The Landloper Part 18

"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 h.e.l.l 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 const.i.tution--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 hea.r.s.e. In his grief he had not been able as yet to dissociate the ident.i.ty 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 hea.r.s.e. 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 surrept.i.tiously.

The two men sent Zelie Dionne back to the city in the carriage. But they waited beside the grave until the s.e.xton 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 s.e.xton 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed 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 subst.i.tuted 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 G.o.d 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 seash.o.r.e. 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 d.a.m.nable 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 antic.i.p.ated entertainment, and allowed him to pa.s.s--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 munic.i.p.al 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 munic.i.p.al 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 and I must try to wake them up!"