The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former articles; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of next month.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world's mental strife. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and service which produce power and character.
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort—to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment f all the world's worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!
But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future—OF HER TYPE.
From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character—like Marie's—just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.
Marie wasn't negative enough—she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness—to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.
No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed beingHARDENED to work. That was everything.
The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.
For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived onChunk's monthly check.
She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. Her father used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her job now. And she was nice. And she was still supported. Perfectly logical.
For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.
When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.
In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.
Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.
The causes were similar.
The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.
Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours—the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to child-bearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric—or for ineffectiveness in result.
Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world—for SHE did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship—for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic—the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.
The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.
They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the START? Wasn't it only the means to the FINISH?
Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.
The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.
On the other hand we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable-floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and game preserves.
It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eiderdown or straw, WITHOUT SERVICE RENDERED AND WITHOUT FATIGUE ENDURED, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.
Marie was as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make four.
She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.
Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind atrophied all the instincts of that struggle including finally the instinct for reproduction.
The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.
The detailed daily reasons for this ultimate social law stand clear in Marie's life. And remember what sort of woman she was. The woman who is coerced by external, authoritative ideals will bear children even when the wish to bear them is really absent. She will bear them without thinking. She will bear them because she has never thought that anything else was possible. But Marie (and this means millions of women throughout the modern world) was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.
She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will.
Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority. She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature of infinite opportunities and no duties.
All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her best one) was instinct and impulse.
But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it had withered away.
She had been sedulously trained to sterility.
Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.
In the January number Mr. Hard will discuss "The Women ofTo-morrow" in "Civic Service."
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6
{pages 778-783 are NOT numbered in the printed copy!} THE WATCHMAN
"And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men." Matthew xxviii. 4
My Claudia, it is long since we have met,So kissed, so held each other heart to heart!I thought to greet thee as a conqueror comes,Bearing the trophies of his prowess home.But Jove hath willed it should be otherwise—Jove, say I? Nay, some mightier, stranger god,Who thus hath laid his heavy hand on me,No victor, Claudia, but a broken manWho seeks to hide his weakness in thy love.
How beautiful thou art! The years have broughtAn added splendor to thy loveliness,With passion of dark eye and lip rose-red,Struggling between its dimple and its pride.And yet there is somewhat that glooms betweenThy love and mine; come, girdle me aboutWith thy true arms, and pillow on thy breastThis aching and bewildered head of mine;Here, where the fountain glitters in the sunAmong the saffron lilies I will tell—If so that words will answer my desire—The shameful fate that hath befallen me.
Down in Jerusalem they slew a man,Or god . . . it may be that he was a god . . .Those mad, wild Jews whom Pontius Pilate rules.Thou knowest Pilate, Claudia—a vain man,Too weak to govern such a howling hordeAs those same Jews. This man they crucified.I knew naught of him—never heard his nameUntil the day they dragged him to his death;Then all tongues wagged about him and his deeds;Some said that he had claimed to be their king,Some that he had blasphemed their deity.'Twas certain he was poor and meanly born,No warrior he, nor hero; and he taughtDoctrines that surely would upset the world;And so they killed him to be rid of him.Wise, very wise, if he were only man,Not quite so wise if he were half a god!
I know that strange things happened when he died . . .There was a darkness and an agony,And some were vastly frightened—not so I!What cared I if that mob of reeking JewsHad brought a nameless curse upon their heads?Ihad no part in that bloodguiltiness.At least he died; and some few friends of hisTook him and laid him in a garden tomb.A watch was set about the sepulchre,Lest these, his friends, should hide him and proclaimThat he had risen as he had foretold.Laugh not, my Claudia.Ilaughed when I heardThe prophecy; I would I had not laughed!
I Maximus, was chosen for the guard,With all my trusty fellows.Pilate knew I was a man who had no foolish heartOf softness all unworthy of a man!I was a soldier who had slain my foes;My eyes had looked upon a tortured slaveAs on a beetle crushed beneath my tread;I gloried in the splendid strife of war,Lusting for conquest; I had won the praiseOf our stern general on a scarlet field,Red in my veins the warrior passion ran,For I had sprung from heroes, Roman born!
That second night we watched before the tomb;My men were merry; on the velvet turf,Bestarred with early blossoms of the spring,They diced with jest and laughter; all aroundThe moonlight washed us like a silver lake,Save where that silent, sealed sepulchreWas hung with shadow as a purple pall.A faint wind stirred among the olive boughs . . .Methinks I hear the sighing of that windIn all sounds since, it was so dumbly sad;But as the night wore on it died away,And all was deadly stillness; Claudia,That stillness was most awful, as if someGreat heart had broken and so ceased to beat!I thought of many things, but found no joyIn any thought, even the thought of thee;The moon waned in the west and sickly grew,Her light sucked from her in the breaking dawn . . .Never was dawn so welcome as that pale,Faint glimmer in the cloudless, brooding sky!
Claudia, how may I tell what came to pass?I have been mocked at, when I told the tale,For a crazed dreamer punished by the godsBecause he slept on guard; but mock not THOU!I could not bear it if thy lips should mockThe vision dread of that Judean morn.
Sudden the pallid east was all aflameWith radiance that beat upon our eyesAs from the noonday sun; and then we sawTwo shapes that were as the immortal godsStanding before the tomb; around me fellMy men as dead; but I, though through my veinsRan a cold tremor never known before,Withstood the shock and saw one shining shapeRoll back the stone; the whole world seemed ablaze,And through the garden came a rushing windThundering a paean as of victory.Then that dead man came forth . . . oh, Claudia,If thou couldst but have seen the face of him!Never was such a conqueror! Yet no prideWas in it . . . naught but love and tenderness,Such as we Romans scoff at, and his eyesBespake him royal. Oh, my Claudia,Surely he was no Jew but very god!
Then he looked full upon me; I had borneMuch staunchly, but that look I could not bear!What man may front a god and live? I fellProne, as if stricken by a thunderbolt;And though I died not, somewhat of me diedThat made me man; when my long stupor passedI was no longer Maximus . . . I wasA weakling with a piteous woman soul,All strength and pride, joy and ambition gone!My Claudia, dare I tell thee what foul curseIs mine because I looked upon a god?
I care no more for glory; all desireFor honor and for strife is gone from me,All eagerness for war. I only careTo help and save bruised beings, and to giveSome comfort to the weak and suffering;I cannot even hate those Jews; my lipsSpeak harshly of them, but within my heartI only feel compassion; and I loveAll creatures, to the vilest of the slaves,Who seem to me as brothers. Claudia,Scorn me not for this weakness; it will pass—Surely 'twill pass in time and I shall beMaximus strong and valiant once again,Forgetting that slain god. And yet . . .and yet . . . .He looked as one who could not be forgot!
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6
THE MAN WHO MADE GOOD {pages 784-799}
By ARTHUR STRINGER
Trotter opened his door and listened. Then he tiptoed out to the stairhead. The coast seemed clear. The house lay beneath him as still as a well. It was nothing more than a three-tiered cavern of quietness.
So he crept back to his own room and closed and locked the door after him. It was a top-floor rear, where a hip-roof gave his back wall the rake of a Baltimore buckeye, and a dismantled electric call-bell bore ignominious testimony to the fact that his skyey abode had once been a servant's quarters.
But the room was quiet, and, what counted more, it was cheap. The thought of ever being put out of it terrified the frugal-minded Trotter. For seven weary months he had wandered about New York's skyline, looking for just the right corner, as peevish as a cow-bird looking for a copse nest.
Yet Mrs. Teetzel's laws were adamantine. Her rule was as Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her "gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion into their unlocked trunks. Cooking in a bedroom was as illicit as private laundry work in the second-floor bathtub. A young Toronto poet who had learned the trick of buttering an envelope and in it neatly shirring an egg over a gas jet was first reminded that he was four weeks behind in his rent and then sadly yet firmly ejected from the top-floor skylight room.
So Trotter, once back in his own quarters, moved about with a caution not untouched with apprehension. Mrs. Teetzel, he knew had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate." This he surreptitiously attached to the gas jet, and secretly thereon made coffee and cooked his matutinal hard-boiled egg. There was a thrill of excitement about it, a tang of outlawry, a touch of danger. It took on the romance of a vast hazard. And it also rather suited his purse, since that particular newspaper office which he had journeyed to New York both to augment and to uplift showed no undue haste in receiving him.
His third and last assault on the Advance office, in fact, had amounted to an unequivocal ejection. Three short questions from the shirt-sleeved autocrat of that benzine-odored bedlam had led to Trotter's undoing. He wasn't expected to know much about newspaper work, but before he came bothering people he ought at least to know a shadow of something about the city he was living in! And the one-time class orator of the University of Michigan was calmly and pointedly advised to go and cut his eyeteeth on the coral of adversity. He was disgustedly told to go out and make good, instead of coming round and bothering busy people.
And Trotter went meekly out. But he had not made good.
He drifted hungrily about the great new city, the city that seemed written in a cipher to which he could find no key. He even guardedly shadowed the resentful-eyed Advance reporters on their morning assignments, to get some chance inkling of the magic by which the trick was turned. He wandered about the river front and the ship wharves and the East Side street markets. He nosed inquisitively and audaciously about anarchists' cellars and lodging-houses; he found saloons where for a nickel very palatable lamb stew could be purchased; he located those swing-door corners where the most munificent free lunches were on display; he dipped into halls where Socialistic fire-eaters nightly stilettoed modern civilization; he invaded ginmills where strange and barbaric sailors foregathered and talked. From all this he was not learning Journalism. He was, however, learning New York.
But now he had struck luck—sudden and unlooked for—in the humble creation of "rhyme-ads" for a Sixth Avenue furniture store. So, having his Bohemian young head somewhat turned by his first check of twenty dollars, he had promptly celebrated his return to affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter named Mershon and two equally hungry-eyed Michiganders yclept Albright to his room with the rakish back wall, where the feast had been a regal if somewhat subdued one.
And now Trotter looked about the room, thoughtfully, and decided it was time to act. All record of this past orgy would have to be wiped out. The window, he knew, was impossible, for already there had been divers complaints as to the mysterious showers of eggshell which day by day fell into the area below.
So Trotter laid several newspapers together. On these outspread newspapers he placed four empty beer bottles, a sardine can, odds and ends of biscuit and zwieback, a well-scraped wooden butter tray, and—what had troubled and haunted him most, from the moment of its purchase in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen store—the lugubrious and clean-picked carcass of a roast turkey.
It had been a fine turkey, and done to a turn. But all along Trotter had been wondering just how he was going to get rid of those telltale bones. At the merriest moments of the feast the question of the corner in which they could be secreted or the aperture out of which they could be thrust had hung over him like a veritable sword of Damocles.
But now he knew there was only one way to solve the problem. And that was to wrap the remains carefully together, tie them up, and make his escape down through the quiet house into the midnight street. There the ever-damnatory parcel could be casually dropped into a near-by ash barrel or tossed into a refuse can, and he could aimlessly round the block, like a sedentary gentleman enjoying his belated airing.
Trotter crept down through the quiet house with all the trepidation of a sneak-thief. His one dread was the apparition of Mrs. Teetzel; she would naturally surmise he was making away with the bedroom stoneware, or the door knobs, or even the lead piping.
He felt freer when he had once gained the street. But no peace of mind could be his, he knew, until he had utterly discarded those carefully wrapped turkey bones. It would be easy enough to toss them into an areaway, if the worst came to the worst.
He looked up and down the street for a garbage can. But there was none in sight. So he walked toward the avenue corner, with his parcel under his arm. There he turned south, and at the next corner swung about west again. But the right chance to get rid of his turkey bones had not come. He glanced uneasily about. He suddenly remembered that the police had the habit of holding up belated parcel carriers and inspecting what they carried. So he quickened his steps. But all the while he was covertly on the lookout for his dumping spot.
A moment later he saw a patrolman on the street corner ahead of him. He dreaded the thought of passing those scrutinizing eyes. He eventually decided it would be too risky. So he doubled on his own tracks, rabbit-like, crossing the street and turning north at the next corner. He had had enough of the whole thing. It was getting to be more than a joke. He would shilly-shally no longer, even though he had to toss the cursed thing up on a house step.
He let the parcel slip lower down on his arm, with one finger crooked through the string that tied it together. He was about to fling it into the gloom of a brownstone step shadow when the door above opened and a housemaid in cap and apron thrust a plaintively meowing cat from the portico into the street. Trotter quickened his steps, tingling, abashed, shaken with an inordinate and ridiculous sense of guilt. He felt that he wanted to keep out of the light, that he ought to skulk in the shadows until he was free of the weight on his arm. He hurried on until he became desperate, determined to end the farce at any hazard. So, as he passed a building where a house front was being converted into a low-windowed shop face, he dropped the paper package into an abandoned mortar box.
He was startled, a moment later, by a voice calling sharply after him: "Hi, yuh! You've dropped y'ur bundle!"
Trotter turned guiltily about. It was a night watchman. He stepped slowly out to the mortar box as he spoke, and picked up the parcel.
There was nothing for Trotter to do but go back and take it. He mumbled something—he scarcely remembered whether it was a word of explanation or of thanks. But he felt the eye of the night watchman boring through him like a gimlet, and he was glad to edge off and be on his way again.
By this time Trotter could feel the sweat of embarrassment on his tingling body. He began to dramatize ridiculous contingencies. He pictured himself as haled into night court, as cross-examined by domineering and incredulous magistrates, who would send him to the Island as a suspicious person. He began to be haunted by the impression that he was being followed. The parcel became a weight to him, a disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim could not have been more ill at ease, more timorous, more terrified.
A sudden idea came to him as he passed a Chinese laundry in which lights still burned and irons still thumped on an ironing board. It was an audacious one, but it pointed toward deliverance.
His plan was to enter the laundry and pass over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again get sight of him!
But it took a moment or two to key himself up to the right pitch. He stepped in beside one of the granite column bases of the First National Trust, to give an extra tug to his still lagging courage. He leaned for a moment against the huge steel grillwork that covered the wide bank window behind him, looking eastward along the side street to where he could see the oblong of light from the laundry front.
A wave of exasperation swept through him at the thought of his own white-livered irresolution. He was about to step forward to face the end of his dilemma when an unlooked-for movement occurred between him and the illuminated laundry front.
It was the movement of a shadowy figure which seemed, at first sight, to erupt from the earth itself. It was several moments, in fact, before Trotter realized that the figure had come up from the basement of the building which stood immediately at the rear of the bank, the building which also contained the laundry. But this was not the thing that held Trotter's attention. The discovery which was causing his eyes to follow every step of the stranger was the fact that this second man ALSO CARRIED A LARGE PAPER PARCEL UNDER HIS ARM.
He turned eastward without looking back. Yet there was something circumspect in his footfall, something suspicious in the very casualness of his movements. Trotter leaned out and looked after him, nonplused by the coincidence, wondering if this second man's mission was the same as his own. He was almost glad to see somebody in the same boat.
Then curiosity overcame him. He turned and followed the other man. He walked eastward, keeping as well in to the house shadows as he could. He saw the man cross the wider traffic-way that ran north and south, look quickly up and down the deserted street and then, as he gained the shadow of the next house wall, veer close in to an iron paling. Then there was a movement which Trotter could not quite make out.
It was not until he crossed the street that he saw what the movement meant. It was not until he caught sight of a galvanized ash barrel standing beside the basement step and the stranger ahead of him walking empty-handed away, that Trotter realized the completeness of the coincidence.
The other man, without so much as stopping for a second, had quietly dropped his paper-wrapped parcel on the top of the galvanized barrel.
At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.
He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps, through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the paper-screened enigma.
A little puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid and worthless.
For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another white elephant on his hands.
Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impassively, disdainfully. There was nothing more than an occasional brick corner, an occasional piece of wall plaster. The only other thing was one larger fragment of stone. Trotter looked at it indolently. It was merely a piece of granite—an ounce or two of stone with one highly polished end, a bit of refuse which a hurrying mason might have used to "rubble" a wall crevice. And he had been fool enough to cart it up four flights of stairs!
He turned the piece of stone over in his hands. It was of porphyritic granite, with distinct crystals of feldspar embedded in a fine grained matrix. Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost association.
Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished and flashing peristyle.
Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He found nothing of note.
But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite, his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an interrogation mark.
It was nine o'clock the next morning when Trotter, carrying a parcel of laundry, walked casually past the First National Trust Building and turned the corner. He also made note, as he stepped into the open-fronted Chinese laundry, of this incongruous side-street neighbor, its squalid meanness cheek by jowl with the lordly magnificence of the many-columned bank structure.
On a narrow-fronted ground floor was the crowded little laundry with its red-lettered sign, its uncurtained windows, its shelves of red-tagged parcels, and its ever-present odor of borax. Below this was a basement, a cellar as narrow and dark as a cistern. A flight of perilously inclined steps led to the door of this basement. This door, in turn, was glass-fronted, but protected by a heavy woven-wire grating. On it was a sign which read:
It was this basement which so inordinately interested Trotter. He essayed several mild inquiries, in handing his frugal parcel of washing over the Chinaman's counter, as to the occupant of the cellar below. About "J. Heeney," however, he discovered nothing beyond the fact that he had occupied the cellar for several months. Trotter did not want to arouse unnecessary suspicion by overinterrogating "J. Heeney's" neighbors.
So he went mildly back to his top-floor room, and sat down and tried to study things out. As he sat there wrapped in thought, his idly wandering gaze rested on the electric bell above the door. He looked at it for several seconds. Then he stood on a chair and twisted away the bell's wiring. Using his pocket knife as a screwdriver, he released the bell from the door lintel. Then he cleaned and polished it. This done, he removed the clapper, wrapped the bell up in a piece of newspaper, and made his unhesitating way back to the cellar beneath the Chinese laundry. He was very much awake as he went slowly down the narrow steps. He wanted nothing to escape his notice.
He found the wire-screened door at the bottom locked. But he could get a clear enough view of the interior, even through the dirty glass. The entire space within was not more than ten feet wide and eight feet deep. It held a litter of plumber's tools, a few lengths of gas piping, a row of batteries, a blowpipe, a small hand-forge, a couple of porcelain washbowls, a deal table and chair and what seemed to be an electric transformer in a sadly battered case.
Across the back of the shop ran a wooden partition, plainly shutting off the main part of the cellar. In this partition, Trotter's careful scrutiny discovered, stood a narrow door. He ached to know what lay behind that door and that partition. But he had to be content with the shallower shop front. So he was not hurried in his inspection of it. It was not until he had fixed the details of the entire place in his mind that he ventured to knock.
There was no answer to his knock. Yet it was plain that some one was inside, for he could see the key in the lock, through the dirty glass. Who that person was he intended to find out.
He was rattling the wire fretwork, impatiently, loudly, when the partition door swung open.
Through this door stepped a short and extremely broad-shouldered man. There was no trace of annoyance on his face. In fact, much to Trotter's vague disappointment, he was smiling, smiling easily and broadly. He wore a workman's jumper, stained with oil and iron rust, and in his hand he carried a large pair of pipe tongs. But these did not interest Trotter. What caught his eye was the fact that the man's boots were white with lime dust.
"Hold on, sister; hold on!" said the man, with a laugh, for Trotter was still rattling the door. The owner stepped across his shop and turned the key in the lock.
"Hard to hear when I'm in doin' my lathe work," he explained, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. All the while, as he swung back the door, his eyes were closely studying the eyes of the other man. Trotter noticed the row of matches stuck in the soiled hatband, and the cotton bag of "Durham" that swung from his sweat-stained belt.
"What can I do for you, sister?" was his companionable greeting.Trotter unwrapped his electric bell.
"Can you give me a clapper for this?" he asked.
The other man took the bell in his hand. Trotter could see powdered lime under his nails.
"I guess I can fix you out," said the shop owner. "Wait a minute."
He turned to the door in the partition, and disappeared from sight, closing the door after him.
Trotter's first decision had been to take the key from the outer door lock. But some sixth sense made him hesitate, prompted him to turn and look at the inner door.
His stare was rewarded by the discovery of a hole in this door, about five feet from the floor. It was a lookout; he felt sure he was being watched. So he thrust his hands into his pockets, gazed carelessly about the shop, and waited.
The man reappeared, shaking his head.
"Nothing doing," he said. He was not able to fit a clapper to the bell.
"But I thought you kept electric supplies here," objectedTrotter.
The other man smiled. His good nature was impregnable.
"Oh, I can get it, if you've got to have it. Come back about ten to-morrow."
"All right," was Trotter's indifferent answer, as he turned languidly away. He went up the steps with equal languor, humming as he went.
Trotter kept guarded watch on "J. Heeney's" plumbing establishment. He watched it like a hungry cat watching a rat hole. And it was three hours later that he had the satisfaction of seeing the plumber ascend to the street and walk hurriedly westward. Trotter could see that he carried a kit of tools under his arm. But to follow him in open daylight was too great a risk. Instead of that, he went down the narrow steps, and through the dusty glass examined the doorlock.
Fifteen minutes later he went down another flight of basement steps, this time to the cellar of a Sixth Avenue locksmith.
"I've got a closet door locked shut on me," he explained. "And I want a key to get it open."
The locksmith looked him up and dow.n He seemed respectable enough, this mild-eyed youth with the locked closet.
But the locksmith knew the tricks of his trade.
"Then I'll take a bunch of `blanks' over with me and open her up for you."
"I'd rather get her open by myself."
"It will cost you a dollar," was the locksmith's ultimatum.
"It's worth a dollar," agreed Trotter. "But how'll we do it?"
"I'll dip a skeleton blank in hot wax and lampblack. Then you put the key in the lock and turn it as far as you can. That'll show the ward marks, where they bite the wax. Then bring me the key and I'll cut it. Maybe it'll take two cuttings. That'll be two dollars!"
Trotter paid a quarter deposit and took the key, made a circuitous way to the plumber's cellar, descended the steps, knocked, got no answer, and quietly inserted the key in the lock, turning it as far as it would go.
Instead of going back to the locksmith, he bought a ten-cent file, and with his own hand cut away the blank according to the ward marks. Once more he made his way to the door of the empty shop and fitted his key. It turned part way round in the lock, but did not throw back the bar. He recoated the key flange with the black wax by holding it to a lighted match and letting it cool again.
He at once saw where his cutting had been imperfect. A few strokes of his file remedied this. He once more fitted the key to the lock, and found that he was free to pass in and out of the door.
Yet he deferred forcing an entrance, at the moment, hungrily as he studied the inner partition door through the iron-grated glass. He knew what such a movement meant. He could not count on Heeney's continued absence. Above all, at this, the beginning of things, he wanted to avoid any untimely mis-step. So he made his way to the street, shuttling cautiously back and forth across the avenue, aimless of demeanor, diffident of step, yet ever and always on the lookout. From half a block away he saw Heeney return to his cellar. From an even remoter stand, two hours later, he perceived the plumber emerge, like a rabbit out of its warren. He also perceived that the rapidly disappearing man carried a large paper parcel under his arm.
As before, this parcel was carried for three blocks and then adroitly deposited on the top of an ash barrel.
Trotter, once Heeney had skulked about the next corner, quietly crossed the street and sauntered past the parcel-crowned barrel, with his open pocketknife in his hand. One sweep of the knife blade slit the paper wrapper, and without so much as stopping on his way Trotter was able to catch up a handful of the litter it held. This litter, as before, was made up of ground mortar and plaster and stone chips. But this time, amid the lime and dust, he could detect the glitter of minute particles of steel.
He tested the larger fragments of these with his knife point. They were very hard, harder even than his tempered blade steel, diamond-like in their durity. He concluded, as he sat on the edge of his bed that night, rubbing them between his fingers, that they could be nothing but particles of keenly-tempered chromium steel. And chromium steel, he knew, was not used in gas pipes. It was foolish to think of it as a subject for lathe work. It was equally absurd to accept it as an everyday element in any plumber's everyday work. Trotter was not ignorant of the fact that steel of this character was used almost exclusively in the construction of high grade safes and bank vaults.
He stood up, suddenly, and crossed the room to his little bookshelf. From this shelf he took down a much-thumbed "World Almanac," a paper-bound volume which for months past had been serving as his only guide to New York. He turned to the pages headed "Banks in Manhattan and Bronx." It took but a minute's search to secure the names of the president and cashier of the First National Trust Company. But when he further read that its capital was three million five hundred thousand, and that its total resources amounted to forty-seven million three hundred thousand dollars, his breath came in shorter gasps of excitement. He began to realize the colossal wealth which lay guarded behind the great porphyritic granite pillars. He also began to realize some new and as yet undefined responsibility. The mere thought of the magnitude of the movement in which he was being made a deliberate and yet disinterested factor brought him once more to his feet, pacing his little den of a room with thoughtful and preoccupied steps.
Early the next morning Trotter was back at the bank corner, like a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the cellar, with a tool kit under his arm.
Five minutes later Trotter was descending the stairs that led to the plumber's shop. Once there, he took out his key, fitted it to the lock, opened the door, stepped quietly inside, and locked the outer door after him. Before venturing to open the inner door he pressed an ear flat against the wooden partition and stood there listening. The silence was unbroken.
He stepped to the side of the shop and caught up a plumber's thick-bodied tallow candle. Then he softly opened the second door, stepped inside, and as softly closed the door after him.
He found himself in perfect darkness. But he stood there, waiting, before venturing to move forward, before daring to strike a light. He knew, as he peered about the blackness that engulfed him, that he was now facing more than an indeterminate responsibility. He was confronting actual and immediate danger. Even as he stood there, sniffing at the air, so heavy with its smell of damp lime and its undecipherable underground gases, a sudden fuller consciousness of undefined and yet colossal peril sent a telegraphing tingle of nerves up and down his body.
The only thing that broke the silence was the faint sound of footsteps on the laundry floor above him, together with the steady thump of irons on the ironing table. There was something fortifying, something consoling, in those neighborly and sedentary little noises.
Trotter struck a match and lighted his candle. He waited without moving for the flame to grow. Then he thrust the candle up before him. As he did so, his hand came in contact with the rough surface of what at first he took to be a stone wall. But as he looked closer he saw that it was not masonry. It was nothing more nor less than a carefully piled mass of stone and brick. Each fragment had been carefully placed on top of its fellow, each interstice had been carefully filled with rubble.
The pile extended from floor to ceiling. It filled the entire cellar. It left only space enough for a man to pass inward from the opened door. It was nothing more than the dump of a mine, the rock and brick from a tunnel, not flung loosely about, but scrupulously stowed away.
Holding the candle in front of him, Trotter bent low and groped his way in through the narrow passage. Everything was as orderly and hidden as the approach to a wild animal's lair. Everything was eloquent of a keen secretiveness. No betraying litter met his eye. Each move had been calmly and cautiously made. Each step of a complicated campaign had been quietly engineered. Trotter could even decipher a series of electric wires festooned from the little tunnel's top. He could see where the passage had gone around obstacles, where it had curled about a dishearteningly heavy buttress base, where it had dipped lower to underrun a cement vault bed, where it had sheered off from the tin-foiled surface of a "closed-curcuit" protective system, and where it had dipped and twisted about to advance squarely into a second blind wall at right angles to the first.
A portion of this wall had been torn away. With equal care an inner coating of cement had been chiseled off, exposing to view an unbroken dark surface.
As Trotter held the candle closer, he could see this dark surface marked off with chalk lines, sometimes with crosses, sometimes with figures he could not decipher. On it, too, he could see a solitary depression, as round and bright as a silver coin, as though a diamond drill had been testing the barrier.
He knew, even before he touched the chill surface with his hand, that it was a wall of solid steel, that it was the steel of the bank vault itself, the one deep-hidden and masonry-embedded area which stood without its ever-vigilant closed-circuit sentry. And he knew that Heeney had grubbed and eaten and burrowed his way, like a woodchuck, to the very heart of the First National Trust's wealth.
It was only then that the stupendousness of the whole thing came home to Trotter. It was only then that he realized the almost superhuman cunning and pertinacity in this guileless-eyed cellar plotter called Heeney. He could see the hours of patient labor it had involved, the days and days of mole-like tunneling, the weeks and weeks of gnome-like burrowing and carrying and twisting and loosening and piling, the months of ant-like industry which one blow of the Law's heel would make as nothing.
It rather bewildered Trotter. It filled him with an ever-increasing passion to get away from the place, to escape while he still had a chance. It turned the gaseous underground tunnel into a stifling pit, making his breath come in short and wheezing gasps. It brought a tiny-beaded sweat out on his chilled body.
Then he stopped breathing altogether. He wheeled about and suddenly brought his thumb and forefinger together on the candle flame, pinching it out as one might pinch the life out of a moth.
For on his straining ears fell the sound of a door slammed shut. There was no mistake, no illusion about it. Some one had entered the shop. Then came the sound of a second door. This time it was being opened. And it was the door leading into the tunnel.
Trotter could see the momentary efflorescence of pale light at the bend in the passage before him. And he realized that he was unarmed. He had not even a crowbar, not even a chisel or wrench, with which to defend himself. He knew he stood there trapped and helpless.
He shrank back, instinctively, without being conscious of the movement. He heard the sound of steps, shuffling and short. Then came an audible grunt, a grunt of relief. This was followed by the thump of a heavy weight dropped to the brick floor. Then came the sound of steps again, still shuffling and short.
Trotter leaned forward, listening, waiting, with every nerve strained. He concentrated every sense on the blur of light along the tunnel wall before him.
As he peered forward, scarcely daring to breathe, he was conscious of the fact that the light had suddenly withered. It vanished from the refracting tunnel sides, as though wiped away by an obliterating black sponge. Even before the truth of the thing had come home to him, he heard the sound of a quietly closed door.
Heeney had gone. He had merely crept into his tunnel mouth, dropped some tools, and then quietly crept out again.
It was not until he heard the slam of the outer door, a moment or two later, that Trotter felt sure of his deliverance. It was not until he knew his enemy was up the steps that he let his aching lungs gulp in the fetid tunnel air.
Then he crept forward cautiously, obsessed by one impulse, the impulse of escape, the passion to reach the open, to find air and light and space once more about him. He did nothing more than feel hurriedly over the bundle that lay in his path. It seemed an instrument of steel tied up in a cloth. He could feel strand after strand of wires, ductile and cloth-covered wires. He could also decipher a disk through which ran a piece of metal, like a blade through a sword guard. He felt sure it was an electrode of some sort, a tool to convert stolen electricity into a weapon of offense and assault. But he neither waited to strike a light nor stooped to puzzle over the bundle.
He paused for a minute to listen at the closed partition door. The only sound that came to his ears was the shuffle of feet and the thump from the ironing board above him. Yet when he opened this partition door he did so noiselessly, cautiously, slowly, inch by inch. Still screened in shadow, he studied the shop, the steps, the wire-blurred window, the street above him. Then he took a deep breath, crossed to the shop door, unlocked it, stepped outside, relocked it after him, and, pocketing the key, climbed the steps to the sidewalk.
His face, as he came out to the light, was almost colorless. His eyes were wide and staring with wonder. He kept telling himself that he must walk slowly, that he must in no way betray himself, that he must appear indifferent and offhand and inconspicuous to every one he chanced to pass. He felt the necessity of guarding himself, for he was now a person of importance. He was an emissary of destiny, an agent entrusted with a vast issue.
The streets through which he passed no longer frowned down at him from their inhospitable skylines. He was no longer an unattached and meaningless unit in the life that throbbed and roared all about him. He meant something to it. He was part of it. He was its guardian. And it would acknowledge him, in the end, or he would know the reason why.
Trotter sat peering mildly about him as that Gargantuan organism known as a newspaper office labored and shrieked in the birth of an afternoon edition. Subterranean Hoe presses roared and hummed, telegraph keys clicked and cluttered, typewriters tapped and clattered like a dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding over an otherwise frenzied accouchement.
It interested Trotter. It interested him very much. But it no longer filled him with mingled fear and revolt. He was, indeed, no longer envious, just as he was no longer nervous. He was as calm as a Nihilist with a bomb in his pocket.
Looking up, he saw that the office boy was holding the rail gate open for him to enter. But he was conscious of no spirit of elation as he stepped through the gate and passed on into that glass-fronted cage where Pyott, the managing editor, sat like a switchman in his many-levered tower.
Trotter saw, seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence.
The man at the desk did not even look up. He merely flung a barbed "Well?" over his shoulder. It reminded Trotter of the preoccupied tail swish of a horse worried by a black-fly. The side flick of one casual monosyllable was plainly all he was worth. Trotter calmly sat down.
"I've been waiting for six months for a job on this paper," he began, quite seriously, quite deliberately. The man at the desk went on writing. The pen did not even stop.
"Yes?" This second monosyllable was neither an answer nor a question. It was merely an intimation that nothing of arresting moment had as yet been uttered.
"So I've come straight to you!"
"Yes!" This third exclamation was plainly a challenge to come to the issue in hand.
"I've been thrown down three——"
"Excuse me," the man at the desk had his hand on a desk 'phone standard, "but you'd better see our city editor."
Trotter laughed a little. "I've seen the city editor four times.It's no use. He only throws me out."
For the first time Pyott, the managing editor, looked up. Then he swung about in his swivel chair and stared at the youth, the somewhat narrow-chested and calm-eyed youth who had the effrontery to sit down without being asked. The calm-eyed youth seemed in no way daunted by the ordeal.
"What do you want?" was Pyott's quick and curt demand.
"I want a job."
The editor's face darkened. Trotter could see that he had angered him. He could see a lean hand shoot out and a lean finger push down on the button that sounded a buzzer in the outer office.
"There's no use doing that till you've heard what I've got to say," announced Trotter.
"Why not?" snapped the man, with a finger still on the button.
"Because your man Hubbart out there told me not to stick my nose in here till I'd made good—till I'd got a big story. And now I've got it. And I'm going to give you the biggest scoop you've printed in five years."
"That's interesting!"
"I'd never have had the nerve to face you if it wasn't."
A boy appeared through the door. The editor swung back to his desk.
"Show this gentleman the way downstairs," he said, without anger, without resentment, without interest.
Trotter stood up and stared at him. "You mean you're not going to take this beat when I've got it right here to hand out to you?" he cried in his startled and high-pitched voice. "You're not going to give me my chance?"
"What chance? What beat are you talking about?"
"A beat that involves the theft of millions of dollars!"
"And what's going to happen to your millions of dollars?"
Trotter sat down in the chair again. "It's going to be stolen, every cent of it."
The man at the desk smiled. It was a very faint and mirthless smile. "You said that before, I think. But who's taking it?"
"One of the most accomplished crooks in all America."
"And from where?" was the next indulgent interrogation.
"From one of the richest banks in this city."
Trotter's calm and deliberate tones were beginning to nettle the other man a little.
"Then it hasn't actually been done?"
"No!"
"Yet you know it IS to be done?"
"Yes!"
Pyott was smiling by this time, quite broadly. "Would you kindly tell me just how you know all this? Just what first opened up the road to your somewhat startling knowledge?"
"Some turkey bones!"
"Ah, I see! Some turkey bones!" He nodded approvingly, indulgently. "And what were you doing with these particular turkey bones?"
"Putting them in a garbage can."
"Ah! You were putting some turkey bones in a garbage can. And as you were about to do this?"
"I caught sight of another man also trying to get rid of a parcel."
"Turkey bones, of course."
A butterball's bosom was no more impervious to slough water than the rapt-eyed youth to the older man's irony.
"When I opened his parcel I found it held mortar and stone and some steel cuttings."
"And this led you to infer?"
"This led me to follow him. He had a basement, I found, directly in the rear of a bank building."
"What bank building?"
"That's my story."
"And I trust the locality agreed with him."
"Extremely well," was Trotter's mild-toned reply. "In fact, it was essential for him to be side by side with that particular bank building, where he could quietly tunnel his way through its back wall and burrow under its floors and eat a passage right through to its vaults."
The man at the desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. This is a newspaper office."
"But can't you see the story in it? Can't you see what it means when you're the only people who're in on it?"
"You'll have to show me your Eskimo!" remarked the unperturbed editor.
"That's what I'm here for!" cried the exasperated youth.
Still again the man at the desk eyed his visitor for a minute of silence. Then he reached for his telephone. "I want Kendrick and Gilman for some city work. Send 'em in to me. Yes, right away, please."
Pyott swung about to his visitor once more. "I'm giving you our two best men. They'll do what you tell them to do."
"But that'll make it THEIR story!" objected Trotter. "I want to land this myself. I want it to be mine."
"Then what am I to do?"
Trotter scarcely knew. But he had not forgotten the thing he had waited and hungered for this many a month. "Put me on your staff, first, so I can be acting for somebody."
Still again the editor smiled. "You're set on being one of us, aren't you?"
"I've got to have something behind me before I can tackle a job like this."
"All right," was the wearily indulgent answer, "call yourself one of us. Now what else do you want?"
"I guess you'd better give me one of your workmen for a lookout," suggested the narrow-chested youth.
"Why a workman? Why not Kendrick or Gilman?"
"All I want is a husky man to see I'm not interfered with from outside," replied the new and jealous god of the press world. "Then I'll land the story myself."
The managing editor's finger end was once more on the buzzer. "I'll give you Tiernan of the job room. He's Irish, and weighs two hundred. Is there anything else?"
"I s'pose I'll need a gun," ruminated the mild-eyed youth. "ButI'm willing to buy that with my own money."
It was not the purchase of the gun that was troubling him. It was the thought that he had never in all his life so much as discharged a revolver. He would not even know how to load it. But then Tiernan would doubtless be able to show him.
A telephone bell was shrilling at the editor's elbow.
"Is that all?" demanded the impatient man of affairs as he turned to the 'phone. He called a cryptic sentence or two into the transmitter and slapped the receiver back on its hook.
"Yes, I guess that's all," answered the wide-eyed boy, with his hat in his hand.
"Then go and make good," said the man at the desk as Tiernan swung in through the office door. "Go and get your story!"
In a newspaper office, where one impression so quickly and inevitably obliterates another, sensation is startling only in the fact of its ephemerality. For two busy hours wave after wave of the world's turbulence had beaten on the shoreline of the Advance staff's attention. Every one knew, from Pyott down, that the day was a "big" one. And since it is seldom the ever-arriving guests of sensation which disturb a newspaper office but rather the secondary thought of bestowing them in their right chamber and bed and fitting them with their right "heading" night-caps, the ordeal of the Advance's day had reached its second and most exacting crisis. So when Pyott, the managing editor, was called up on the wire by Obed Tyrer, the President of the First National Trust, the call from that quarter carried with it no responsive curiosity.
"Can you come up here right away?" demanded the banker, in a voice of that coerced tranquillity into which the trained mind translates itself when face to face with undue excitement.
"No; I can't! "
"Why can't you?"
"Well, among other things, I've got the trifling matter of a paper to put to press. What's wrong?"
"You know what's wrong!"
"Do I?"
"And you and your men let this go through, two whole weeks of it, for the sake of your little yellow-journal scarehead!"
"Look here, Tyrer, I'm a busy man. Tell me what you're talking about, or ring off."
"I'm talking about the lunacy of a one-cent journalist who's willing to risk even his own funds for the sake of an afternoon beat! I tell you, Pyott, the whole story's got to be stopped!"
"What story?"
"The Advance story! I've got your man Trotter here now. He——"
"Ah, Trotter!" exclaimed Pyott. He was at last beginning to see light.
"I've got him and your job-room man named Tiernan up here, but I can't do anything with Trotter. He's mad, mad as a March hare. Says he's got to get his story down to you for to-day's issue."
"So you've got Trotter there! What else have you got?"
"Will you hold things up till I run down and talk it over? Will you promise me that much?"
Pyott laughed. "Then young Trotter got his story, after all?"
"Got his story? Of course he got it. And in another four hours that safe-cracker would have drilled right into our vitals. I tell you we can't imperil our institution this way. We can't let that stuff get out. We can't do it!"
"Nobody's going to break your nice new bank, Obed! You run down here in a taxi and we'll try to straighten things out."
"But what'll I do with Trotter? How're we ever going to hold him in?"
"Where's your safe-cracker man?"
"We've got him right here! Burns is sending over an A. B. P. A. man to take care of him."
"D'you mean he's hurt?"
"No, no! We've identified him as Missouri Horton of the ScottGang—he got a Sing Sing life sentence for yegg work in Yonkers.But Burns tells me he had enough money buried away to buy Tammanyinfluence and get paroled. Can't you see what that means?"
"Which way? To your office or to mine?"
"To us! They've got him now, for life! They can get him back toSing Sing and keep the whole cursed thing under cover!"
There was a moment's silence before the cogitating Pyott spoke again. "And you say you've got Trotter right there with you?"