To Him That Hath

"It's presumptuous in me to speak of the other dream, for to work for its fulfilment would require all the things I've lost and many things I never had – a fair name, influence, some money, a personality, ability of the right sort. Besides, the dream is vague, unshaped – only a dream. It is not new, and it is not even my own dream. Thousands have dreamt it, and many are striving to turn it into a fact, a condition. Yes, it would be presumptuous for me to speak of it."

"But I'd like very much to hear about it – if you don't mind."

"Even though it will sound absurd from me? Well, if you wish me to."

He paused a moment to gather his thoughts. "One thing the last four months have taught me," he began, "is that the discharged criminal has little chance ever to be anything but a criminal. Many come out hardened; perhaps the prison hardened them – I've seen many a young fellow, who had his good points when he entered, hardened to irreclaimable criminality by prison associates and prison methods. These have no desire to live useful lives. Some come out with moderately strong resolutions to live honestly, and some come out with a fierce determination. If these last two classes could find work a large proportion of them would develop into useful men. But instead of a world willing to stretch to them a helping hand, what do they find? They find a world that refuses them the slightest chance.

"What can they do? They persist as long as their resolution lasts. If it is weak, they may give up in a few days. Then, since the upward road is closed against them, they turn into the road that is always open, always calling – the road of their old ways, of their old friends. They are lost.

"A week ago I was all bitterness, all rebellion, against the world for its uncaring destruction of these men. I said the world pushed these men back into crime, destroyed them, because it feared to risk its worshipped dollars. I feel bitter still, but I think I can see the world's excuse. The world says, 'For any vacancy there are usually at least two applicants; I choose the better, and let the other go.' It is a natural rule. So long as man thinks first of his own interest that rule will stand. Against such a rule that closes the road of honesty, what chance does the discharged convict have? None! – absolutely none!

"Since the world will not receive back the thief, since there is no saving the thief once he has become a thief, the only chance whatever for him is to save him before he has turned to thievery – while he is a child.

"Have you ever thought, Miss Chambers, how saving we are of all material things, and what squanders, oh, what criminal squanderers! we are of human lives? How far more rapidly the handling of iron, and hogs, and cotton, has developed than the handling of men! The pig comes out meat and soap and buttons and what not, and the same rigid economy is observed with all other materials. Nothing is too small, too poor, to be saved. It is all too precious!

"There is no waste! But can we say the same about the far more important business of producing citizens? Look at the men in our prisons. Wasted material. Had they been treated, when they were the raw material of childhood, with even a part of the intelligence and care that is devoted to turning the pig into use, into profit, they would have been manufactured into good citizens. And these men in prisons are but a fraction of the great human waste. Think of the uncaught criminals, of the stunted children, of the human wreckage floating about the city, of the women who live by their shame! – all wasted human material. And all the time more children are growing up to take the places of these when they are gone. Why, if any business man should run his factory as we conduct our business of producing citizens, he'd be bankrupt in a year!

"This waste can be saved. I do not mean the men now in prison, nor the women in the street, nor those on whom ill conditions have fastened disease – though even they need not be wholly lost. I mean their successors, the growing children. If the production of citizens were a business run for profit – which in a sense it is, for each good citizen is worth thousands of dollars to the country – and were placed in the hands of a modern business man, then you would see! Had he been packer, steel manufacturer, goldsmith, not a bristle, not an ounce of steel, not the infinitesimal filings of gold, escaped him. Do you think that he would let millions of human beings, worth, to put a sordid money value upon their heads, ten thousand dollars apiece, be wasted? Never! He would find the great business leak and stop it. He would save all.

"And how save? I am a believer in heredity, yes; but I believe far more in the influence of surroundings. Let a child be cradled in the gutter and nursed by wickedness; let wickedness be its bedfellow, playfellow, workfellow, its teacher, its friend – and what do you get? The prisons tell you. Let the same child grow up surrounded by decency, and you have a decent child and later a decent man. Could the thousands and thousands of children who are developing towards criminality, towards profligacy, towards a stunted maturity, be set amid good conditions, the leak would be stopped, or almost – the great human waste would be brought to an end. They would be saved to themselves, and saved to their country.

"Nothing of all this is new to you, Miss Chambers. I have said so much because I wanted to make clear what has become my great dream – the great dream of so many. I should like to do my little part towards rousing the negligent, indifferent world to the awfulness of this waste – towards making it as economical of its people as it is of its pigs and its pig-iron. That is my dream."

He had begun quietly, but as his thought mastered him his face had flushed, his eyes had glowed, and he had stood up and his words had come out with all the passion of his soul. Helen's eyes had not for an instant shifted from his; her's too were aglow, and glow was in her cheeks.

For several moments after he had stopped she gazed at him with something that was very like awe; then she said, barely above a whisper: "You are going to do it!"

"No, no," David returned quickly, bitterly. "I have merely builded out of words the shape of an impossible dream. Look at what I dream; and then look at me, a janitor! – look at my record!"

"You are going to do it!" she repeated, her voice vibrant with belief. "The dream is not impossible. You are doing something towards its fulfilment now – the boy, you know. You are going to grow above your record, and above this position – far above! You are going to grow into great things. What you have been saying has been to me a prophecy of that."

He grew warmer and warmer under her words – under the gaze of her brown eyes glowing into his – under the disclosure made by her left hand, on which he had seen there was no engagement ring. Her praise, her sympathy, her belief, thrilled him; and his purpose, set free in words, had given him courage, had lifted him up. As from a swift, dizzy growth, he felt strong, big.

A burning impulse swept into him to tell her his innocence. For a moment his innocence trembled on his lips. But the old compelling reasons for silence rushed forward and joined battle with the desire of his love. His hands clenched, his body tightened, he stared at her tensely.

At length he drew a deep breath, swallowed with difficulty. "May the prophecy come true!" his dry lips said.

"It will!"

She studied him thoughtfully for a minute or more. "Something has been occurring to me and I'd like to talk to you about it." She rose. "But I must be going. Won't you walk with me to the car, and let me talk on the way?"

A minute later they were in the street, from which the day had all but faded and into which the shop-windows and above them the tier on tier of home-windows, were stretching their meagre substitute. David's blood was leaping through him, and in him were the lightness and the all-conquering strength of youth. The crisp winter air that thrust its sting into many of the stream of home-coming workers, tinglingly pricked him with the joy of living.

"Have you thought again of writing?" she asked.

"About as much as a man who has leaped from a house-top to try his wings, thinks again of flying."

"I am speaking seriously. If the impulse to write should return, would you have time for writing?"

"I think I could manage three or four hours a day."

"Then why not try?"

"The ground where one alights is so hard, Miss Chambers!"

"But perhaps you did not soar the other time because you had over-worn your wings. Perhaps they have grown strong and developed during their rest. Many of us used to believe they would carry you far up. Why not try? You have nothing to lose. And if you succeed – then the dream you have told me of will begin to come true."

For several paces David was silent. "I, too, have thought of this. As you say, there is nothing to lose. I shall try."

"Why not take an idea in the field of your dream?" she pursued eagerly. "Why not write a story illustrating how the criminal is to be saved? – say, the story of a boy amid evil surroundings that urged him toward a criminal life; the boy to come under good influence, and to develop into a splendid citizen."

"That may be just the idea," said David.

They discussed the suggestion warmly the remainder of their walk to the car. A little farther on, as they were coming out upon the Bowery, the Mayor of Avenue A swayed into view. Astonishment leaped into his pink face when he saw who David's companion was. His silk hat performed a wide arc, and David had a sense that backward glances over the Mayor's shoulders were following them.

"And you really believe in me?" David asked, as Helen's car drew to a stop.

"I do – and I believe all the other things I have said." She gave the answer with a steady look into his eyes and with a firm pressure of her hand.

"I hope you'll not be disappointed!" he breathed fiercely, exultantly.

He retreated to the sidewalk and standing there, the clanging of the elevated trains beating his ears, he watched the slow passage of her car through the press of jostling, vituperating trucks, volleying over the cobble-stones, till it disappeared beyond Cooper Union. Then he turned away, and strode the streets – chin up, shoulders back, eyes straightforward – powered with such a hope, such a determination to do, as he had not known since his first post-college days. Perhaps he would conquer the future. He would try.

Yes … he would conquer it!

CHAPTER IV

PUCK MASQUERADES AS CUPID

David had suggested school to Tom, but the boy would none of it.

"What, set in one o' dem agony seats, biffin' your brain wid books, a skinny lady punchin' holes t'rough you wid her eyes! Not for mine, pard!"

A job was what he wanted, and David at length concluded that after Tom had been tamed by the discipline of a few months of regular work, he would perhaps be more amicable toward education.

There were but two men of whom David could ask aid in finding a place for the boy, Mr. Rogers and the Mayor of Avenue A. Mr. Rogers was beginning to be something of a puzzle to David. One thing that made David wonder was the smallness of Mr. Rogers's business compared with his ability. They had had a few short talks and David had discovered there lurked behind that reserved exterior a sharp intelligence which now and then flashed out unexpected poniards of bitter wit. David contrasted him with another rental agent he had met, doing several times Rogers's business, and the second man seemed a nonentity. Yet Rogers was the agent of but half a dozen tenements, and made no effort to extend his clientage.

David also wondered at what he could regard only as idiosyncrasies. The dingy brown of Rogers's hair seemed to him hardly a natural colour; he guessed hair dye. But hair dye he associated with vanity, with the man who would falsify his gray hair to extend his beauship, and vanity Rogers apparently had not. And one day, while sweeping out Rogers's office, David had tried on Rogers's spectacles, which had been left on the desk, and had discovered he could see through them as well as with his naked eyes. The lenses were blanks. Why should the man wear blank spectacles, why should he dye his hair? Mere idiosyncracies of course – yet rather queer ones.

Rogers was always kind and courteous to David, and David heard from tenants and neighbours many stories of the agent's warm heart – of rent advanced from the agent's own pocket when a tenant was out of work, of food that came covertly to fatherless families, of mysterious money and delicacies that came to the sick poor. Yet he was invariably cold and distant to David, and cold and distant to all others; so much so that to try to thank him was an embarrassment. Sometimes, when musing about Rogers's business restraint, his colourless dress, his reserve, his stealthy generosity, it seemed to David that Rogers sought obscurity and anonymity with the zeal that other men seek fame and brass tablets.

It was the reserve of Rogers and the constraint David felt in his presence, and even more the knowledge of the greater influence of the Mayor of Avenue A, that made David choose to ask the latter's aid in seeking work for Tom. So about four o'clock of the afternoon following Helen's call, he walked into the Pan-American Café. At a large table in a front corner sat the Mayor, two other men, and half a dozen women, all drinking of coffee and eating of cake, and all shaking with full-voiced laughter that bubbled straight from the diaphragm. David was in no hurry, so he sat down in the opposite corner of the almost empty café to wait the departure of the Mayor's friends.

The ladies about the Mayor were hearty beauties of from ten to twenty years' acquaintance with womanhood; and among them there was an abundance of furs and diamonds. Most of them were misses, David learned from the way the Mayor addressed them. The Mayor, David soon perceived, was the center of their interest. Their pleasantries, their well-seasoned smiles, their playful blushes, were all directed at him, and now and then one of his sallies was reproved by a muff's soft blow upon his mouth. The rôle of target seemed to please him; he bent now to this one, now to that, made sweeping flourishes, made retorts that drew upon him more of the same pleasant missiles. It began to dawn upon David that his saviour was very much of a gallant.

Presently the Mayor, rising to greet a newcomer, noticed David. After a few moments he excused himself and took a chair at David's table. A silk vest that was a condensed flower garden made the mayoral front a gorgeous sight to behold.

There was a new respect in the Mayor's manner. "I see you're flyin' in high society these days," he began, in a whisper.

"You refer to Miss Chambers? She's merely interested in me as you are – in my reform." David said this quietly, as though the subject was closed.

His dignity was not lost on the Mayor. "Say, you've taken an all-fired brace to yourself in the last ten days, ain't you! As for your lady friend – well, if the way she was talkin' to you is the way reformers talk, gee I wish some one like her'd try to make a man out o' me! She's all right, friend. I've seen her before and I've heard a lot about her. But her old man – Lord, but I'd like to set for a week or so on his windpipe! Real estate is one o' his thousand lines, you know. He owns a lot o' tenements in this part o' town – none near St. Christopher's, o' course – and as a landlord, say, he's just partic'lar hell!"

"I've come to ask another favour of you," David cut in, quickly. "You've seen the boy that stays with me. I want to get him a job if I can. I thought possibly you might be able to help me."

"I've seen the kid, yes. Somethin' of a sleight o' hand performance, ain't he? – now he's there and now he ain't. Where'd you pick him up?"

"We just fell in with each other a couple of months ago. There's a man in him."

"I see. And you're trying to dig it out. You'll have to do a little blastin' on the job, don't you think? As for gettin' him work" – he shook his head slowly – "there's about five thousand families on Avenue A, and each family's got five boys, and about once in so often the street out there is blockaded with their mas beggin' me to get 'em jobs. There's how I'm fixed."

"You can't help me then?"

"You've sized it up. Sorry. Wish I could."

After a moment David asked hesitantly: "You couldn't use a boy here, could you?"

"Here! Nothin' I could use a boy for."

"Help in the kitchen, carry things up from the cellar, clean up," David suggested.

The Mayor shook his head.

"It would be great for the boy if he could work a while for some one like you that would understand him, make allowances, and break him in properly," David went on eagerly. "He's never held a job, and a stranger wouldn't have much charity for his shortcomings, wouldn't keep him long. You don't need him, but still you can make things for him to do. In three or four weeks I'll have found another job for him, and by then you'll have him worked into shape to hold it. Of course I'll pay his wages myself – say three dollars a week; only he must think it's coming from you."

The Mayor's look changed to that sharp, penetrating gaze with which he had searched David's interior on his first visit. "Yes, you're in dead earnest," he grunted after a few seconds.

He raised a fat forefinger. "See here, friend. You're cuttin' into my business. I'm an octopus, a trust – you understand? – and any man that tries any philanthropic stunts in my part o' town, I run him out o' business. See? Now you send the kid around and I'll let him bust things here for a while. But keep your coin. I reckon three dollars ain't goin' to put Carl Hoffman on the bum."

David thanked him warmly. "But you don't need the boy," he ended in a determined voice, "so I can't let you pay him."

The Mayor regarded David steadily for a moment. "Have it your own way," he said abruptly; and suddenly his big fist reached across the table, and to David it was like shaking hands with a fervent pillow. "Friend, I've sized you up for the real thing. You made your mistake, and it was a bad one – but we all make 'em. You belong 'way up. I'm proud to know you."

David flushed and was stammering out his appreciation, when the Mayor interrupted with, "Oh, a friend that's good enough for Miss Chambers is good enough for me."

He glanced over his shoulder at the group he had left, then leaned confidentially across the table and asked in a whisper: "What d'you think o' the bunch? – the ladies I mean."

"Why, they seem to be very fine," David answered, surprised. "And they admire you."

"Friend," said the Mayor with an approving nod, "you certainly ain't been lookin' on with your blind eye. They do that! And every afternoon it's the same – either them, or some other bunch. And d'you know what they're after?"

"No."

"Me. They want to marry me. And there ain't a girl on the avenue between fifteen and seventy that ain't tryin' to do the same. Friend, I can't help bein' pop'lar with the ladies. I like 'em – God bless 'em! But when you've got a whole avenue tryin' to marry you, it's hell!"

He shook his head with an air of sadness. "I don't want to marry. I was married once for about a year. It was when I was a kid. I guess she was a pretty nice girl, but she was too much like her mother, and when she went I swore I'd keep out o' that kind o' trouble. But they're closin' in on me. One of 'em's sure to get me. I don't know which one, or mebbe I could head her off. I ought to keep away from 'em, but I can't leave 'em alone, and they won't leave me alone. Oh, hell!"

He rose with a groan. "Well, send round the kid," he said, and carefully pulling down his vest and smoothing his dozen hairs, he rejoined his friends. As David left the café he heard a deep roar from the Mayor, and had a glimpse of a fair suitress of forty rebuking the Mayor's mouth with her muff.

David sent Tom to the Mayor, and walked over to a hardware store on the Bowery to order some new ash cans. As he was returning through the Bowery a man stepped to his side with a quiet, "Hello, pal." Startled, David looked about. Beside him was a wiry, gray man, with deep-lined face and a keen, shifty eye. It was a man David had known in prison – a cynical, hardened gentleman who had been running counter to the law for thirty years, during which time he had participated in scores of daring robberies and had known most of the country's cleverest criminals. Bill Halpin was his name – at least the most recent of his dozen or two.

Halpin had taken a fancy to David while they were prison-mates, why David could not understand; and his greeting was warm to come from one of his contemptuous nature. The two walked on together, and David, in response to Halpin's queries, told that he had gone to work with the determination to live honestly. Halpin gave a sneer of unbelief – he sneered at all things save the frankly evil – but said nothing. When they reached David's tenement, David asked him in, but he said he had an engagement with a pal, and went away after promising to come around some other time.

David shovelled the furnace full of coal and was beginning his preparations for dinner, aglow with his new hopes and with the thought that he had regained Helen for his friend, when there was a knock at his door. He opened the door, expecting his usual caller – a tenant with a grievance. Kate Morgan stepped into the room.

David had seen her in finery before, but never in such finery as now. There was a white velvet hat with two great black plumes that curled down upon her back hair; a long black coat, through whose open front glowed the warm red of a gown; a black fur scarf round her neck and a black muff enclosing her white-gloved hands.

She stepped into the room and her eyes – brighter than ever were the eyes of the furs' original owners – gleamed over the scarf with hard defiance.

"Good evening, Mister Aldrich."

David flushed. "Good evening." He drew his one rocking-chair toward her. "Won't you sit down?"

She sank into the chair, threw open the coat so that the full glory of its white satin lining and of the red dress were displayed, and thrust out a little patent-leathered foot.

"I saw you with Miss Chambers last night," she said, her brilliant eyes darting contempt at him. "Of course you told her all about that Allen affair. You're not only a coward. You're a squealer."

David was standing with his back to his mantel, and Kate had to see the erectness, the confidence, the decision, that had come to him since the night of their adventure. "I don't know why you're saying these things," he returned quietly, "but if saying them pleases you, go on."

"Well, ain't we got high and dignified since we became a janitor!" she sneered. "A janitor! Sweeping – scrubbing – listening to the kicks of dirty tenants – digging with your hands in the garbage to separate paper, tin cans, greasy bones. Lord, but ain't you high up in life!"

"Go on," said David.

She drew out her cigarette box – she knew he disliked to see her smoke – lighted a cigarette, and blew a little cloud toward him.

"A janitor! What a poor, weak, miserable soul you've got. Think of a man turning from excitement, an easy life, good things, and taking up this! But you're not a real man. You'd rather do dirty work for a year than earn a year of good times by a night's work. Wouldn't you like to know what I cleaned up the other night after you sneaked out?"

"What you wanted, I suppose."

"That's it – I got all I went after! I'm on Easy Street for a year. And I'm enjoying life, too. You set that down. While you clean up other people's dirt, and live in a basement, and cook yourself three-cent dinners!"

All her fierceness, all her scorn, were in her words, gave them a jagged edge; and she thrust them in deep and twisted them vindictively. David, very white, looked steadily down at her, but made no reply.

"And besides, you're a squealer!"

He continued silent.

She sent out a puff of smoke, her eyes blazing at him, and thrust again:

"And a damned coward!"

David grew yet paler, but he continued his steady, silent gaze.

She sat looking up at him for several moments, without speaking again. Then slowly something of the fierce scorn, the wild desire to pain him, went out of her face.