Chapter I: Pitch My Tent (13)

I decided that I must get out into the air; so, mumbling something to the surprised clerk about returning shortly, I bolted from the office and walked around the block. As I look back at it now, I was a rather pitiable object. I was undoubtedly in what, if I were speaking and not writing, I should call "the deuce of a funk"; but for the sake of fine English, I will term it a panic. My heart was beating, my mouth was dry, my knees were weak. I came very near darting off every time I reached a corner, and I should certainly have done so but for the knowledge that if I did I should never get up the courage to come back again. So I stuck and finally screwed up my courage to return to the office; but every object and detail in those streets through which I passed that morning are fastened in my mind as if they had been stamped there by a stroke of lightning.

When I walked in again the clerk said, Yes, Mr. Leigh had returned. Would I take a seat for a moment? I sat down in what was a chair of torture. A man under certain stress is at a great disadvantage in a chair. If he be engaged in reflection, the chair is a proper place for him; but if in action, he should stand. Every moment was an added burden for me to carry, which was not lightened when young Canter walked out of the office and with a surly glance at me passed on.

The clerk took my card, entered the door, and closed it after him. I heard a dull murmur of voices within, and then after what appeared to me an interminable wait, he reappeared and silently motioned me in. I hated him for months for that silent gesture. It seemed like Fate.

As I entered, a man past middle age with a strong face, a self-contained mouth and jaw, a calm brow, and keen eyes glanced up from a note he was writing and said:

"Excuse me a moment if you please. Won't you take a seat?"

I sat with the perspiration breaking out as I watched the steady run of his pen over the sheet. I felt as a criminal must who watches the judge preparing to pass sentence. At length he was through. Then he turned to me.

"Well, Mr. Glave?"

I plunged at once into my subject.

"Mr. Leigh, I am a young lawyer here, and I have come to ask your permission to pay my addresses to your daughter."

"Wha-t!" His jaw positively fell, he was so surprised. But I did not give him time.

"I have no right to ask it--to ask any favor of you, much less a favor which I feel is the greatest any man can ask at your hands. But I--love her--and--I--I simply ask that you will give me your consent to win her if I can." I was very frightened, but my voice had steadied me, and I was gazing straight in his eyes.

"Does my daughter know of this extraor--of this?" He asked the question very slowly, and his eyes were holding mine.

"I hardly know what she may divine. I told her once that I thought a gentleman should not--should not try to marry a gir--a lady until he had asked her father's permission, and she is so clear-minded that I hardly know----"

"Does she know of your attachment?"

"Yes, sir. I mean, I told her once--I----"

"I thought you said you thought a gentleman had no right to speak to her until he had gained her father's consent!" A slight scorn had crept into his face.

"Yes, sir, I did--something like that, though not quite that--but----"

"How then do you reconcile the two?" He spoke calmly, and I observed a certain likeness to his daughter.

"I do not--I cannot. I do not try. I only say that in my cooler moments my principle is stronger than my action. I gave way to my feelings once, and declared myself, but when I got hold of myself I felt I should come to you and give you some account of myself."

"I see." I began to hope again, as he reflected.

"Does my daughter reciprocate this--ah--attachment?

"No, sir. I wish to God she did; but I hope that possibly in time--I might prevail on her by my devotion." I was stammering along awkwardly enough.

"Ah!"

"I am only asking your permission to declare myself her suitor to try to win--what I would give the world to win, if I had it. I have no hope except that which comes from my devotion, and my determination to win. I have nothing in the world except my practice; but mean to succeed." I had got more confidence now. I went on to give him an account of myself, and I tried to tell him the truth, though doubtless I gave myself the natural benefit of a friendly historian. I told him frankly of my unfortunate experience in the matter of the contribution to the _Trumpet_--though I did not conceal my views on the main subject, of the corporation's relation to the public. I must say that Mr. Leigh appeared an interested auditor, though he did not help me out much. At the end, he said:

"Mr. Glave, I have some confidence in my daughter, sufficient--I may say--to have decided for some time back to allow her to manage her own affairs, and unless there were some insuperable objection in any given case, I should not interfere. This is one of the vital affairs in life in which a man has to fight his own battle. I refer you to my daughter. If there were an insuperable objection, of course I should interfere." I wondered if he knew of Canter, and took some hope from his words.

The only thing that gave me encouragement was that he said, just as I was leaving:

"Mr. Glave, I used to know your father, I believe. We were at college together." I think I must have shown some feeling in my face, for he added, "We were very good friends," and held out his hand. I came away drenched with perspiration; but I felt that I had made a step in the direction of winning Eleanor Leigh, and almost as if I had gained a friend. At least, I liked him, as self-contained as he was, for he looked at times like his daughter.

That evening Miss Leigh observed something unusual in her father's expression, and finally, after waiting a little while for him to disclose what he had on his mind, she could stand it no longer.

"Dad, what is it?" she demanded.

Mr. Leigh gazed at her quizzically.

"Well, I have had a rather strenuous day. In the first place, I got a letter from Henry Glave." Miss Eleanor's eyes opened.

"From Henry Glave! What in the world is he writing to you about?"

"He has offered me assistance," said Mr. Leigh. He took from his pocket a letter, and tossed it across the table to her, observing her with amusement as her expression changed. It, possibly, was not the Henry Glave she had had in mind.

As she read, her face brightened. "Isn't that fine! I thought he would--" She stopped suddenly.

"You wrote to him?" said Mr. Leigh.

"Yes, but I didn't know he would. I only asked his advice--I thought maybe, he possibly might--knowing how he liked you. This will help us out? You will accept his offer, of course?"

Mr. Leigh nodded. "I am considering it. It was certainly very good in him. Not every man is as grateful these times. My only question is whether I ought to accept his offer."

"Why not?"

Mr. Leigh did not answer for a moment, he was deep in reflection, reviewing a past in which two older men who bore my name had borne a part, and was trying to look forward into the future. Presently he replied:

"Well, the fact is, I am very hard pressed."

For answer Eleanor sprang up and ran around to him, and throwing her arm about his neck, kissed him. "You poor, dear old dad. I knew you were in trouble; but I did not like to urge you till you got ready. Tell me about it."

Mr. Leigh smiled. It was a patronizing way she had with him which he liked while he was amused by it.

"Yes. I'm--the fact is, I'm pretty near--" He paused and reflected; then began again, "What would you say if I were to tell you that I am almost at the end of my resources?"

The girl's countenance fell for a second, then brightened again almost immediately.

"I shouldn't mind it a bit, except for you."

Mr. Leigh heaved a sigh which might have been a sigh of relief.

"You don't know what it means, my dear."

"Oh! Yes, I do."

"No-o. It means giving up--everything. Not only all luxuries; but--" He gazed about him at the sumptuous surroundings in his dining-room, "but all this--everything. Horses, carriages, servants, pictures--everything. Do you understand?"

"Everything?" Eleanor's voice and look betrayed that she was a little startled.

"Yes," said her father with a nod and a sigh. "If I assign, it would all have to go, and we should have to begin afresh."

"Very well. I am ready. Of course, I don't want to be broke; but I am ready. Whatever you think is right. And I would rather give up everything--everything, than have you worried as you have been for ever so long. I have seen it."

"Nelly, you are a brick," said her father fondly, looking at her in admiration. "How did you ever happen to be your Aunt Sophy's niece?"

"Her half-niece," corrected the girl, smiling.

"It was the other half," mused Mr. Leigh.

"Tell me about it, father. How did it come? When did it happen?" she urged, smoothing tenderly the hair on his brow.

"It didn't happen. It came. It has been coming for a long time. It is the conditions----"

"I know, those dreadful conditions. How I hate to hear the word! We used to get them when we were at Miss de Pense's school,--we had to work them off--and now people are always talking about them."

"Well, these conditions," said Mr. Leigh smiling, "seem a little more difficult to work off. I am rated as belonging to the capitalists and as opposed to the working class. The fact is I am not a capitalist; for my properties are good only while in active use, all my available surplus has gone into their betterment for the public use, and I am a harder-worked man than any laborer or workman in one of my shops or on one of my lines."

"That you are!" exclaimed his daughter.

"I belong to the class that produces, and we are ground between the upper and the nether millstones. Do you see?"

Eleanor expressed her assent.

"The fire, of course, cost us a lot."

"It was set on fire," interrupted his daughter. "I know it."

"Well, I don't know--possibly. It looks so. Anyhow, it caught us at the top notch, and while the insurance amounts to something, the actual loss was incalculable. Then came the trouble with the bank. So long as I was there they knew they could not go beyond the law. So Canter and the others got together, and I got out, and, of course----"

"I know," said his daughter.

"They asked me to remain, but--I preferred to be free."

"So do I."

"I had an overture to-day from the Canters," said Mr. Leigh, after a moment of reflection. "I do not quite know what it means, but I think I do."

"What was it?" Eleanor looked down with her face slightly averted.

"Jim Canter came from his father to propose--to suggest a _modus vivendi_, as it were. It means that they have started a blaze they cannot extinguish--that they are having trouble with their people, and fear that our people are coming around, but it means something further, too, I think." Mr. Leigh ceased talking, and appeared to be reflecting.

"What?" said the girl, after waiting a moment.

"You know--your aunt--however--" He paused.

She rose and faced him.

"Father, I wouldn't marry him to save his life--and I have told both him and Aunt Sophia so." Mr. Leigh gave a sigh of relief.

"You, of course, declined the proposal they made?" said Eleanor.

"I did--I think they have broken with the Argand interest. I saw your aunt to-day, and had a talk with her. I think her eyes are opened at last. I told her a few plain truths."

He dropped into reflection and a quizzical expression came into his eyes.

"I had a very remarkable thing happen to me to-day."

"What was it?" demanded his daughter.

"I had an offer of marriage made me."

Eleanor Leigh's face changed--at first it grew a shade whiter, then a shade redder.

"I know who it was," she said quickly.

"Oh!" Mr. Leigh shut his lips firmly. "I did not know."

"She is a cat! She has been sending me flowers and opera tickets all winter, and deluging me with invitations. I knew she was up to something." She spoke with growing feeling, as her father's eyes rested on her placidly with an amused expression in them. "I wouldn't be such easy game. Why, dad, she'd bore you to death--and as to me, I wouldn't live in the house with her--I couldn't." She stood with mantling cheek and flashing eye, a young Amazon girded for battle.

"I will relieve you," said her father. "It is not the feline-natured lady you have in mind; but a person quite different." Miss Eleanor looked relieved.

"Dad--it couldn't be--it was not Aunt Sophia? That would explain a lot of things. You know I think she's been laying some snares lately. She even forgave me when I told her the other evening that that was the last time I would ever accept an invitation from Mr. Canter, even as a favor to her. Dad, she'd make you miserable. You couldn't."

"No," said Mr. Leigh. "In fact, it was not a lady at all. It was a person of the opposite sex, and the proposal was for your hand."

"Dad! Who was it? Now, dad." She moved around the table to him, as Mr. Leigh, with eyes twinkling over his victory, shut his mouth firmly. "Dad, you'd just as well tell me at once, for you know I am going to know, so you might as well tell me and save yourself trouble. Who was it?"

Mr. Leigh took her firmly by the arms and seated her on his knee.

"Well, it was a young man who appeared quite in earnest."

"It wasn't--no, I know it wasn't he--he wouldn't have done that--and it wasn't--" (she pondered) "no, it wasn't he--and it wasn't--" She suddenly paused. "Tell me, what did he say? How did you like him? What did you say to him?"

"So you have settled who it is. Perhaps, you sent him to me?"

"Indeed, I did not, and I don't know who it was. What did you tell him?"

"I told him you were of age----"

"I am not. I am twenty."

"No, I told him you were too young--to think of such a thing----"

"I am twenty," repeated the girl.

"That is what I told him," said Mr. Leigh, "and that I thought you were able to take care of yourself."

The girl rested her chin on his head and went off in a reverie.

"Dad, we must hold together," she said. Her father drew her face down and kissed her silently. "The man who takes you away from me will have to answer with his life," he said.

"There is no one on earth who could," said Eleanor.

XXXVI

THE RIOT AND ITS VICTIM

It is a terrible thing for a man with a wife and children to see them wasting away with sheer starvation, to hear his babes crying for bread and his wife weeping because she cannot get it for them. Some men in such a situation drown their sorrow in drink; others take a bolder course, and defy the law or the rules of their order.

The Railway Company, still being forced to run their cars, undertook to comply with the requirement, even though the protection of the police was withheld. The police were instructed, indeed, to be present and keep the peace, and a few were detailed, but it was known to both sides that no real protection would be granted. Coll McSheen's order to the force bore this plainly on its face--so plainly that the conservative papers roundly denounced him for his hypocrisy, and for the first time began to side decisively with the company.

The offer of increased wages to new men was openly scouted by the strikers generally. But in a few houses the situation was so terrible that the men yielded. One of these was the empty and fireless home of McNeil. The little Scotchman had had a bitter experience and had come through it victorious; but just as he was getting his head above water, the new strike had come--against his wishes and his vote. He had held on as long as he could--had held on till every article had gone--till his wife's poor under raiment and his children's clothes had gone for the few dollars they brought, and now he was face to face with starvation. He walked the streets day after day in company with a sad procession of haggard men hunting for work, but they might as well have hunted on the arctic floes or in the vacant desert. For every stroke of work there were a hundred men. The answer was everywhere the same: "We are laying men off; we are shutting down."

He returned home one night hungry and dejected to find his wife fainting with hunger and his children famished. "I will get you bread," he said to the children, and he turned and went out. I always was glad that he came to me that night, though I did not know till afterward what a strait he was in. I did not have much to lend him, but I lent him some. His face was haggard with want; but it had a resolution in it that impressed me.

"I will pay it back, sir, out of my first wages. I am going to work to-morrow."

"I am glad of that," I said, for I thought he had gotten a place.

The next morning at light McNeil walked through the pickets who shivered outside the car-barn, and entered the sheds just as their shouts of derision and anger reached him. "I have come to work," he said simply. "My children are hungry."

The first car came out that morning, and on the platform stood McNeil, glum and white and grim, with a stout officer behind him. It ran down by the pickets, meeting with jeers and cries of "Scab! scab!" and a fusillade of stones; but as the hour was early the crowd was a small one, and the car escaped. It was some two hours later when the car reappeared on its return. The news that a scab was running the car had spread rapidly, and the street near the terminus had filled with a crowd wild with rage and furiously bent on mischief. As the car turned into a street it ran into a throng that had been increasing for an hour and now blocked the way. An obstruction placed on the track brought the car to a stop as a roar burst from the crowd and a rush was made for the scab. The officer on the car used his stick with vigor enough, but the time had passed when one officer with only a club could hold back a mob. He was jerked off the platform, thrown down, and trampled underfoot. The car was boarded, and McNeil, fighting like a fury, was dragged out and mauled to death before any other officers arrived. When the police, in force, in answer to a riot-call, reached the spot a quarter of an hour later and dispersed the mob, it looked as if the sea had swept over the scene. The car was overturned and stripped to a mere broken shell; and on the ground a hundred paces away, with only a shred of bloody clothing still about it, lay the battered and mutilated trunk of what had been a man trying to make bread for his children, while a wild cry of hate and joy at the deed raged about the street.

The men who were arrested easily proved that they were simply onlookers and had never been within fifty feet of the car.

The riot made a fine story for the newspapers, and the headlines were glaring. The victim's name was spelled according to the fancy of the reporter for each paper, and was correctly published only two days later.

The press, except the _Trumpet_, while divided in its opinion on many points, combined in its denouncement of the murder of the driver, and called on the city authorities to awake to the gravity of the situation and put down violence. It was indeed high time.

Moved by the similarity of the name to my friend McNeil, I walked over that afternoon to that part of the city where he had lived. It was one of the poorest streets of the poor section. The street on which I had lived at the old Drummer's, with its little hearth-rug yards, was as much better than it as the most fashionable avenue was better than that. The morass, like a moving bog, had spread over it and was rapidly engulfing it.

The sidewalks were filled with loafers, men and women who wore the gloomiest or surliest looks. As I passed slowly along, trying to read the almost obliterated numbers, I caught fragments of their conversation. A group of them, men and women, were talking about the man who had been killed and his family. The universal assertion was that it served him right, and his family, too. I gleaned from their talk that the family had been boycotted even after he was dead, and that he had had to be buried by the city, and, what was more, that the cruel ostracism still went on against his family.

"Ay-aye, let 'em starve, we'll teach 'em to take the bread out of our mouths," said one woman, while another told gleefully of her little boy throwing stones at the girl as she came home from outside somewhere. She had given him a cake for doing it. The others applauded both of these. The milk of human kindness appeared to be frozen in their breasts.

"Much good it will do you! Do you get any more money for doing it?" said an old man with round shoulders and a thin face; but even he did not seem to protest on account of the cruelty. It was rather a snarl. Two or three young men growled at him; but he did not appear afraid of them; he only snarled back.

I asked one of the men which house was the one I was seeking. He told me, while half a dozen hooted something about the "scab."

When I came to the door pointed out I had no difficulty in recognizing it. The panels and sides were "daubed" up with mud, which still stuck in many places, showing the persecution which had been carried on. Inside, I never saw a more deplorable sight. The poor woman who came to the door, her face drawn with pain and white with terror, and her eyes red with weeping, would not apparently have been more astonished to have found a ghost on the steps. She gave a hasty, frightened glance up the street in both directions, and moaned her distress.

"Won't you step inside?" she asked, more to get the door closed between her and the terror of the street than out of any other feeling; and when I was inside, she asked me over again what I wanted. She could not take in that I had called out of charity; she appeared to think that it was some sort of official visit. When she found out, however, that such was my object, the effect was instantaneous. At first she could not speak at all; but after a little she was calm enough and poured out all her woes. She went over anew how her husband had come over from Scotland several years before and they had been quite comfortably fixed. How he had gotten work, and had belonged to the union, and they had done well. He had, however, been obliged by the union to strike, and they had spent all the money they had, and in addition to that had gotten into debt. So, when the strike was over, although he obtained work again, he was in debt, and the harassment of it made him ill. Then how he had come North to find work, and had had a similar experience. All this I knew. It was just then that her last baby was born and that her little child died, and the daughter of the employer of her husband was so kind to her, that when her husband got well again, there was talk of a strike to help others who were out, and she made him resign from the union. Here she broke down. Presently, however, she recovered her composure. They had come to her then, she said, and told her they would ruin him.

"But I did not think they would kill him, sir," she sobbed. "He tried to get back, but Wringman kept him out. That man murdered him, sir."

There was not a lump of coal in the house; but her little girl had gone for some cinders, while she minded the baby. She had to go where she was not known--a long way, she said--as the children would not let her pick any where she used to get them.

When I came out I found that it had turned many degrees colder during the short time I was in the house, and the blast cut like a knife. The loafers on the street had thinned out under the piercing wind; but those who yet remained jeered as I passed on. I had not gotten very far when I came on a child, a little girl, creeping along. She was bending almost double under the weight of a bag of cinders, and before I reached her my sympathy was excited by the sight of her poor little bare hands and wrists, which were almost blue with cold. Her head, gray with the sifted ashes, was tucked down to keep her face from the cutting wind, and when I came nearer I heard her crying--not loud; but rather wailing to herself.

"What is the matter, little girl?" I asked.

"My hands are so cold--Oh! Oh! Oh!" she sobbed.

"Here, let me warm them." I took the bag and set it down, and took her little ashy hands in mine to try and warm them, and then for the first time I discovered that it was my little girl, Janet. She was so changed that I scarcely knew her. Her little pinched face, like her hair, was covered with ashes. Her hands were ice. When I had gotten some warmth into them I took off my gloves and put them on her, and I picked up her bag and carried it back for her. My hands nearly froze, but somehow I did not mind it. I had such a warm feeling about my heart. I wonder men don't often take off their gloves for little poor children.

I marched with her through the street near her house, expecting to be hooted at, and I should not have minded it; for I was keyed up and could have fought an army. But no one hooted. If they looked rather curiously at me, they said nothing.

As I opened the door to leave, on the steps stood my young lady. It is not often that a man opens a door and finds an angel on the step outside; but I did it that evening. I should not have been more surprised if I had found a real one. But if one believes that angels never visit men, these days, he should have seen Eleanor Leigh as she stood there. She did not appear at all surprised. Her eyes looked right into mine, and I took courage enough to look into hers for an instant. I have never forgotten them. They were like deep pools, clear and bottomless, filled with light. She did not look at all displeased and I did not envy St. Martin.

All she said was, "How do you do, Mr. Glave?" It was quite as if she expected to find me there--and she had. She had seen me stop little Janet and put the gloves on her. She was on her way to the house, and she had stopped and waited, and then had followed us. I did not know this until long afterward; but I asked her to let me wait and see her home, and so I did.

That walk was a memorable one to me. The period of explanations was past. I dared harbor the hope that I was almost in sight of port. When I put her on the car, she was so good as to say her father would be glad to see me some time at their home, and I thought she spoke with just the least little shyness, which made me hope that she herself would not be sorry.

When I left her, I went to see my old Drummer, and told him of the outrages which had been perpetrated on the poor woman. It was worth while seeing him. He was magnificent. As long as I was talking only of the man, he was merely acquiescent, uttering his "Ya, Ya," irresponsively over his beer; but when I told him of the woman and children, he was on his feet in an instant--"Tamming te strikers and all teir vorks." He seized his hat and big stick, and pouring out gutturals so fast that I could not pretend to follow him, ordered me to show him the place. As he strode through the streets, I could scarcely keep up with him. His stick rang on the frozen pavement like a challenge to battle. And when he reached the house he was immense. He was suddenly transformed. No mother could have been tenderer, no father more protecting. He gathered up the children in his great arms, and petted and soothed them; his tone, a little while before so ferocious, now as soft and gentle as the low velvet bass of his great drum. I always think of the Good Shepherd now as something like him that evening; rugged as a rock, gentle as a zephyr. He would have taken them all to his house and have adopted them if the woman would have let him. His heart was bigger than his house. He seemed to have filled all the place; to have made it a fortress.

The strike had cast its black cloud over all the section, and not all of its victims were murdered by the mob.

I fell in with the man who had spoken to me so cheerily one morning of the sun's shining for him. He looked haggard and ill and despairing. He was out of work and could find none. In our talk he did not justify the strike; but he bowed to it with resignation as a stricken Orestes might have bowed to the blows of Fate. His spirit was not then broken--it was only embittered. His furniture which was so nearly paid for had gone to the loan sharks; his house of which he boasted had reverted to the Building Company. He looked fully twenty years older than when I had seen him last. I offered him a small sum which he took gratefully. It was the first money he had had in weeks, he said, and the stores had stopped his credits. A few weeks later I saw him staggering along the street, his heart-eating sorrow drowned for an hour in the only nepenthe such poverty knows.

XXXVII

WOLFFERT'S NEIGHBORS

I had not been to visit Wolffert and, indeed, had but a hazy idea of where he lived, knowing only that he had a room in the house of some Jew in the Jewish quarter. Hitherto our meetings had taken place either in John Marvel's narrow little quarters or in mine at the old Drummer's. But having learned from John that he was ill, I got the address from him, and one afternoon went over to see him. I found the place in a region more squalid than that in which John Marvel and I had our habitation and as foreign as if it had been in Judea or in a Black Sea province. In fact, it must have exhibited a mixture of both regions. The shops were small and some of them gay, but the gayest was as mean as the most sombre. The signs and notices were all in Yiddish or Russian, the former predominating, and as I passed through the ill-paved, ill-smelling, reeking streets I could scarcely retain my conviction that I was still in an American city. It was about the hour that the manufactories of clothing, etc., closed and the street through which I walked was filled with a moving mass of dark humanity that rolled through it like a dark and turgid flood. For blocks they filled the sidewalk, moving slowly on, and as I mingled in the mass, and caught low, guttural, unknown sounds, and not a word of English all the while, I became suddenly aware of a strange alien feeling of uncertainty and almost of oppression. Far as eye could see I could not descry one Saxon countenance or even one Teuton. They were all dark, sallow, dingy, and sombre. Now and then a woman's hat appeared in the level moving surge of round black hats, giving the impression of a bubble floating on a deep, slow current to melt into the flood. Could this, I reflected sombrely, be the element we are importing? and what effect would the strange confluence have on the current of our life in the future? No wonder we were in the throes of a strike vast enough to cause anxiety!

I was still under the dominion of this reflection when I reached the street in which Wolffert had his home, and, after some difficulty, discovered the house in which he had his abode.

The street was filled with wretched little shops, some more wretched than others, all stuck together in a curious jumble of tawdry finery and rusty necessities. Among them were many shops where second-hand clothing was exhibited, or, from appearances, clothing for which that term was a flattering euphemism. I stopped at one where second-hand shoes were hung out, and, opening the door to ask the way, faced a stout, shapeless woman with a leathery skin and a hooked nose, above which a pair of inquisitive black eyes rested on me, roving alternately from my feet to my face, with an expression of mingled curiosity, alarm, and hostility. I asked her if she could tell me where the number 1 wanted was, and as my inquiry caused not the least change of expression, I took out my card and wrote the number down. She gazed at it in puzzled silence, and then with a little lighting of her dark face, muttered a few unintelligible words and bustled back to where a curtain hung across the narrow shop, and lifting one corner of it gave a call which I made out to be something like "Jacob." The next moment a small, keen-looking boy made his way from behind the curtain and gazed at me. A few words passed between the two, in a tongue unknown to me, and then the boy, laying down a book that he carried in his hand, came forward and asked me in perfectly good English, "What is it you want?"

"I want to know where number 5260-1/2 ---- Street is. I have that address, but cannot find the number."

"I'll show you." His eyes too were on my shoes. "The numbers of the streets were all taken down last year, and have not been put back yet. That is where Mr. Wolffert lives. Do you know him?"

"Yes, I am going to see him."

He turned and said something rapidly to his mother, in which the only word I recognized was Wolffert's name. The effect was instantaneous. The expression of vague anxiety died out of the woman's face and she came forward jabbering some sort of jargon and showing a set of yellow, scattering teeth.

"I'll show you where he lives. You come with me," said Jacob. "She thought you were an agent." He suddenly showed a much better set of teeth than his mother could display--"She don't speak English, you see." He had laid down his book on the counter and he now put on his cap. As he passed out of the door he paused and fastened his eyes on my feet. "You don't want a pair of shoes? We have all sorts--some as good as new. You can't tell. Half the price, too."

I declined the proffered bargain, and we walked up the street, Jacob discoursing volubly of many things, to show his superior intelligence.

"What was your book?" I inquired.

"U. S. History. I'm in the sixth grade."

"So? I should think you are rather small to be so high?" My ideas of grades were rather hazy, having been derived from "Tom Brown at Rugby" and such like encyclopædias.

"Pah! I stand next to head," he cried contemptuously.

"You do! Who stands head?"

"Iky Walthiemer--he's fourteen and I ain't but twelve. Then there is a fellow named Johnson--Jimmy Johnson. But he ain't nothin'!"

"He isn't? What's the matter with him?"

"He ain't got no eye on him--he don't never see nothin'."

"You mean he's dull?"

"Sure! Just mem'ry, that's all. He's dull. We beat 'em all."

"Who are 'we'?"

"We Jews."

"So----"

"Well, here we are. I'll run up and show you the door"--as we stopped at a little butcher shop beside which was a door that evidently led up a stair to the upper story.

"All right. You know Mr. Wolffert?"

"Sure! We all know him. He's a Jew, too."

"Sure!" I tried to imitate his tone, for it was not an accent only.

He ran up the stair and on up a second flight and back along a dark, narrow little passage, where he tapped on a door, and, without waiting, walked in.

"Here's a man to see you."

"A gentleman, you mean," I said dryly, and followed him, for I have a particular aversion to being referred to to my face as a mere man. It is not a question of natural history, but of manners.

"Well, Jacob," said Wolffert when he had greeted me, "have you got to the top yet?"

"Will be next week," said Jacob confidently.

I found Wolffert sitting up in a chair, but looking wretchedly ill. He, however, declared himself much better. I learned afterward--though not from him--that he had caught some disease while investigating some wretched kennels known as "lodging houses," where colonies of Jews were packed like herrings in a barrel; and for which a larger percentage on the value was charged as rental than for the best dwellings in the city. His own little room was small and mean enough, but it was comfortably if plainly furnished, and there were books about, which always give a homelike air, and on a little table a large bunch of violets which instantly caught my eye. By some inexplicable sixth sense I divined that they had come from Eleanor Leigh; but I tried to be decent enough not to be jealous; and Wolffert's manifest pleasure at seeing me made me feel humble.

We had fallen to talking of his work when I said, "Wolffert, why do you live in this horrible quarter? No wonder you get ill. Why don't you get a room in a more decent part of the town--near where John Marvel lives, for instance?"

Wolffert smiled.

"Why?--what is the matter with this?"

"Oh! Why, it is dreadful. Why, it's the dirtiest, meanest, lowest quarter of the city! I never saw such a place. It's full of stinking"--I was going to say "Jews"; but reflected in time to substitute "holes."

Wolffert, I saw, supplied the omitted objection.

"Do you imagine I would live among the rich?" he demanded; "I thought you knew me better. I don't want to be fattened in the dark like a Strasbourg goose for my liver to make food acceptable to their jaded appetites. Better be a pig at once."

"No, but there are other places than this--and I should think your soul would revolt at this--" I swung my arm in a half circle.

"Are they not my brethren?" he said, half smiling.

"Well, admit that they are--" (And I knew all along that this was the reason.) "There are other grades--brethren of nearer degree."

"None," he ejaculated. "'I dwell among my own people'--I must live among them to understand them."

"I should think them rather easy to understand."

"I mean to be in sympathy with them," he said gently. "Besides, I am trying to teach them two or three things."

"What?" For I confess that my soul had revolted at his surroundings. That surging, foreign-born, foreign-looking, foreign-spoken multitude who had filled the street as I came along through the vile reek of "Little Russia," as it was called, had smothered my charitable feelings.

"Well, for one thing, to learn the use of freedom--for another, to learn the proper method and function of organization."

"They certainly appear to me to have the latter already--simply by being what they are," I said lightly.

"I mean of business organization," Wolffert explained. "I want to break up the sweat shop and the sweat system. We are already making some headway, and have thousands in various kinds of organized business which are quite successful."

"I should not think they would need your assistance--from what I saw. They appear to me to have an instinct."

"They have," said Wolffert, "but we are teaching them how to apply it. The difficulty is their ignorance and prejudice. You think that they hold you in some distrust and dislike, possibly?" As his tone implied a question, I nodded.

"Well, that is nothing to the way in which they regard me. You they distrust as a gentile, but me they detest as a renegade."

"Well, I must say that I think you deserve what you get for bringing in such a mass of ignorance. Now, you are an American, and a patriotic one. How do you reconcile it with your patriotism to introduce into the body politic such an element of ignorance, superstition, and unrest?"

"Why," said Wolffert, "you don't know our people. The Jew is often an element of ignorance and superstition, though he is not alone in this, but he is never an element of unrest--when he is justly treated," he added after a pause. "But, whatever these people are in this generation, the next generation--the children of this generation--will be useful American citizens. All they require is a chance. Why, the children of these Russian Jews, baited from their own country, are winning all the prizes in the schools," he added, his pale face flushing faintly. "That lad who showed you in is the son of parents who sell second-hand shoes in the next street and cannot speak a word of English, and yet he stands at the head of his class."

"No, second!" I said.

"How do you know?"

"He told me."

"The little rascal! See how proud he is of it," said Wolffert triumphantly.

"He tried to sell me a pair of shoes."

Wolffert chuckled. "Did he?" Then he sobered, catching my thought. "That is the most important thing for him at present, but wait. Let this develop." He tapped his forehead. "He may give you laws equal to Kepler's or a new philosophy like Bacon's. He may solve aerial navigation--or revolutionize thought in any direction--who knows!"

His face had lighted up as he proceeded, and he was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes glowing.

"I know," I said, teasingly. "He'll sell shoes--second-hand ones polished up for new."

I was laughing, but Wolffert did not appreciate my joke. He flushed slightly.

"That's your gentile ignorance, my friend. That's the reason your people are so dense--they never learn--they keep repeating the same thing. No wonder we discover new worlds for you to claim!"

"What new worlds have you discovered?"

"Well, first, Literature, next commerce. What is your oldest boasted scripture?"

"I thought you were talking of material worlds!"

"We helped about that, too--did our full part. You think Queen Isabella pawned her jewels to send Christobal Colon to discover America--don't you?"

I nodded.

"Well, the man who put up the money for that little expedition was a Jew--'Arcangel, the Treasurer.' You never heard of him!"

"Never."

"He did it all the same. If you would read something else beside your narrow English writings, Glave, you would learn something of the true history of civilization." Now and then Wolffert's arrogance, like Antipater's, showed through the rents in his raiment.

"What for instance? since you appear to know it all."

"Well, almost any other history or philosophy. Read the work of the thinkers old and new--and see how much deeper life is than the shallow thing called by that divine name by the butterflies and insects and reptiles who flaunt their gauzy vans in our faces or fasten their brazen claws in our vitals. Meantime, you might read my book," he said with a smile, "when it comes out."

"Well, tell me about it meantime and save me the trouble. I sometimes prefer my friends to their books."

"You were always lazy," he said smiling. But he began to talk, laying down his philosophy of life, which was simple enough, though I could not follow him very far. I had been trained in too strict a school to accept doctrines so radical. And but that I saw him and John Marvel and Eleanor Leigh acting on them I should have esteemed them absolutely utopian. As it was, I wondered how far Eleanor Leigh had inspired his book.

XXXVIII

WOLFFERT'S PHILOSOPHY

(WHICH MAY BE SKIPPED BY THE READER)

As Wolffert warmed up to his theme, his face brightened and his deep eyes glowed.

"The trouble with our people--our country--the world--is that our whole system--social--commercial--political--every activity is based on greed, mere, sheer greed. State and Church act on it--live by it. The success of the Jew which has brought on him so much suffering through the ages has revenged itself by stamping on your life the very evil with which you charge him--love of money. What ideals have we? None but money. We call it wealth. We have debased the name, and its debasement shows the debasement of the race. Once it meant weal, now mere riches, though employed basely, the very enemy and assassin of weal. The covetousness, whose reprobation in the last of the commandments was intended as a compendium to embrace the whole, has honeycombed our whole life, public and private. The amassing of riches, not for use only, for display--vulgar beyond belief--the squandering of riches, not for good, but for evil, to gratify jaded appetites which never at their freshest craved anything but evil or folly, marks the lowest level of the shopkeeping intellect. The Argands and the Canters are the aristocrats of the community, and the Capons are the fit priests for such people."

He turned away in disgust--but I prodded him.

"What is your remedy? You criticise fiercely! but give no light. You are simply destructive."

"The remedy is more difficult to give," he said gravely; "because the evil has been going on so long that it has become deep-rooted. It has sunk its roots into, not only the core of our life, but our character. It will take long to eradicate it. But one economic evil might be, and eventually must be changed, unless we wish to go down into the abyss of universal corruption and destruction."

"You mean----?"

"Capitalism--the idea that because a man is accidentally able to acquire through adventitious and often corrupt means vast riches which really are not made by himself, but by means of others under conditions and laws which he did not create, he may call them his own; use them in ways manifestly detrimental to the public good and, indeed, often in notorious destructiveness of it, and be protected in doing so by those laws."

"'Accidentally'--and 'adventitious means'! That does not happen so often. It may happen by finding a gold mine--once in ten thousand times--or by cornering some commodity on the stock or Produce Exchange once in one hundred thousand times, but even then a man must have intellect--force--courage--resourcefulness--wonderful powers of organization."

"So has the burglar and highwayman," he interrupted.

"But they are criminals--they break the law."

"What law? Why law more than these others? Is not the fundamental law, not to do evil to others?"

"The law established by society for its protection."

"Who made those laws?"

"The people--through their representatives," I added hastily, as I saw him preparing to combat it.

"The people, indeed! precious little part they have had in the making of the laws. Those laws were made, not by the people--who had no voice in their making, but by a small class--originally the Chief--the Emperor--the King--the Barons--the rich Burghers--the people had no part nor voice."

"They received the benefit of them."

"Only the crumbs which fell from their masters' tables. They got the gibbet, the dungeon, the rack, and the stick."

"Wolffert, you would destroy all property rights."

"My dear fellow, what nonsense you talk. I am only for changing the law to secure property rights for all, instead of for a class, the necessity for which no longer exists, if it ever did exist."

"Your own law-giver recognized it and inculcated it." I thought this a good thrust. He waved it aside.

"That was for a primitive people in a primitive age, as your laws were for your people in their primitive age. But do you suppose that Moses would make no modification now?"

"I have no idea that he would. For I believe they were divine."

"Surely--Moses acted under the guidance of the great Jehovah, whose law is justice and equity and righteousness. The laws he gave were to inculcate this, and they served their purpose when Israel served God. But now when He is mocked, the letter of the law is made an excuse and is given as the command to work injustice and inequity and unrighteousness. Surely they should be, at least, interpreted in the spirit in which they were given. You claim to be a Christian?"

"A very poor one."

"In name, at least, you claim that there has been a new dispensation?"

"Yes--an amplification--a development and evolution."

"Precisely. In place of an 'eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth--the other cheek turned--to do to others as you would have them do to you!'"

"That is the ideal. I have not yet reached that degree of----" I paused for the word.

"I, too, acknowledge that evolution, that ideal. Why should we not act on it?"

"Because of human nature. We have not yet reached the stage when it can be practically applied."

"But human nature while it does not change basically may be regulated, developed, uplifted, and this teaching is based on this principle. It has not yet borne much apparent fruit, it is true; but it is sound, nevertheless. We both in our better moments, at least, feel it to be sound, and there has been a little, however little uplift, and however hard to maintain.