Dyker stiffened.
"Did you hear that?" he demanded.
"Hush! Keep your voice down, or I won't tell you nothing of what I know. Remember you're supposed to be making love to me."
"All right, all right; but I want an answer to my question."
"Well, then, of course, I heard it. I was at the keyhole there—that's why I want you to whisper now.—And I heard more."
"What was that?"
"Wait a minute. You'll do me a favor if I tell you?"
"Anything," he smiled.
"But this is business. If I tell you something that it's worth your while to know, will you promise not to blow on me to Miss Rose?"
"I promise."
"And to do something more that I'll ask you?"
Wesley was now certain that he must not stick at promises.
"Surely."
"Then sit tight. I don't know as much about O'Malley as I pretended out there in the hall, but I do know about Miss Rose. I don't know whether O'Malley is goin' to double-cross you or not, but I do know that Miss Rose has given you the double-cross already."
She had thought that passion played a large part in his relations with her mistress, and she had counted upon awakening his jealousy. What, however, had far exceeded his affection was a poor pride of possession, and when Violet's words, in addition to touching his ambition, struck at that pride, they aroused an anger that was far more dangerous than any sense of love betrayed.
"What's that?" he demanded.
Two red beacons flashed into his pale checks, and his heavy lids, shooting upward for a single instant, disclosed hard, gray eyes gone hot and malevolent.
"Be careful. Speak low, I tell you," she cautioned; "and remember your promise."
"I don't believe——"
"Here's Cassie!"
They waited while the black opened the champagne and filled the glasses.
Violet brushed Dyker's hair over his eyes and laughed at the effect. Dyker caught the offending hand and kissed it by way of punishment.
"Cassie," he banteringly asked, "why didn't you ever tell me there was such a nice little girl in this house? I had to get the news from a friend on the outside."
He tossed the now grinning negress a dollar and, as soon as she had left them, dropped the farce as promptly as did Violet.
"I say I can't believe you," he resumed, the two spots of anger still glowering in his cheeks.
Violet knew that her whole hope rested upon her ability to force conviction.
"You've got to believe me," she said. "I'll tell you all that you told Miss Rose till I had to run away, that evening."
She did it, omitting scarcely a particular.
"That's right, ain't it?" she concluded.
"May be. But what does that prove? It only shows that you heard me."
"It shows that I can hear Miss Rose when she talks to somebody else. And I did hear her."
"Whom was she talking to?"
"The man you asked her about. To Rafael Angelelli."
"Well, but I told her to talk to him."
"An' she did it. But the first time I heard her was just before you told her to."
"That same night?"
"He was in the kitchen with her when you came in. Why, he's here all the time! I don't care what she pretends to you, she's stuck on him, an' every girl in the house knows it."
Rapidly, but as fully as she had sketched the dialogue between Rose and Dyker, she now described the first conversation that she had overheard between her mistress and the Italian.
"I'd come down to graft a drink," she said, "an' I heard them from the stairs. That's how, after he'd left, I came to listen to you too."
Dyker had quailed under the revelation, thus made to him, of political danger. He now quivered in anger at the comments upon himself, somewhat colored, that Violet had placed in the mouths of Rose and Angel.
"I'll find out about this!" he said, struggling against the desperate arms flung swiftly around him to keep him on the sofa. "Let me go! By God, I'll have that drunken cat down here and squeeze the truth out of her throat!"
All the caution, all the craft, all that she had counted upon as the real Wesley Dyker seemed to have escaped him. His voice was still low, but in every other respect he was a raging beast.
She fought with him, mentally and physically.
"You can't get anything out of her that way," Violet urged, as the man twisted under her strong hands. "Of course she'll say it's all lies. And you'd only be warning her. You don't want her to know that you know; you want a chance to block her game."
Partly convinced by this argument and partly subdued by the physical restraint that accompanied it, Dyker ceased his struggles.
"But I want to be sure," he muttered sullenly.
"You can't be sure by goin' to Miss Rose."
"Well, I ought to tell her." The high tide of his anger was slowly subsiding, and the rocky Dyker that she had built on was beginning to show its crest above the still hissing waves. "Look here, Violet," he said, "I'm sorry I behaved like such a fool. I beg your pardon, but you must see that I have got to put this thing up to Rose."
"You forget your promise."
"No, I don't, but I must make sure."
Violet thought rapidly.
"Listen," she said; "I told you I wanted you to do something for me an' you gave your word you'd do it.—Will you?"
"Of course I will, only I'm thinking a little about myself."
"This will help you, too."
"What do you want?"
Violet drew a long breath.
"I want you to go over to the avenue right away," she said, "and buy me a long cloak and a hat and bring them back, and then take me out of here without a word to anybody. You needn't walk more'n three squares with me, an' then I won't bother you no more."
Dyker drew away and whistled softly. His face grew quite composed again. The heavy lids fell over his eyes.
"So that's it, is it?" he asked.
"I want to get away," said Violet.
"And so you've cooked up this little mess of lies to make me the goat, eh?"
Violet felt the sands slipping beneath her feet. She laced her fingers together till the knuckles bruised her flesh.
"Don't do that," she pleaded; "don't take it that way; it's true, what I told you, every word of it. I only want you to keep your promise to me."
She stopped with a sob, and waited.
Wesley reached calmly for a glass of wine, drank it, put down the glass, thrust his hands deep into his trousers' pockets, and, stretching out his long legs, regarded, humming, the toes of his shining pumps.
"I don't believe you," he said at last.
"But, Mr. Dyker——"
"It's too thin."
"Even if it was a lie," Violet despairingly persisted, "you ought to help me. Do you know who I am?"
"That's the point."
"Do you know how I was brought here?"
"I can guess."
"I was tricked. The man said he wanted to marry me. I didn't know. I believed him. An' they beat me an' starved me and did things I couldn't think about an' couldn't help thinkin' about. An' all I want is just for you to do me this one little favor. I won't bother you. I won't blow on you——"
"What's that?"
"Oh, you know I wouldn't blow on you! I couldn't. I want to forget the whole thing. I've got friends to go to who'll get me work. I only want you to get me out of the door and safe away."
Like most men of his sort Dyker, although ready enough to make a living out of the results of cruelty, hated the sight of cruelty's self. The girl's words touched, though lightly, his selfish heart.
"But I can't afford to help you," he protested. "You see how I'm tied up here. I can't have Rose jump on me now."
"You know she's jumping on you already. You know she's knifing you in the back. The only way you can stop her is by using what I've told you."
"Of course," said Dyker in the tone of a man thinking aloud, "if she really was playing both ends against the middle, I could pull her teeth by going straight to O'Malley and telling him so."
Violet did not wholly understand this, but she agreed immediately.
"Of course you could," she said.
"And I suppose I could have her pinched then, if you'd testify against her. Would you do that? Would you go into court?"
Violet's fingers closed spasmodically.
"Just give me the chanc't," she said fervently.
"And of course there are other girls who've been in the same scrape here?"
"There's a new one upstairs this minute."
"There is? Um. That's good." He rattled the money in his pocket. "Only, look here," he persisted, "if you have been telling the truth, it will probably make me solid with O'Malley, but if you haven't, I'll go clean to smash."
Violet saw the turn of affairs and, with hope's revival, her mind cleared immediately.
"I haven't told you all," she said, "and I guess the rest will make you sure enough."
"There's more then?"
"A lot."
"What is it?"
"Will you help me out of here?"
"If you convince me.—Let's see; the shops around here are still open.—Yes, if you convince me, you'll be out of here in half an hour."
It was her only chance. She did not hesitate. She told him the whole of what she had heard of the later assuring interview between Rose and Angelelli.
This time he listened quietly, his face inscrutable.
"That all?" he asked when she had ended.
"That's all," she said.
"It's the truth?"
"Ain't I sayin' it proof that it's true? How could I make it up? I don't know all that it means."
"You knew enough to pass it on to me."
"Lucky for you I did, too; but I don't know all it means—how could I?—and you do know, an' that ought to be proof enough that it's God's truth, Mr. Dyker."
She stopped. Her case was with the jury.
Dyker rose.
"Cassie!" he called.
Violet leaped to her feet and laid her hands on his arm.
"What are you goin' to do?" she whispered.
He silenced her with a gesture.
"What you want," he said.
Cassie put her black head in at the door.
"Cassie," he continued, flipping the maid another dollar, "I'm a little off my feed. I'm going to the drugstore on the corner and get fixed up."
"Thank you, Miste' Dyker.—Ah kin go fer you, Miste' Dyker," said the negress. "Thank you, sah."
"No, thanks, Cassie, I can go myself; I want the air. But you can do something else for me. You can just not let this girl run away from me. I know she would run if she could, but I like her too well to let her, so if anybody wants her, just you say she's in here and engaged for the evening by me. I'll be back in fifteen minutes."
He left one door as the willingly assenting Cassie closed the other, and Violet flung herself on the sofa and buried her face in the cushions, now fearful that the servant, notwithstanding their precautions, had overheard her, now afraid that Dyker would change his purpose and fail to return, and again dreading that he might betray her to Rose. Since the night she had waited for Max to telephone in the café, since the terrible morning that had followed, it was the longest quarter of an hour that she had known, but it at last dragged its quivering length away. The doorbell rang. Cassie passed through the room to find Violet sitting suddenly upright, and at once returned with Dyker, his summer raincoat tossed across his arm.
As the servant left them, he lifted the coat. Below it, not wrapped in the paper usual to a new purchase, was a dark cloak. He unrolled it, uncovered a beaver hat, and handed them both to the panting Violet.
"Here you are," he said quietly.
She seized them and began to put them on.
"No," he cautioned, "on second thought, I guess I'd better carry them. The parlor door's open, and Evelyn and Fritzie are in there with a couple of men. I'll go ahead and open the vestibule door and the front door. Then you come by as if you were going upstairs."
"Evelyn'll come out to see if I have any money."
"She'll never learn that, though here, by the way, is a ten-dollar bill that will come in handy.—The doors will be open and I'll be on the pavement. Keep only a yard behind me. Riley's at the other end of his beat, and I have a cab at the curb. Ready?"
She could not speak, but she nodded her russet head.
He passed before her up the rosy twilight of the hall.
Violet, following, her lips tight, her breathing suspended, her heart pounding against her breast, was dimly aware of her own soft footfalls sounding hideously loud, of the blast of light and laughter from the parlor.
Dyker flung wide the vestibule door.
"Good-night!" he called to Evelyn.
"Going? Good-night!" Violet heard the Englishwoman answer.
She heard Evelyn rise. She heard the front door open. She saw Wesley raise his arm.
She hurried by the parlor door, and then, instead of turning to the stairs, gathered up her red kimona and ran through the vestibule, through a patch of soft, fresh darkness, and was tossed precipitately into a cab into which Dyker followed her just as the horse, under a quick blow, dashed madly up the street.
At the open cab-window the night air beat upon her fevered face. She drank it deep into her thirsting lungs. It was the wine of freedom.
The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it never sleeps.
The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army of the workers begins to scurry westward.
First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth, and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black. Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely silent.
The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed, whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out, selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.
At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves, but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours, selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts.
The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.
Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze.
But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.
Into this street—into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time—the cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. The girl, through the dark thoroughfares that had preceded it, had answered a score of questions, which Dyker had asked her, the fever of escape beating high in her breast and tossing ready replies to her heated lips; but now, in the roar and brilliance of Rivington Street's nocturnal traffic, there had come upon her a terror almost equal to that which had assailed her when, with Max for her guide, the lighted length of East Fourteenth Street had first unrolled itself before her. The city was again an inimical monster awaiting her descent from the cab, and the newly acquired habit of seclusion, the habit of the prisoner, recoiled upon her. Freedom was strange; it became awesome, and when the horse was stopped and Violet knew that she must soon fare alone, she cowered in a corner, breathing hard.
"Can't go no furder, boss," said the cabby, leaning far around from his seat. "Where to now?"
"Nowhere right away," answered Dyker. "Just stand where you are for a minute."
Then he turned to Violet.
"Now," he said, not unkindly, "I'm afraid I'll have to drop you here. It wouldn't do for me to figure publicly as an active agent in this case, you know. But you needn't worry. Just get out and walk to the next corner. Turn to your right, take the next cross-street to your left, go up the first narrow street you come to, and your friend's house ought to be about the third in the row. It will be a little dark, but you won't have any trouble finding it."
Violet hesitated.
"I hope I won't," she said.
"Surely not. If you have, just ask the way of the first policeman you see."
"Not a policeman, Mr. Dyker!"
"Of course, a policeman. He won't hurt you as long as you keep your cloak tight. Now, you're sure you've given me the right address?"
"I gave you the one the man gave me."
"Yes, but I mean you're not lying to me?"
Violet's wide eyes should have been sufficient denial.
"Why would I do that?" she asked.
"That's so; only I thought—well, I beg your pardon, Violet. You have my office-address on that card. I'll send for you in a day or two—be sure to be home every afternoon—and then we'll fix Madame Rose with the District-Attorney.—Good-by. Sure you're not afraid?"
Her gratitude would not permit her to acknowledge fear.
"Not afraid," she smiled, rather grimly.
"Then remember: the first street to your right, the next to your left, and then to your right again—third or fourth house in the row."
He opened the cab-door and alighted, holding out his hand.
She straightened her beaver hat, drew the folds of her dark cloak tightly over the betraying crimson of her kimona, and, helped by his grasp, followed him to the swarming curb.
"I—I don't know how to thank you," she said.
"Then don't try," returned Dyker, laughing easily. "You can make it all right with me when you testify against Rose."
She kept his hand a moment longer, partly in fear of the human multitude about her and partly in genuine gratitude.
"But I do thank you," she said.
Dyker, not too well liking the white light of publicity in which this little scene was being enacted, pressed her hand and dropped it.
"That's all right," he responded. "Just don't forget your promise." He stepped back into the cab. "Good-by, and good luck," he said.
"Good-by," he heard her answer, and then, with his head out of the cab-window, he saw her pause bewilderedly. "To your right," he cautioned.
He watched her turn. He saw her plunge into the crowd. He saw the crowd swallow her up.
"Take me over to my office," he ordered the driver, and added his address.
Once there, he dismissed the cab, climbed the steps of what seemed an old and modest little house, and, opening the door and turning into the front room, lit a gas-jet the flame of which revealed an apartment surprisingly new and arrogant. The walls were lined with new bookcases holding rows of new law-books, and surrounded by rows of new chairs. The flat-top desk in the center, at which his stenographer sat by daylight, was a new desk, with new wire-baskets upon it, and a new telephone, to which Dyker now immediately proceeded and called a number.
"Hello," he said into the transmitter, adopting the low tone that he always used in his wired conversations. "Is that Schleger's?—It is?—That you, Ludwig?—This is Dyker.—Yes, good-evening, Ludwig.—Yes, pretty good, thank you. How are you, and how's business?—That's good. Mrs. Schleger and the babies all right?—I'll bet that boy's gained three pounds!—He has? I'm glad to hear it. You're a wonder.—Yes.—That's what I said. And, say, Ludwig, is O'Malley anywhere around?—He isn't?—Hasn't been in this evening?—Oh! Well, I wonder where I can find him.—You don't? Perhaps he's at Dugan's place.—No, it's not anything important: I just wanted to take a drink with him, that's all. He's sure to be at Dugan's or Venturio's, but I guess I won't bother. Ever so much obliged, Ludwig.—Good-by."
In spite of his word, Dyker did, however, bother. He called three other numbers in his quest of the political boss, and when he found him, the underling made a pressing appointment for an important conference on the next morning, though what it was that he wanted then to discuss he carefully neglected to mention over a telephone-wire.
He hung up the receiver in a glow of satisfaction.
"And now," he said, "I think I'll get away for the night. I don't care to have any arguments with Rose for a day or two."
Yet, even as he said it, the telephone-bell uttered its staccato summons. He stood uncertainly beside the desk.
"She wouldn't have the nerve to use the wire," he argued. "Perhaps it's O'Malley with more to say."
Again the bell rang, and his curiosity overcame his caution. He took up the receiver.
"Hello!" he said sharply, and then his tone mellowed, for the voice that came to him across the hurrying New York night was the voice of Marian Lennox.
"Is that Mr. Dyker's office?" it asked.
"It is the head of the firm himself," he answered, "and mighty glad to hear from you."
"I am glad you're glad," the voice pursued, "because I want to ask a favor."
"It is as good as performed. What is it?"
"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I want you, please, to take me home."
"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are you?"
"At the settlement."
"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.
"Yes."
"Very well, I'll be over right away."
He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker, who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked the distance.
In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms, persist as only feminine natures can persist.
They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles, cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless, their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:
"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."
Dyker knew the place by reputation. He had always scorned it for its own sake, and now he had come to hate it for Marian's. For want of a better term, it may be repeated that he was in love with Marian. Moreover, he wished the assistance that an early marriage with the daughter of a wealthy department-store owner would give him in the coming campaign. And, finally, his peculiar legal activities were already well enough known on the East Side to make it probable that any young woman entering the settlement would speedily learn of them.
After the night of the opera his cooler reflection had rejected Marian's plan of joining the Rivington Street colony as a fervently girlish dream destined to fade before the reality of action. He had decided that the best way to aid its dissipation was no longer to combat it, and he had even, during the months that had followed, seen Marian but rarely, and never alone. Occupied with politics and knowing the tactical value of restraint, he had not so much as pressed his wooing. He had relied upon what he chose to describe as his sweetheart's basic commonsense to work out their common salvation, and had decided that, this commonsense being what he esteemed it, Marian was a woman more likely to be won by a Fabian campaign than by a Varric attack.
The point wherein these calculations erred was their underestimation of the momentum of a girlish impulse. That method of consideration which makes one slow to reach convictions works beyond the convictions and retards one from action upon them, once they are achieved, but the impulsive mind that bolts a creed unmasticated straightway drives its owner, in the creed's behalf, to the thumbscrews or the wrack. It is from the pods of half-baked opinions that there is shaken the seed of the church: Marian meant to keep to her purpose.
Perhaps Wesley's silence and the subtle sense of pique that it awakened played a part in this; perhaps the purpose was self-sufficient; but, in either case, Marian missed scarcely an evening at the settlement. Two of her former classmates were knee-deep in the work there, and what she saw and what they told her served only to confirm her. It thus happened that, anxious again to see him alone, and more anxious to let him know the endurance of her resolution, she had, on this evening, telephoned on the chance of finding him late at his office.
"Good heavens!" he gasped as she met him at the settlement's door. "What on earth are you doing in this part of town at this hour of the night? Let me 'phone for a taxi."
What, as a matter of fact, she had been doing was to listen to slim little Luigi Malatesta and fat little Morris Binderwitz respectively attacking and defending the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a greater American than George Washington; but what she thought she had been doing was assisting in raising the lower half of society. Under this impression, her fine brown eyes shone with the consciousness of moral rectitude, her mouth was even more than usually firm, and her head even more than usually like some delicate cameo.
"One thing at a time, please," she imperturbably answered. "First, no taxicab. It isn't far to Second Avenue, which is quiet enough, and I want to walk for a few blocks."
She took the arm that he grimly offered, and he began to break his way through the noisy crowd under the flaring gasoline lamps of the push-carts. Coherent conversation was at first impossible, but Dyker felt a glow of pride as, with her fingers closed in tight trust upon him, he shouldered a passage for her, and Marian herself was not insusceptible to the thrill inherent in the situation. Nevertheless, the girl, as soon as they had turned northward, reverted to her former attitude; and the man, knowing well that all this meant that she was still determined upon a course necessarily delaying his wooing and perhaps resulting in his discovery, frankly resumed his opposition. He did more and worse: he swept aside all his method of silence, all his plans of conquest through non-resistance.
"Now," he said, continuing their interrupted talk, "I should really like to know what you, of all people in the world, were doing on Rivington Street."
"I was there," she announced serenely, "because I have made up my mind that it is I, of all people in the world, who ought to be there."
"Marian,"—he almost stopped as he said it—"are you really in earnest about this fancy? Do you honestly mean that you are seriously considering any such chimerical course?"
He had, naturally, chosen precisely the tone that, were any additional incentive required, would have compelled her to resolution. Her mind, as it chanced, was, however, made up, and what he now said served only to turn her toward that feminine logic which assumes as done that which is determined.
"I am past consideration," she said. "I have already virtually begun."
"Marian! You're joking."
"I am simply stating a fact. Why do you suppose I have been staying in town this summer? I begin my real work at the settlement with the first of next week."
Her classmates in Rivington Street, could they have heard this, would have been pleased, but they would also have been surprised. Nevertheless, she at once mentally decided to make good her declaration.
In the darkness Dyker bit the lip that, under his short, crisp mustache, trembled with vexation.
"You really mean that?"
She bowed a brief assent.
"Then what, if you please, do you propose to do when you get there?"
As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain.
"You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you ought to know how the girls—hundreds and hundreds of them—are every week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to stop them."
It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of action and not enough to prove how little individual action individually directed can be worth.
For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would not admit them.
"But you can't!" he protested. "It is impossible that you should. It's inconceivable that a woman of your delicacy should go into such coarse work!"
"Is it better that it should be left to coarse women? It seems to me that there has been enough of coarseness in it already."
"But this—why, it's something that one can't even speak about!"
"Yes, something that we are not permitted even to mention, Wesley; and because we aren't permitted even to mention it, the thing grows and grows, night by night. It thrives in the shadow of our silence. They tell me that the liquor laws are broken, because nobody will mention it; that bestial men get rich in it, because nobody will mention it; that in this city alone there are three hundred saloon dance-halls intended to furnish its supply, because nobody will mention it!"
Figuratively, Dyker threw up his hands in horror, but actually, like all desperate men, he seized at the straws of detail.
"Now, that just shows how wrong your view of the whole subject happens to be," he declared. "My work has put me in a position to know something about these dance-halls, and I know that they exist simply because the girls that go to them want them to exist—the girls, mark you; not the men. Why, the girls aren't taken to such places; they go of themselves, they pay their own admission, and it is the usual thing for a girl earning six dollars a week in a store to save fifty cents out of every salary-envelope for the dance-halls."
"Then you want me to conclude that the fact that they want to do the thing makes the thing right?"
"You don't understand——"
"Precisely; and so I mean to learn."
"You can't learn. No matter how closely you study this whole matter, you can't learn, Marian. How can a clean-hearted, clean-lived American girl ever get the point of view of these low-down, low-browed foreigners? It's the sort of thing they're used to."
"Before they begin it?"
"It's the survival of the fittest."
"Then can't some be made more fit to survive?"
"It's the law of life, and it can't be stopped."
"So was negro slavery the law of life. It couldn't be stopped either—until we stopped it."
"That is all theory, Marian; it won't work out in practice. The great point is that these unfortunate women, whether they become unfortunate through the dance-halls or anywhere else, are simply not our sort of clay: they're not Americans."
"They are human beings."
"A pretty low example."
"And they are more Americans than your ancestors or mine were three hundred years ago."
"Nonsense. They're different, I tell you—different. Seriously, I know what I am talking about: I speak from systematic investigations, reports, statistics. The very latest investigation shows that all but about thirteen per cent. of these women were either born abroad or else are the children of foreign parents. It is always the newest immigrants that swell the ranks, and of course the newest immigrants are our lowest type."
"I don't see that all this alters the question."
"Well, it does."
"The lower they are, the more plainly it is our duty to raise them."
"My dear Marian, how can you raise them when you don't understand them?"
Marian shook her handsome head.
"Youwillcome back to that," she said; "and all that I can answer is that, not being utterly stupid, and having come to understand a few abstract problems, I have hopes of mastering something so close at hand to me and so concrete as a fellow human being."
"What, for instance?" asked Wesley, "can you understand of the typical Jewish girl of the East Side?"
"A good deal, I think. They were talking about that type at the settlement this evening. We were looking from the front windows at an endless stream of Jewish girls tramping home from the factories where they worked to the tenements where they slept. Somebody said there are nearly four hundred thousand Jews living east of the Bowery; that in most Jewish families the ambition to which every comfort must be sacrificed is the education of the boys; that for this reason the girls must work and are worked until there is nowhere else in the world where so much labor is got out of young women, and yet that the Jewess that is not married and a mother before she is twenty is regarded as a family disgrace. It seems to me, Wesley, that the case of those girls is pretty easy to understand. It seems to me that they are on the horns of a rather ugly dilemma."
Dyker's cane whipped the air as if it were striking at the heads of opposing arguments.
"You accept as gospel," he said, "everything that is told you by anybody but me. It isn't a pleasant subject, but, if you insist upon facts, let me tell you that there are troops of Jewesses who come down here from the upper Ghetto and walk the streets for no other purpose than to get money for their wedding trousseaus."
It was a blow at her conventions, and she shuddered; but she stood by her guns. They had crossed down Twenty-sixth Street now and they turned into the quiet of Madison Avenue, among comfortable houses and silent churches, as she answered.
"If they do that," she said, "it is because they have to."
"Have to? Why on earth should they have to?"
"I don't know, but I know that the very use they make of the money shows what they do is only a means and not an end."
"Are trousseaus so necessary that these girls have to sell their souls for them?"
"Souls have been sold for less. Even you and I make considerable sacrifices for things that other people in other classes would not think needful at all."
He had done his best to bridle his annoyance, but now he could bridle it no longer. He was wholly sincere in his inability to take seriously either the girl or her point of view, and now, though he felt as if he were riding a hunter at a butterfly, he charged blindly.
"Oh, please don't let us jump at sentiment and theory," he remonstrated; "let us keep our feet on figures and fact. The figures grow with the population; they always have so grown and they always will so grow. And the plain fact is that, though a few good people have been trying to stop this thing for four thousand years, they have never succeeded in doing anything but soiling themselves in the attempt."
"I know that," she frankly acknowledged, "and I don't know what it is that's to blame; but I know that there isn't any evil that hasn't some cure if we can only find it out."
"Then why not leave the search for a cure to the experienced?"
"I shall; but I propose to become one of the experienced. I mean to give my time, at least for a while, to first-hand study. Perhaps then I shall learn enough to know that it's useless for me to go on, but I shall keep trying to go on until I am convinced that there isn't any use in the trying."
"That's absurd, Marian—simply absurd. The condition is, after all, one that must be dealt with by the law, and I tell you honestly that, as yet, even the law is helpless."
"Has the law really tried? Has it ever attempted, for instance, to do anything to the men that take these immigrant girls at the dock and make slaves of them?"
"Yes, it has; it has tried just that. In Chicago two men were arrested for taking a couple of such girls—they had brought them from New York—and when the case was appealed, the United States Supreme Court found that, though importation of girls was a violation of federal law, yet the federal law providing a punishment for merelyharboringsuch girls after their arrival was unconstitutional."
Marian's voice faltered.
"Is—is that true?" she asked.
"Absolutely," said Dyker. Like most lawyers of his generation, his ideas of what was right were limited only by the final decisions of what was legal, and if the Supreme Court of the United States had, by even a majority of one, declared that the sun moved around the earth, Dyker would have first denied and then forgotten all previous astronomy.
"Absolutely," he repeated, and awaited her capitulation.
But Marian did not capitulate. She merely drew a long breath and answered:
"After all, that, of course, is just a small portion of the big question, and the only way it moves me is to lessen my opinion of the Supreme Court."
It was Wesley's turn to gasp, and he did so. He had always suspected that these college-settlements were hotbeds of Socialism and Anarchy—two theories that, to Dyker, were one and the same—and now he had his confirmation.
He was too cynically wrong upon one side of their subject to realize how emotionally wrong she, in her hope of accomplishment through personal appeal, might be upon the other. But here was a concrete denial of his one sincere conviction, and, though he was at last calm enough to see that he must not allow this conviction to wreck his suit, he was not so calm as to maintain a clear judgment. It was plain that Marian would not be turned from her experiment. His best course was, he then reasoned, immediately to put on record his opinion of its futility, even to quarrel with her in defense of that opinion, and then, when experience brought the awakening upon which his own worldly experience counted, to stand ready to profit by the inevitable reaction that would most likely show the perfidy of the women whom Marian hoped to help, detract from the credibility of any gossip they might recount concerning him, and end by winning him his wife.
"All right," he said sharply, "it is perfectly useless to talk reasonably to anybody that can take such a view of so simple a matter. Here is Thirty-fourth Street. I think we had better walk over to Broadway and get that taxi."
The worst thing that a man can impute to a handsome woman is a lack of intellect. Marian's cheeks flushed.
"I quite agree with you," she replied. "I am utterly incapable of arguing with anybody that so confuses law and justice."
"Very well," said Dyker; "but I want you to remember what I have said upon the subject as a whole. When you have trusted these women and been betrayed by them, when they have poisoned your mind against all the principles you have been brought up to believe, when you have left the world of sentiment and bruised your poor hands with hammering at the door of fact, then you will acknowledge that I have been right. I am not angry——"
"Oh, of course not!"
"I am not angry, but I am firm. I only ask you to believe that I shall never be far away from the settlement, and that you have only to telephone for me when you have need of me."
Marian compressed her lips to a more severe firmness, and the ride from Thirty-fourth Street to Riverside Drive was made in silence; but the following Monday found her, against all parental protests, enlisted as a settlement-worker in Rivington Street.
Michael M. O'Malley, political boss, held his court, that next morning, in the back room of Ludwig Schleger's saloon on Second Avenue, and, because it was to be a busy day and there were many pleas to be made and many petitions to be received, he came early to his post.
As he swung majestically up the street toward his destination, his carefully pressed light gray suit flapping in the warm breeze about a figure so tall and so thin that any suit approaching "a fit" would have achieved only a caricature, his progress was almost regal. Pedestrians stepped to one side as if the bulk of his unseen dignity demanded a far wider strip of the paved channel than was required by his visible physique. Workingmen touched their grimy caps, the overseers of the street-repairing gangs bowed respectfully, children on their way to school bobbed their heads, and, at a corner, Officer Riley, concluding a substitute week "on the day turn," offered his best military salute. The keeper of every news-stand received a nod; the bootblacks outside of each saloon were given a brief word of greeting; there was not a beggar but got some largess, and of the several men that hurried up with a request, hinted or expressed, all were permitted to walk a few steps in the august presence, all received a brief, civil phrase of agreement, postponement, or consideration.
"Trouble about your place?" It was thus that O'Malley interrupted the voluble plea of a saloon-keeper that approached him. "I'll have that cop, Conners, looked into. His eyes are too new; they see more'n they're paid to see. Who's tendin' day-bar for you? Johnny Mager? All right, if they take the thing up front, I'll see that you get your license transferred in his name. Keep your shirt on an' leave it to me."
He had not paused in his walk; he had not raised his quiet voice or quickened his slow speech; but the suppliant retired satisfied, reassured.
Indeed, O'Malley's face was one that, if it would not inspire confidence in a stranger unacquainted with the man's reputation for guarding the interests of his dependents, at least bore the unmistakable stamp of that knowledge of life which is power. It was sallow and long, with a long thin nose and long thin lips, and cold eyes that thrust as swiftly and as deeply as the stilettos of Mr. O'Malley's Italian constituents. He smiled often and his smile was bitter; he spoke little and his words were short; but his servants had early learned that he was as sure to keep his promise as he was ready to give it, and that, so long as his tasks were well done, he was an indulgent master.
He entered "Schleger's place" with the air of an owner, nodded to the white-jacketed man behind the polished counter and before the polished mirror, and gave a quick, firm pressure to the plump, outstretched hand of the fat and grinning proprietor.
"All well with the family?" he asked, smiling his wry smile.
Ludwig Schleger beamed assent.
"Anything doing last night?"
"Nothin'," replied Ludwig. "'Ceptin' Mr. Dyker called you on the telephone. Wouldn't say what he wanted."
"I know that. Haven't had any more roughhousing?"
"No," grinned Schleger, wisely; "the boys are all got wise that they can't meddle with my new night-man."
"I see. Name's Hermann Hoffmann, ain't it?"
"That's right."
"Hum. Well, he may be useful. You must get him to move into this precinct, or else register him from here. Votes right, of course?"
"I ain't asked him yet."
"Do it to-night."
O'Malley walked to the dimly lighted back-room, hung with racing prints and framed lithographs advertising a wide variety of whiskeys. He drew a wicker-bottomed chair to a stained round table, and sat down.
The proprietor brought him a glass and a syphon of seltzer—the boss's only drink—and disappeared. The bar-keeper came with a handful of black cigars for which O'Malley paid with a bill, refusing the change, and also disappeared. Then the door of communication was shut and guarded, admission being denied to all persons not properly accredited, and the quiet, thin man in the light gray suit, now sipping his seltzer, now reflectively adjusting his bright blue tie, which bore a brilliant diamond pin, and always slowly smoking, began his conference with such callers as he had granted appointments.
They came in force—alone and in groups—all manner of men by the main entrance and a woman or two ushered through a side door. This one was promised a reward for duty to be done, that one assigned to the performance of a delicate piece of diplomacy. Now and then a short, sharp, cold reprimand for negligence or failure sent away a caller whipped, penitent, trembling; and here and there release was promised for a wayward son sent to "The Island," or a line of credit written for use at a grocer's shop.
Wesley Dyker came early. He paused at the bar for a drink to stiffen his courage, lingered a little longer until a predecessor had been dismissed, and then, his lids lowered, entered, alone, with a succinct account of Rose's attempt to play a double game.
When he had finished the narrative, O'Malley sat for a while gazing unconcernedly at the blackened ceiling, and smoking quietly.
"Well?" he said at last, and turned the sharp thrust of his gaze upon his caller.
Dyker, who was sitting opposite and who had been served with a drink of whiskey, tossed off the liquor in order to gain time to muster an answer for this unexpected query.
"Well," he at length replied, annoyed at thus being put into a position where he must make his proposition in the form of a request, "are you going to stand for that sort of thing?"
"I dunno."
"Iwouldn't stand for it," said Dyker.
"If you had my job you might have to."
There was another pause. The long fingers of O'Malley tapped gently on the table. Dyker shifted uneasily in his seat.
"I wouldn't stand for it a minute!" he at last broke forth. "And what's more, you can have her up for something worse than the disorderly-house charge. She has one kidnapped girl in her house now, and I've got another that escaped from her, and who's ready to testify."
An instant later he was sorry that he had spoken so readily.
O'Malley tilted back against the wall until the front legs of his chair rose six inches from the floor. He blew an easy ring of smoke.
"You seem to have come here with your case all prepared," he remarked.
Wesley flushed and stammered.
"You see," he began, "I mean that I got hot at this, and I said to myself that it was only right to let you know this woman wasn't to be depended upon."
The forward legs of O'Malley's chair came down with a loud thump. Wesley started, but the boss only impaled him with another cold glance.
"See here," said he, "before we can do business we'd better altogether understand each other. Just what is it you want?"
"I—I think I've made that clear."
"Ithink not."
"I want this Légère woman pinched for running a white-slave place. I want to see her taught a lesson that the other women down her way will profit by."
"Of course you do. But what do you want for yourself?"
The issue was too conclusively joined to permit of further evasion. Wesley took his courage in his hands.
"Why, I've not made any secret of that," he said, "and neither has headquarters. I want the next election for magistrate. I told you that long ago."
He launched his declaration with the bravado of weakness at bay, and then breathlessly awaited the answer.
Michael O'Malley leaned back again in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and closed his keen eyes, reflecting.
His was an hereditary office, but, unlike most men that inherit power, he had inherited also the abilities that had gained the power. His father, who had begun life as a policeman, had been a great exemplar of the political uses of an element fully realized only by the expert politician: the human element. The name of O'Malley had now for a generation been, south of Fourteenth Street, a magic title. To a legion of men, women, and children, it stood for a sort of substitute, and very near and practical, Providence. It implied contact, fellow-feeling, the personal relation. Acting upon the politician's axiom that whatever is acquired is right, the elder O'Malley had risen from the street force until, after zealous party-work, he had been promoted, in the palmy days of policy and the pool-rooms, to the "Gambling Squad," where he had performed the astounding financial feat of saving eight times his monthly salary, had retired, and grown annually richer and stronger through politics, without once losing the esteem of his voting underlings, or once seeming to cease being one of them. Since his father's death, now that gambling had declined and prostitution had risen as political material, Michael, who had been brought up to the business, had filled the place of that genuinely mourned parent. Without any publicly acknowledged means of support, even with no headquarters save the daily shifted back-rooms of saloons, he had extended and increased the power and the fortune that had been left to him. He was known as the friend of the distressed; he was recognized as benefiting with his left hand the poor whom he unimpededly robbed with his right. To those who were without money or without assistance he was always accessible. He made festival with the merry and was readily sympathetic with them that mourned. By small gifts at all times and large gifts in days of emergency, by acting as the adviser, the employment-agent, the defender, from the law, of the people whom he exploited and upon whose weaknesses and vices he throve, he won and held fast both the tribute and the allegiance of the vicious and the weak.
It was a mighty position and yet one that, in moments like the present, was inherently delicate, one in which the fortunate man must move warily lest in gaining a new friend he lose an old. It is all very well to be temperate and profit by drunkenness, to be abstemious and take money from prostitution; it is easy to give presents at Christmas and picnics in summer when the giving is in reality only paying a small rebate to wives for drunken husbands, to mothers for daughters stolen. It is easy to find a place in the municipal government for the man that stuffs a ballot-box for you, or the procurer that registers your fraudulent votes from the houses of his customers; but it is fatal to punish, for what may be a passing disloyalty, anyone that your world, perhaps ignorant that offense has been committed, regards as having been placed by a careless Heaven under your protecting wing,—fatal, that is to say, unless you acquire something more than you throw away.
Of all this, though scarcely with such frankness of phrase, Michael O'Malley made thought before he gave Dyker the reply for which that clever young lawyer was waiting. Behind his closed eyes he weighed the chances carefully: the things to be gained against the things that might be lost.
Then he thoughtfully lit another black cigar.
"You've got to keep out of personal relations with these women," he yawned.
Dyker bit his lip.
"I don't have them," he replied.
"Yes, you do. Cut 'em out. Understand?"
Surprisedly, angrily, Dyker found himself bowing obedience, like a school-urchin detected in some breach of academic discipline.
"A woman with a past," continued O'Malley, "is all right for the present, but a slow mare in the futurity."
"I dare say you're correct," said Wesley Dyker. With a single blow of the whip, the master had demonstrated his mastery.
O'Malley smoked a while longer in silence.
"Now then," he at last pursued, "about this magistracy. You think the boys'll stand for you?"
"I think they will," Wesley replied, with humble mien, but rising assurance. "And I think it ought to make the ticket look better to the uptown people to have—if you will pardon my saying so—my sort of name on it."
O'Malley grunted.
"Don't you worry about the looks of the ticket, or the value of your sort of a name," he said. "The kid-glove game is played out; it's only the monkey who's always hopping about on his family-tree."
Dyker's courage ebbed again, but he knew that to stand upon his dignity was to be overthrown.
"At all events," he persisted, "I am pretty well known hereabouts by this time, and I think honestly that I am pretty well liked."
O'Malley nodded. He knew more about that than Dyker knew. Dyker had, with more or less direct assistance from O'Malley's own headquarters, already won some prominence for himself, and had been of some use to the organization, in that sort of legal-practice which is a highly specialized branch of the profession on the lower East Side. The purpose of that branch is simply the protection of the criminal, especially the criminal engaged in the procuring or confining of slave-girls, but its methods, far from being unusual, are merely a daring extension of the methods that, within the last decade, have increased in popularity among the seemingly more respectable practitioners. Evidence is manufactured or destroyed, according to immediate needs; favorable witnesses are taught favorable testimony; postponements are secured until a politically indebted judge is on the bench. There follows a formal bellowing against what are called invasions of inalienable personal rights, and then there comes a matter-of-course acquittal. With Dyker's ability in this sort of work O'Malley was thoroughly familiar; for this man's party-services he was sufficiently grateful, and with the chance of the lawyer's rise to a popularity that would be of still further help he was well satisfied.
"If you'd be elected," he at length reflectively remarked, "you'd have a mighty responsible position, Dyker."
"I know that."
"There would be a good many ways"—O'Malley knocked, with great deliberation, the ash from his cigar—"a good many ways in which you could help the party—if you'd be elected."
He seemed to be discussing, disinterestedly, a purely abstract question; but Dyker did not miss his meaning.
"I shouldn't overlook them," he said.
"And,if you'd be elected, there'd be a lot of ways in which you might hurt—the party."
"I scarcely think you have any just cause for apprehension upon that score, Mr. O'Malley. I think that my record speaks for itself. My record is regular; it is an open book to the whole city——"
"Never mind that, Dyker; it's an open book to me, anyhow."
"I'm aware of it; but then——"
"All I want to know is two things."
"And they are, Mr. O'Malley?"
"First, are you the kind that lose their head over a good thing and land in jail?"
"Does my law-practice seem to indicate that I should be likely to overstep legal limits?"
"No, I guess it don't. But you can't always tell; we can't afford no hogs; and that sort of a man gives all his friends a black eye."
"But I say to you——"
"And next, I want to know, Mr. Dyker, whether you're the kind of a man that don't forget them that put him where he's at."
The low, slow spoken sentence ended with a sudden click of Mr. O'Malley's long, vulpine jaws. He leaned quickly forward across the table and fixed Wesley with the stiletto of his eyes.
Dyker met that gaze steadily. He leaned, in his turn, toward O'Malley, and his own voice dropped to a whisper. There was an exchange of a dozen sentences, and the two men had arrived at a perfect understanding: Dyker was as good as elected.
O'Malley pressed the call-button.
"Billy," he said to the bar-keeper, "have somebody run out and bring in Larry Riley off his beat. I want to see him."
As the bar-keeper nodded and disappeared, Dyker started to rise.
"I don't know whether Riley had better see me here," he said. "Rose's house is on his regular beat."
"All the more reason to sit tight," replied the comprehending O'Malley. "What's the use of gettin' square with a person unless the person knows who done it?"
"But I am not sure that Riley would be a safe man to confide this to. He's naturally a friend of Rose's."
"He's more of a friend of mine."
The officer entered a minute later, his flushed face gravely attentive, his helmet in his hand.
"Riley," said O'Malley, "you know this Légère woman."
"I do that, Mr. O'Malley, sir."
"Well, she's been gettin' too gay. When you go off duty, you tell Jim to have her place pinched to-night."
Riley's cheeks became a shade less red.
"It's sorry I am to hear, sir, that she's been misbehavin' of herself," he murmured.
"Sure you're sorry. Tell Jim to get there early: we don't want nobody but the women."
"What"—Riley wet his dry lips—"What's the charge?"
"Runnin' a white-slave joint. You're to be sure to get a girl she has in the third floor back."
O'Malley's tone had been conclusive; it indicated that the interview was at an end; but the big officer stood twirling his helmet between his large hands.
"Mr. O'Malley, sir?" he began.
"What is it, Riley?"
"There's nothin' else?"
"Nuthin'."
"An'—there ain't no other way out of it for Mrs. Légère?"
"No, there ain't. But you can report her house and get the credit yourself, Riley."
"Thank ye kindly, sir; but if ye don't mind, sir, I think I'd rather let someone get it as nades it more. Ye see, Mr. O'Malley, sir, this here Mrs. Légère has been powerful kind to me, an'——"
"All right, have it your own way."
"I—I can't do nothin' for her, Mr. O'Malley?"
"Not this time. That's all, Riley.—And, Riley——"
The thin boss stood up and crossed to the bulky policeman. His voice was still low and soft.
"Yis, Mr. O'Malley?"
"If that woman gets wind of this an' makes a getaway, I'll have your uniform off you so God damned quick you'll wish I'd skinned you alive."
"Yis, Mr. O'Malley, sir," said the officer. "No fear of that, sir."
But he left the audience-chamber with a heavy heart. He lived the life that he was compelled to live, and he did what he was ordered to do, but he could not without compunction turn upon one that had bought a right to his own and his superior's protection.
There was not a little silent bitterness in his heart as, later, returning to the station-house, he thought upon these things. He remembered the days when he had been new upon the force. Those were the days when the popular tide had turned against gambling and, amid the raids that meant the breaking of steel doors, the pursuit of offenders through secret passages and across steep roofs, it was for a while possible for a policeman to retain his ideals. But he remembered also how, when the ruling powers had thus been forced to destroy the nests where once they had gathered golden eggs, the long arm of necessity swung slowly backward until it paused at the point where it had since remained and, because the eggs must be gathered somewhere, the police were expected to gather them from the aeries of the vultures that preyed upon women.
Riley had not minded, every pay-day, handing over to the appointed heeler the five dollars wherefor he received a receipt for a dollar and a half as dues to the political club to which he was expected to belong. For quite some time he had been content with closing his eyes to saloons that were opened on Sundays by proprietors that were powerful, and with allowing others to profit by the rewards of his voluntary blindness. But at last there came the first baby in the Riley home, and then the second, and the wife's long illness; and then assessments were increased and, finally, after many a broad hint from the men higher up, he was given plainly to understand that he must either hand over a goodly portion of money, every week, from the offending women on his beat, or else lose his usefulness to the force.