The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot
near his nose, and groaned. “The poor folks do not know. They who ask
for the votes of the slashers, the weavers, the beamers--the men of the
mills--they who ask votes do not want the poor folks to know, because
the votes would not be given to them who sell poison in the water,” he
told the astonished good woman who had watched his act.
“I am careful about my kitchen--I am neat--I wash everything, Etienne,”
she assured him, sniffing at the slime in the sink, overcome by
confusion, her housewife's reputation at stake.
“Yes, but you cannot wash the souls of them dam' scoundrels who send
that water through the pipes to the poor people who can buy no other,”
he raged. “This is not your blame--you did not know.” He pointed his
finger, quivering, dripping with the slime, at the child on the bed.
“They have murder her! With this!” He slatted his finger with the
gesture of one who throws off a noisome serpent.
“But I drink the water--it hasn't made me sick,” she protested.
“You--me--odders that are all dry up--tough old fools--we ought to die
and we don't,” he raged, stamping back and forth across the kitchen,
waving his arms. “We have been poison so much we do not notice. But the
poor little childs--the young folks that die--die in these tenements all
the time--and we see the white ribbons hanging from the doors, so many
place every day--the poor young folks with life ahead and much to live
for even down here--they are poison and they do not know! Oh, _le bon
Dieu_! Boil dem dam' devil in hell in the water they have sell to the
poor!” He stopped, shocked by these words he heard coming from his
mouth, and crossed himself contritely. “But I look at her--I hear what
the docteur say--I talk and I cannot help!” He staggered into the room
where the child lay, and sat down in a chair and held his face in his
hands.
It was an aged and somewhat unctuous physician whom Farr brought. The
doctor pursed his lips and puckered his eyebrows above the little wraith
who minded him not at all, lying with eyes half closed, plucking with
finger and thumb at the bedclothing.
“With a bit stronger constitution--if she were a little older--Take the
case of an adult--”
“Say it short,” growled Farr, clenching his fists as if he wanted to
beat indulgence for the child out of the hide of the world. “I'm paying
you for her life.”
“I have nothing to sell you in this case--therefore there can be no
pay.” He leaned over the bed and smoothed the moist, tangled hair away
from the child's brow. “I can only _give_ you something, my friend. I
give you all my sympathy. This baby is departing on a long journey, and
I'm Christian enough to believe that the way will be made very smooth
for the feet of little children. That's the faith of an old man.”
There were both earnestness and tenderness in his tones--the smugness of
the physician was gone. He shook Farr's hand and went out of the room,
treading softly.
And the next day Rosemarie's tiny fingers stopped their flutterings and
she went away--somewhere!
XI
THE LORDS OF THE CITY
Walker Farr would not allow the tiny body of Rosemarie to be carried
away in the white hearse. In his grief he had not been able as yet to
dissociate the identity of the child from the poor little tenement in
which her spirit had dwelt for the few barren years of her life; it
seemed to him that she would be very lonely in the white hearse. He rode
to the cemetery, holding the tiny casket across his knees. There was
only the one carriage--it was sufficient to carry the friends of little
Rosemarie: one Walker Farr and old Etienne and play-mamma Zelie Dionne.
The rack-tender sat opposite Farr and nursed a bundle on his knees. He
had wrapped it surreptitiously.
The two men sent Zelie Dionne back to the city in the carriage. But they
waited beside the grave until the sexton had finished his work; Farr
felt an uncontrollable impulse to wait till all was ended, as he had
always waited every night till the little girl was sound asleep and
tucked up in bed in the good woman's house. He sat crouched on the edge
of a turfed grave, elbows on his knees, his hands clutched into his
shock of hair.
After the sexton had departed, tools on his shoulder, Etienne unwrapped
the bundle. He began to arrange the child's toys on the grave.
“It is as the others do--the fathers and mothers of our faith in the
tenement-houses,” he explained, wistfully, to the young man. He pointed
to other graves in the vicinity, short and narrow graves. Toys were
spread on them, too. They were the poor treasures of dead children. The
toys had been left there in the vague, helpless yearning of parents who
strove to reach their human consolation beyond the grave.
Farr gazed on these pitiful memorials of the children--from those graves
to the new mound which covered Rosemarie. The ache that had been in
his throat for so many hours grew more excruciating. He realized that
a father in those circumstances would weep, but he did not feel like
shedding tears, and he was ashamed of himself for what seemed lack of
something within himself. What he felt then, what he had felt ever
since that young doctor had passed sentence of death was surly, bitter
rancor--the anger of a man who is robbed.
“Look all around at the graves,” said Etienne, tears in his wrinkles. “I
know something better since I take off that faucet. Not all the martyr
die when the lion eat 'em up and the fire burn 'em; there be some martyr
these day, too. And sometimes, mebbe, some man what have the power will
come here and see all these poor little grave and then he go and choke
the lion what eat all these poor childs.”
“What kind of man would that be?” pondered Farr. At that moment he had
little faith--much less faith than usual--in the decency of any human
being; and for many years his faith in humankind had been expressed by a
contemptuous snap of his finger.
To sit there longer and look at that fresh earth with the pathetic toys
sprinkled over it was a torment his soul could not endure.
He arose and hurried away and Etienne followed him. They trudged in
silence back to the city--Etienne to take his rake and pike-pole from
the hands of the man who had substituted at the rack, and Farr to resume
surly domination over his sweating Italians.
“The martyrs,” Etienne had called them. The notion of that stuck in
Farr's brooding thoughts.
He tried to look deeper into his own heart than he had ever looked
before and explain to himself just what motive had attracted him to the
child in the first place; he had never been especially interested in
children before. He found himself muttering, “And a little child shall
lead them,” without understanding just why this child had led him so
strangely.
If one Walker Farr had understood it at all and had been able to explain
it to himself, he would have penetrated the mystery of the dynamics of
love--the great gift to humanity that God has not seen fit to expose
in its inner workings. Therefore, Farr strode here and there in the
hot sun, spurred his diggers with crisp oaths, and on the heels of his
profanity muttered to himself, “And a little child shall lead them.”
The tile boss of the Consolidated, whose crew was following the
trench-diggers, accosted Farr, after several inspections of his
lugubrious countenance.
“Don't you think you need to be cheered up a little?”
Farr scowled at him.
“I don't know what has disagreed with you, but you're certainly in a bad
way,” pursued the boss. “Go up with the crowd to City Hall to-night
and hear 'em open up the police scandals. Plenty of free fun for the
heavy-hearted! There are about half a dozen fat cops in this city who'll
be fried to a crisp on both sides, and the sound of the sizzling will be
pleasant in the ears.”
“I'm not interested.”
“You will be, if you tend out. The hearing is before the mayor and the
whole city government. Nothing very hefty in the way of charges--only
loafing in beer-coolers during the heat of the day, spending their time
chasing the labor-agitators out of the parks, and letting burglars keep
house all summer in the mansions up-town while the owners are away at
the seashore. It's all more or less of a joke.”
“Why don't the mayor and aldermen of this city attend to duty instead of
jokes?”
“Oh, this city is run so smooth that there's nothing to do in the summer
except stage a little farce comedy at City Hall.”
“Let me tell you that there's something to be investigated in this city
that isn't a joke,” raged Farr, his bitter ponderings blossoming into
speech.
“What's that?”
“Murder going on every day in this damnable town.”
“Well, I guess if there was any murder going on which we didn't hear
about, even from our fat cops, it would be investigated, all right.
What's the matter with you?”
“I'm glad now you told me about that hearing to-night,” stated Farr,
ignoring the other's curiosity. “I'm glad I know when and where to
locate the mayor and his men in session. I'll find out if they propose
to waste the people's time hearing funny stories about policemen and are
going to let murder go on while they are laughing.”
He strode away, cursing at his workmen as he tramped along the side of
the ditch.
Farr knocked at the garret room of Etienne early that evening.
“I want you to come with me,” he commanded.
The old man obeyed without questions. As they walked along the streets
Farr did not volunteer information. He was grimly sure that if Etienne
should receive an inkling of what was expected of him the old man would
not stop running until he had crossed the Canadian border.
They were ten minutes worming their way through the press that packed
the corridors of City Hall. Groups were bulked at the doors admitting
to the aldermen's room--men thatched against each other and overlapping
like bees in a swarm at the door of a hive.
But the young man was tall and his shoulders were broad and he kept
uttering the magic words, “Room for witnesses!” In his own consciousness
he knew that what he should attempt to testify to that night was not
on the slate, but the crowd accepted him as one of those from whom they
anticipated entertainment, and allowed him to pass--and Etienne, holding
to his young friend's coat, followed close and made his way before the
throng could close in again.
The hearing began and progressed, and there was much laughter when
the delinquencies of certain fat policemen were related--it was
a free-and-easy affair--a sort of midsummer fantasy in municipal
politics--a squabble between ward bosses who had become jealous in
matters of the distribution of police patronage.
Walker Farr, standing against the wall of the audience-chamber, did
not laugh. He was busy with thoughts of his own. This bland fooling in
municipal matters while stealthy death, protected by city franchise,
dripped, so he believed, from every faucet in the tenement-house
district, stirred his bitter indignation. Etienne Provancher stood
beside him, and the old man did not laugh, either, because he did not
understand in the least what those men were talking about. And he was
very uneasy, wistfully awe-stricken, hardly daring to touch with his
hands the polished oak at his back. He was in the great _hotel de ville_
whose exterior he had stared at many times without presuming or daring
to enter the broad portals.
Then there came a recess while the mayor examined papers at his desk.
The aldermen leaned back in their chairs with lighted cigars.
“Etienne,” whispered the young man, deep resolve thrilling him, his
eyes blazing into the wondering gaze of the old man, “those men who sit
behind those desks can do something to save the children and the poor
folks in the tenements. But they must wake up, these men here must. You