Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of the case.

  “Do? Nothing. Hasn’t the State Board of Arbitration declared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’re so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no services in return for their privileges.”

  “That’s a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. “Well, it’s nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man ’em with policemen, and run ’em till the managers had come to terms with the strikers; and he’d do that every time there was a strike.”

  “Doesn’t that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?” asked March.

  “I don’t know. It savors of horse sense.”

  “You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you’re more father-in-lawed. And before you’re married, too.”

  “Well, the colonel’s a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed in. He’s on the keen jump from morning till night, and he’s up late and early to see the row. I’m afraid he’ll get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all; I can’t get any show at them: haven’t seen a brickbat shied or a club swung yet. Have you?”

  “No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the papers, and that’s what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I’m solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the children haven’t been at school since the strike began. There’s no precaution that Mrs. March hasn’t used. She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office.”

  Fulkerson laughed and said: “Well, it’s probably the only thing that’s saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”

  “No. You don’t mean to say he’s killed!”

  “Not if he knows it. But I don’t know — What do you say, March? What’s the reason you couldn’t get us up a paper on the strike?”

  “I knew it would fetch round to ‘Every Other Week,’ somehow.”

  “No, but seriously. There’ll be plenty of news paper accounts. But you could treat it in the historical spirit — like something that happened several centuries ago; De Foe’s Plague of London style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It’s a big thing, March, this strike is. I tell you it’s imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches — well, it would just be the greatest card! Come! What do you say?”

  “Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I’m killed and she and the children are not killed with me?”

  “Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary part?”

  “I’ve no doubt he’d jump at the chance. I’ve yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn’t lay down his life for.”

  “Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another inspiration, and smiled patiently. “Look here! What’s the reason we couldn’t get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”

  “Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.

  “No; I’m in earnest. They say some of those fellows — especially the foreigners — are educated men. I know one fellow — a Bohemian — that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”

  “I guess not,” said March, dryly.

  “Why not? He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he? Suppose you put it up on him the next time you see him.”

  “I don’t see Lindau any more,” said March. He added, “I guess he’s renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

  “Pshaw! You don’t mean he hasn’t been round since?”

  “He came for a while, but he’s left off coming now. I don’t feel particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of Fulkerson’s grin. “He’s left me in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

  Fulkerson laughed out. “Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who’d ‘a’ thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnest with those ‘brincibles’ of his? But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

  “There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented.

  “One’s enough for me.”

  “I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson. “Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see ‘gabidal’ embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he’s a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”

  When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came, perhaps because Mrs. March’s eye was not on him. He was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the apparent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to the East River.

  Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

  March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

  “I suppose you’ll be glad when this cruel war is over,” March suggested, as he got in.

  The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

  His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life, impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just befo
re the coup d’etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was as quiet as on the East Side.

  Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the platform and ran forward.

  IV

  Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were blazing.

  “Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?”

  The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning brows. “No.”

  Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.

  “Then what’s the reason he don’t come here any more?” demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel. “Oh, it’s you, is it? I’d like to know who told you to meddle in other people’s business?”

  “I did,” said Dryfoos, savagely. “I told her to ask him what he wanted here, and he said he didn’t want anything, and he stopped coming. That’s all. I did it myself.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. “I should like to know what you did it for? I’d like to know what made you think I wasn’t able to take care of myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn’t suppose it was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I’ll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don’t concern you.”

  “Don’t concern me? You impudent jade!” her father began.

  Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled from them. She said, “Will you go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all back?”

  “No!” shouted the old man. “And if—”

  “That’s all I want of you!” the girl shouted in her turn. “Here are your presents.” With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets — among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father’s plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running up-stairs.

  The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws, controlled himself. “Take — take those things up,” he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not much bigger than Christine’s. “How do you suppose she found it out?” he asked, after a moment.

  “She seems to have merely suspected it,” said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine’s violence had brought there.

  “Well, it don’t make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now she knows.” He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat hung.

  “Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel, “I can’t remain here, after the language your daughter has used to me — I can’t let you leave me — I — I’m afraid of her—”

  “Lock yourself up, then,” said the old man, rudely. He added, from the hall before he went out, “I reckon she’ll quiet down now.”

  He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a vary far-off thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy typography about yesterday’s troubles on the surface lines. Among the millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was over and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking, and then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.

  “What has got all the cars?” he demanded of the driver, who jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.

  “Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn’t been any car along for a week.

  Strike.”

  “Oh yes,” said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.

  The man asked, “Where to?”

  Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with uncontrollable fury: “I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I’ll show you the place.”

  He could not remember the number of ‘Every Other Week’ office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow’s confidence.

  There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson’s empty office. “Where’s Fulkerson?” he asked, sitting down with his hat on.

  “He went out a few moments ago,” said Conrad, glancing at the clock. “I’m afraid he isn’t coming back again today, if you wanted to see him.”

  Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March’s room.

  “That other fellow out, too?”

  “He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answered Conrad.

  “Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon?” asked the old man.

  “No,” said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a score of times and found the whole staff of “Every Other Week” at work between four and five. “Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn’t much doing to-day. Perhaps it’s the strike that makes it dull.”

  “The strike-yes! It’s a pretty piece of business to have everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and get drunk.” Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young man’s mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. “I’ve got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn’t get a car. If I had my way I’d have a lot of those vagabonds hung. They’re waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses — pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call out the militia, and fire into ‘em. Clubbing is too good for them.” Conrad was still silent, and his father sneered, “But I reckon you don’t think so.”

  “I think the strike is useless,” said Conrad.

  “Oh, you do, do you? Comin’ to your senses a little. Gettin’ tired walkin’ so much. I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on the East Side think about the strike, anywa
y.”

  The young fellow dropped his eyes. “I am not authorized to speak for them.”

  “Oh, indeed! And perhaps you’re not authorized to speak for yourself?”

  “Father, you know we don’t agree about these things. I’d rather not talk—”

  “But I’m goin’ to make you talk this time!” cried Dryfoos, striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist. A maddening thought of Christine came over him. “As long as you eat my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won’t have my children telling me what I shall do and sha’n’t do, or take on airs of being holier than me. Now, you just speak up! Do you think those loafers are right, or don’t you? Come!”

  Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. “I think they were very foolish to strike — at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the work.”

  “Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over there on the East Side that it ‘d been wise to strike before we got the Elevated.” Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, “What do you think?”

  “I think a strike is always bad business. It’s war; but sometimes there don’t seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice. They say that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while.”

  “Those lazy devils were paid enough already,” shrieked the old man.

  “They got two dollars a day. How much do you think they ought to ‘a’ got?

  Twenty?”

  Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But he decided to answer. “The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day.”

  “They lie, and you know they lie,” said his father, rising and coming toward him. “And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after they’ve ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men? How is it going to end?”

  “They will have to give in.”