lips as he stared at the front page of the paper held open in his hands.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Grogan,” said Miss Masters starting up, alarmed.
Grogan wiped his forehead and moistened his lips.
“Nothing,” he said, “it’s hot and I’m—I’m—”
He threw the newspaper on the floor.
“Here,” he said, “give me another newspaper.”
The girl picked up another paper from the heap on the corner of the desk and passed it across to him. Grogan looked at the headlines.
“Help—murder,” he cried. Then he cast the paper on the floor and got to his feet abruptly.
“Mr. Grogan,” asked the girl, “what is the matter?”
“I asked for quiet,” Grogan replied, picking up the papers and shaking them angrily, “and on the front page of this paper is a letter written and signed by Mary Randall.”
“And why should Mary Randall disturb you?”
“Do you know she writes to me?”
“Writes to you?”
“She does.”
“What does she say?”
“Everything—and then some,” was the grim response. “Don’t laugh!” he ordered. “Here’s one of the last of them.” Grogan took a dark blue envelope from his pocket, extracted a single sheet of the same color and read.
“Michael Grogan:—Do you remember what your old Irish mother said to you when you left Old Erin to seek your fortune in the new world? She said: ‘Mike, me boy, don’t soil your hands with dirty money.’ Mary Randall.”
“Don’t soil your hands with dirty money,” repeated Miss Masters.
“That’s a nice billy dux to find beside your plate at breakfast, ain’t it now?” demanded Grogan. Then after a pause he murmured half to himself,
“Me old Irish mother, God bless her, withher white hair and her sweet Connemara face! I can see her now, just as she stood there that day in the door of our cabin when I went off up the road, a slip of a boy, with a big bag of oatmeal over me shoulder—one shirt and me Irish fighting spirit. That was me capital in life, that and her blessing. She’s sleeping there now, and the shamrock is growing over her—”
Grogan stopped. His voice had grown husky.
“Say,” he demanded turning on Miss Masters abruptly, “why don’t you make me stop? Don’t you see I’m breaking me heart?”
The girl had really been moved. “I can’t,” she said, “because—” She got out her powder puff and proceeded hastily to decorate her nose. She was still engaged in this operation when the telephone rang. Grogan started.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“Why, it’s only the telephone. What is the matter with you, Mr. Grogan?”
“I dunno,” responded Grogan despondently, “I’m as nervous as a girl in a peek-a-boo waist.”
The telephone rang again.
“Why don’t you answer that?” demanded Grogan sharply.
“I will,” replied the girl, “but there’s no great rush, is there?”
“Yes there is,” insisted Grogan, “I can’t bear the suspense.”
The young woman laughed and picked up the receiver.
“Lake City Electrical Company,” she said. “What? Who is it, please.”
Grogan, who had continued pacing up and down the office, stopped and made wild gestures to Miss Masters. Covering the mouthpiece of the instrument so she would not be heard, the girl asked.
“What is it, Mr. Grogan?”
“Whist!” replied Grogan, “If that is Mary Randall on the wire there, I’ve gone to Alaska. I’ve given all me money away and I’m living on snow balls.”
Miss Masters smiled and replied with assurance: “This isn’t Mary Randall.”
“Thank God for that,” breathed Grogan.
“Hello,” went on Miss Masters into thetelephone. “Oh, you’re long distance? Well?”
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Harry Boland hasn’t come downtown yet.”
“He may be in any moment—shall I—”
She broke off sharply as Harry himself came in the door drawing off his gloves.
“Wait! Just a moment please,” she went on. “He has just come in.”
“Someone for me, Miss Masters?” the young man inquired, hanging up his hat on a rack by the door. Without waiting for a reply he turned to Grogan. “Good morning, Mike.”
“’Tis a fine day—I hope,” returned Grogan cautiously.
“Yes, someone calling you, Mr. Boland,” broke in Miss Masters.
“Don’t want to talk to anyone,” said the young man curtly.
“Hello, hello,” continued Miss Masters at the telephone. “Hello, long distance? Mr. Boland is too busy—”
“Wait, please,” interrupted Harry quickly, “did you say ‘long distance?’”
Miss Masters nodded. “Just a moment,” she said into the telephone.
“Yes, Mr. Boland,” she said. “It’s a long distance. Some one wants to talk to you in—Millville, Illinois.”