Scott Leroy
To Him That Hath

CHAPTER VIII
THE WORLD'S DENIAL

That night Tom confessed he had privately saved a few dollars; and from the Morgans' flat he brought David's overcoat and several of the other articles they had pawned. David's conscience demanded that the savings should not be used, and he wondered what right they had to their own property, redeemed with stolen money. But need conquered ethics. A day or two later the landlady demanded her rent, giving the choice between payment and the street; the money went to her. Hunger pressed them; the redeemed articles began to return one by one to the pawnshop.

In a few days the grip left David, and though still weak, he began to creep about the streets, looking for work. He believed success impossible – and immediately success came.

The great stores were enlisting armies of temporary employes for the holiday season, and as at this time there are not enough first-class men and women to fill the ranks, they were accepting the second-class and the third and the tenth, examining no one closely. David heard of this chance, and, quailing at heart and expecting nothing, joined the line of applicants at the big department store of Sumner & Co.

"What experience?" demanded the superintendent when David reached his desk.

"None," said David.

The superintendent glanced him over, saw that his face was good.

"Work for nine a week?"

"Yes."

He scratched on a slip of paper and handed it to David.

"Start in at once in the check-room."

David reeled away from the desk. That evening he and Tom celebrated the advent of the Impossible by eating twenty cents' worth of food; and his excited hope, fearful, daring, kept sleep from his eyes all night. He knew he was only a temporary man, but his hope reasoned that if he gave exceptional satisfaction he might be retained after the great post-Christmas discharge. If retained permanently, he might work his way up in the store; and if he could remain only a few months, at least he would then be able to say, when seeking a new place and asked for his record, "I worked last for Sumner and Company; I refer you to them." His hope told him this position might prove the foothold he sought – and he determined to exert all that was in him to make it so.

Toward the end of his fourth day here, a woman for whom he had just laid upon the counter several packages she had checked two or three hours before, declared that a small parcel containing gloves was missing. Weary and exasperated from her day among the jostling shoppers, she berated David in loud and angry voice. He suggested that possibly she had not checked the parcel, that she might have checked it in some other store, that perhaps she had ordered it delivered and had forgotten it, that possibly she had dropped it.

Nothing of the kind! She knew what she'd done with it! They'd been careless, and given it to some other woman!

David, still very courteous, suggested that possibly it had been picked up and taken to the lost-and-found desk. She might inquire there.

She would not! She had left it here! She had been robbed!

She was departing ragefully, but David followed her and by using his best persuasion secured her grudging consent to wait till he himself should inquire at the lost-and-found desk. A few minutes later he returned with the package. She could say nothing more, for on the wrapper was the stamp of the desk and the hour the parcel had been turned in. She made a curt apology – it came hard, but still it was an apology – and went out.

David had his reward. The superintendent over him, attracted by the woman's angry voice, had drawn near and looked on unseen. He now came forward. "That was well done, Aldrich," he said. "I couldn't have handled her better myself."

David grew warm. Yes, this place might prove his foothold!

A similar thought came to one of the other four men in the check-room. This man, a regular employe in the room, had recently been reproved several times for negligence and discourtesy, and he knew his hold on his place was precarious. The fear now struck him, at the great discharge might not he be sent away and this new man Aldrich be kept?

His wits set to work. He now remembered that David had evaded questions about his past. Perhaps in it there was something that would change his chief's opinion. That night he followed David, warmed by his strengthened hope, from the store, and made inquiries in the little grocery shop in David's tenement. Just a poor man who had been having a hard time – this was all he could learn. He hung around the tenement, and presently David came down and walked away. He followed. After several blocks David stopped before St. Christopher's and gazed across the street at it. The shadowing man wondered. Then it occurred to him that in there they might know something about this man Aldrich.

He entered.

The next morning David was summoned to the office of the superintendent of his department. He was still aglow from the commendation of yesterday. But the superintendent's face struck him cold.

"Are you the David Aldrich who stole five thousand dollars from St. Christopher's Mission?" the superintendent asked quietly.

For a minute David could not speak. His foothold – lost! Again the abyss!

"I am," he said. But here was a man different from the other employer that had discharged him. Here a plea might be effective. "I am," he repeated. And then he went on desperately: "But whatever I may have done, I'm honest now. As honest as any man. And I'll work hard – nothing will be too hard! I ask only a chance – any sort of a chance. A chance to earn my living! – a chance to remain honest!"

"I have not acted hastily," the superintendent returned. "I have called up the Mission and confirmed a report I had from another source. I know your whole story. Your pay is in this envelope. That is all."

David went out, dizzily falling … falling … falling into depths he felt were hopeless. And as he fell, in the sickened swirl of his mind one sudden thought stood forth, sharp, ironic: It was St. Christopher's that had pushed him from his foothold, that had sent him plunging back into the abyss!

Once more began the search for work. But now fewer men were needed; there was time to question. But he tramped on, and on, looking always for a man who would not question, and always rebuffed – his clothes growing shabbier and shabbier, his shoes growing thinner, his little money wasting away – foot-sore, heart-sore, gripped by despair.

He had chanced upon at intervals in the Bowery and on Broadway several of his Croton prison-mates. All of them that had tried to be honest had been conquered by the difficulties, and had gone back to their old trades. He now, on his despairing walks, met two of them again, and both urged him to quit his foolish struggle and join with them. Nothing during the three terrible months had revealed to him how his moral instincts had suffered as did the fact that he was now tempted.

During these black days he saw little of Tom. David did not want to talk, did not want to box, there were no meals; so the boy came home only to sleep. David was certain Tom was stealing again, but he had not the heart for reproof. One can hardly seek to convert a thief to honesty when one can only offer starvation for reform.

Since Helen Chambers's call David had now and then had a faint hope that he might in some way hear from her. But no word came. He understood. She scorned him for the deed of four years ago, she believed he was now regularly practising theft and was directing the thefts and lies of a boy. Her sympathy, her instinct to aid, might impel her to establish friendly relations with a repentant thief, but never with such a thief as she considered him.

On his recovery David had resumed his Wednesday evening visits to his accustomed doorway near St. Christopher's. One night he saw that which poured a new agony into the cup he had thought already overbrimming. When Helen Chambers stepped from the Mission a man he had never before seen was beside her – a tall man, of maturity and dignity. With the instant instinct of the lover he recognized here another lover; and he read, in a smiling glance she turned up as they passed the doorway, that this man had her admiration and her confidence.

The next morning – the night had held the cup constantly to his lips – he went to the Astor Library and secured a copy of the Social Register. The man's name, as it had come to him across the darkness in Helen's low resonant voice, was Allen. There were many Allens in the Register, but only one that could possibly be the Allen he had seen the night before. The Register's data, and deductions therefrom, informed David that Mr. Henry Allen was forty, a member of half a dozen clubs, a man of wealth and social standing, and a lawyer of notable achievement.

Just the sort of husband Helen Chambers deserved! David closed the book and crept out.

The evening of the day before he found work in the department store, Kate Morgan had told him she had just secured a new place. "Did you get it through Miss Chambers?" he had suspiciously demanded.

"No," she had answered, smiling defiantly. At parting she had said with sharp decision, standing at his door: "You've had enough of the honest life. You're going to be with me on this job. Set that down." Without giving him a chance to reply, she had stepped out and closed the door.

He did not see her again till the middle of December, when one Sunday evening she knocked, walked in and promptly sent Tom on an errand.

"I can only stay for two minutes," she said, speaking rapidly and in a low voice. "This is supposed to be my Sunday off, but one of the maids is sick, so instead of a day I get an hour and a half. Say, it's certainly a swell house. The family is just a man and his mother. Just them two in a house big enough for a town – and think of the way we rub ribs down here! They've got carloads of silver, all of it solid; and the old lady has simply got barrels of jewelry. They're going to have a big blow-out on Christmas, so none of the servants get a holiday then. But almost all of them are going to get New Year's Eve and New Year's Day out. The house will be almost empty New Year's Eve. That's when we'll clean it up."

"You seem to have no doubt that I shall join you," David said dryly.

"None at all!" she answered promptly.

"Well, I shall certainly not!"

"You may think you'll not," she returned, undisturbed. "But you will. Anybody but a fool would have come to his senses long ago. You've found you can't get a job. You've got to live. It's steal or starve. Of course you're going to be in."

"I shall not!" David returned doggedly.

The days of the second half of the month moved slowly by. David continued walking the streets, occasionally daring to ask for work. His money was all gone, and everything was in the pawnshop except his overcoat, from which he hardly dared part at this season. His clothes were now so worn and shapeless as of themselves to insure the refusal of any place but that of a labourer. A labourer's place he possibly could have found – for a labourer's character is not questioned, since usually there is opportunity for him to steal no more than the value of a pick and shovel, and the wages left behind would more than cover such a loss. But for a labourer's work David had not a labourer's strength.

He was forced down … down; finally to those low services by which the dregs of the city's population keep a decrepit life within themselves. The odd jobs about saloons which are usually done for beer-payment he performed under the inspiration of the free-lunch counter. He peeled potatoes in Bowery restaurants where dinners are fifteen cents, his work to pay for a meal; and when the dinner, which he had seen cooked in a filthy kitchen and served in half-washed dishes, was put before him, his stomach so revolted that he often turned from the untasted food and hurried into the street.

He was at the bottom of the abyss. Light, hope, were far above – the walls were smooth and high – his climbing strength was gone. He could not last much longer. He wondered, darkly, fearfully, what would be the end. Yet he had not given up; there was still bitterness, rebellion, in him, and still an automatic, staggering courage.

Three days before New Year's Kate Morgan called again. "I'm home to stay; my father's so sick I had to throw up my job," she said with a wink. She drew a ring of keys from the pocket of her skirt and silently held them before David's eyes; then, with a sharp little smile, she slipped them back, and drew out five sheets of paper, on each of which was a rough diagram of one of the floors of her late employer's house, with the doors and stairways marked and the location of the valuables. She explained the plans to him, adding details not charted, and on rising to go she handed him the sheets that he might familiarise himself with the house.

"But I shall have nothing to do with this," he said desperately, thrusting back the papers.

"Oh, yes you will," she returned, putting her hands behind her back.

He let the sheets fall to the floor, but she went out without giving them another glance. He looked at the papers, picked them up, stared at them whitely; and then, in a sort of frenzy, as though he would annihilate temptation, he tore the sheets into a thousand flakes and thrust them into his pocket.

The next morning he set forth with the despairing energy of the man who has a new fear, who has fiercely summoned all his resources for a last struggle. But mid-winter is a season when even a skilled man of blameless reputation has trouble in finding work; for David there was no chance whatever. And then, in his extreme desperation, he determined on a new course – in asking for work he would openly tell his record. Perhaps some one, out of sympathy for the struggle he was making, would give him an opportunity. He had thought of this plan before, but he had put it aside, because, he had reasoned, to avow himself a thief was to murder his chances. But the old course had brought him nothing; the new plan held at least a possibility.

David walked the streets half the day before he could drive himself to try this plan. At length a superintendent consented to see him and listen to his story and appeal. "I appreciate your frankness," the superintendent replied, not unkindly. "But I am under strict orders on this point; I can take only men of the straightest records. But I hope you'll find something."

David was left without courage to try the plan again that afternoon. The next day he could find no one willing to hear him. In the evening Kate Morgan called again. Everything was in readiness for their venture of the following night, she told him. Once more he declared that he would have nothing to do with the affair. But to himself his words sounded only of the lips; and his indignation did not quicken the least trifle when Kate flung a dry laugh into his face.

The following morning, the last day of December, he spurred his spent courage on to another attempt. He at length found a wholesale notion store where a packer was wanted. The head of the packing department was large and powerful, with coarse, man-driving features; but, undeterred by this appearance, David recited his story.

The superintendent stared amazedly at David, and swore. "Well if you ain't got the nerve!" he roared. "You admit you're a crook, and yet you ask me for a job! What d'you think we're runnin' here? – a reform school? Not on your life! Now you see if you can't find the door out o' here – and quick!"

David had neither the strength nor the spirit to reply to this man as he had replied to the owner of the department store in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. When he reached the open air he walked a few paces, then paused and leaned against the front of a building. He felt an utter exhaustion – there was not another effort in him. He was like a horse, driven to the last ounce of its strength, that lies down in its tracks to die; the whip can only make it quiver, cannot make it rise. He chanced to turn his head, and saw himself in the mirror that backed the show-window – a thin, stooping figure with a white line of a mouth and a gray, haggard face. He was so numb, so spiritually spent, that this spectre of himself stirred not a single emotion within him.

That evening he swept a saloon, and ate of the cheese and corn-beef sandwiches at the free-lunch counter till the bartender ordered him out. Then he wandered aimlessly through the night, which was balmy despite the month, with no desire to return to the dingy four walls of his unheated room. He remembered in a vague way that this was the night Kate Morgan had set for the robbery; and perhaps his staying from home was due to the unfelt guidance of his conscience. He had no definite thoughts or sensations; only a vast, stunning sense of absolute defeat.

A little after eleven o'clock he found himself wandering along the East River, and presently he turned upon a dock and walked toward the water between two rows of trucks, facing each other, their shafts raised supplicatingly to the stars. He seated himself at the end of the dock, and his chin in his two hands, looked out upon the river. Save for the reflection, like luminous, writhing arms, that the few lights of Brooklyn reached toward him on the water's surface, and save for the turbulent brilliance under the Williamsburg Bridge's great bow of arc lights, the river, which the tide was dragging wildly out to sea, was as black as blindness.

He gazed forth into the darkness, forth upon the swirling water – dully, without thought, in the flat stupor of unrising defeat… Presently a bell began to send down the hour from a neighbouring steeple. Mechanically he counted the strokes. Twelve. The number at first had no significance, but after a moment its meaning thrilled him through. This was the New Year!.. The New Year!.. And how was he beginning it? Penniless – friendless – without work – with little strength – with no courage – without hope. A happy New Year, indeed!

Suddenly all the bitterness that had been gathering and smouldering within him these last four months, burst out volcanically. And his passion was not alone in his own behalf; it was in behalf of the thousands of others who had made a similar struggle, and to whom the world had similarly denied the privilege of honesty. Starved and hopeless! Why? Because he could not work? – because there was no work? – because the world had decided the moral development of such as he required further punishment? No. Because the rich, powerful world was afraid! – afraid of its dollars! Because, if he were taken in, given a chance to live honestly, he might steal a bolt of cloth, or a coat, or a vase, or a shawl! There was the reason – the only reason. A bolt of cloth against a human life, begging to live! A coat against a human soul, agonising to be honest! Cloths and coats mean dollars – mean carriages, and diamonds, and wines. Cloths and coats must be guarded.

But the human life? The human soul?

In his wild rage David rose, turned his back upon the dark river, and shook his fist at the great indifferent city.

CHAPTER IX
THE OPEN ROAD

At one o'clock David, still aflame with bitterness, was entering his room when a door across the hall opened and Kate Morgan looked out. "Come into my house!" she snapped in a whisper.

David could not see her face, but her voice told him she was angry. He followed her. Actresses' photographs on the walls, a rug of glaring design, cheap red-and-green upholstered furniture that overcrowded the little room – such was Kate Morgan's parlour. She closed the door, then turned, her eyes blazing, and swore at him.

"A nice time to be getting home! I've been waiting two hours for you!"

For a moment he looked at her uncomprehendingly. "Oh, you're thinking of that robbery. You needn't have waited. I told you I'd have nothing to do with it."

"Drop that bluffing! You know you're in it!"

He started toward the door.

"Where you going?" she demanded.

"To bed."

She seized his arm, stepped between him and the door and stared wrathfully up at him. She now saw how pale and drawn his face was. Her wrath slowly left her. "You're tired – blue," she said, abruptly, but softly.

He nodded. "So I'm going to bed."

"Let's chat a minute first," she said, and drew him to the largest of the chairs, and pushed him down into it. "And we'll have something to eat, just you and me. I've made dad go to bed. It's all ready. I'll bring it in here."

She moved a little table before him and went out. Could David have seen the look she held upon him through the door, he would have been puzzled, perhaps startled. After she had made three trips into the rear of the flat there were upon the table a plate of sandwiches, a dish of olives, a pie, and two cups of coffee, all served with a neatness that, after the Bowery restaurants, was astonishing to David.

"Now, we'll begin," she said, and sat down on the opposite side of the little table. The food had a wonderful taste to David, and the coffee – it was real coffee – warmed his chilled body. For several minutes they both ate in silence, then Kate pushed back her chair, lighted a cigarette, and sat regarding him with eyes that grew very soft.

When he had finished she leaned suddenly forward and laid a hand on one of his.

"I don't like it for you to look this way, David," she said.

He started at the touch and at the "David." She saw the start and drew her hand away. "Why shouldn't I call you David? We're good pals, ain't we? I'm tired of this miss and mister business. Call me Kate."

He was still too surprised to make an immediate answer, and she went on softly, "You look very bad!"

The remark brought flooding back to him all his misery and hopelessness, all his rebellion, and he forgot his wonder at her overture. "Why shouldn't I?" he asked bitterly.

She nodded. "I understand," she said. "The world's got no use for a man that's been a crook. He's got no chance. I've seen a lot of boys come back, and swear they'd never touch another job. They tried – some of 'em hard, but none as hard as you. But nobody wanted 'em. What way was open? Only one – to go back to cracking cribs. They all went back." She paused, then added: "Now I want to ask you one square question: what's the use trying?"

David was remembering his four months' futile struggle when he involuntarily echoed, "What's the use!"

"Yes, what?" she continued quickly. "The world may not owe you a living, but it owes you the right to live. It owes you that much. If it won't let you live by working, why, you've got to live by stealing. There's no other way. You've tried the first – "

She went on, but David heard no more. His bitterness, his resentment, were making a fiercer plea. Yes, he had tried! Could any man try harder? And what had he gained? Rebuff – insult – uttermost poverty. There was no use in trying further – none whatever. There was left only the second way – the one road that is always open, that always welcomes the repentant thief whom the world refuses.

Why should he not enter this only road? He had no single friend who would be pained. He had no faintest hope of a future. All that could be lost was lost. The thief's trade promised him the necessities of life. He had offered to pay the world in work for these necessities, but the world had refused his payment. What could he do, then, but take them? – Besides, would it not be just treatment of the world – of the world that had destroyed him, of the world that cared more for dollars than for souls – if some of its all-precious wealth were taken from it?

He looked up; his face was tight-set, vindictive; his eyes glittered.

Kate's gaze was fixed upon him, waiting. "It's time we were starting," she said. "It's almost two."

He breathed deeply, almost convulsively.

"Come on," he said.

She reached across and seized his hand. "I knew you'd come in!" she cried triumphantly. "We'll turn a lot of tricks together, you and me!"

He gripped her hand so hard that she gave a little gasp, but he did not answer. For a minute or more they looked silently into each other's face.

"Come, we must go," she said… "You have your diagram of the house?"

"No. I tore it up."

She drew some sheets from the front of her flannel waist. "Here's another, then. You may need it."

From beneath the red-and-green sofa she took a suit-case, which she threw open. In it were a full set of burglar's tools. "We really don't need 'em, for I've got keys to almost everything. But we'll take 'em along and twist the locks a bit, so they'll never suspect the job may have been done by someone who'd been in the inside – that is, by me. We'll bring the swag back in the suit-case."

She looked at David, as at a superior artist, for commendation of her plan; but he silently regarded the strange instruments in the bag. She slipped on a pair of rubbers, fastened on a little hat, and had David help her into a short jacket which had large pockets in the lining. David drew on his overcoat, picked up the suit-case, and together they crept down the black stairways and out into the street. She chattered softly all the while, as though fearing David, if left to his own thoughts, might withdraw from the adventure.

Shortly before three o'clock Kate paused, in one of the Seventies near Fifth Avenue, before a flight of broad steps leading up to a broad stoop and a broad entrance. "Here we are," she whispered.

They searched the street in both directions with quick glances. Not a soul was in sight. Then they slipped to the shadowed servants' entrance beneath the stoop, and in less than a minute Kate had unlocked a door of iron grating and a second door of wood, and they were standing in a dark hallway. She opened the grip, handed David a lantern, took one for herself, tied a handkerchief over his face so that all below the eyes was hidden, and masked herself likewise. Then with a jimmy and a wrench she hurried away.

Two minutes later she reappeared. She was inspired with the desire to impress David with her skill as a thief, as another woman might be inspired to attract male attention by the display of her beauty. "I just opened a back window and broke the latch," she whispered. "We'll lock these doors when we go out, and they'll think we got in through the window. Now, come on. But hadn't you better take off your shoes? They're pretty heavy."

David sat down upon a chair, and she turned her lantern's bar of light upon his feet, so that he could better manage the laces. When the shoes came off, there were his heels and toes gleaming whitely. In the confusion of strange sensations that had begun to flow in upon him, he had forgotten that his stockings were only tops. He quickly shifted his feet out of the embarrassing rays.

"That's all right," said Kate. "There'll be plenty of new ones to-morrow."

They went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life – Kate tense and alert with excitement, David giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. After a dozen of these pauses, when to David the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, Kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries.

"The drawing-room," she whispered, and slowly sweeping it with her lantern she revealed to him its gorgeous fittings. Then her lantern sought out a curio cabinet, of glass sides and gilded frame, standing in a corner. "That's what we want in here," she said. At her order David set down the suit-case he had carried, and they tiptoed to the cabinet over rugs worth hundreds of dollars a step.

"You get the good things in there, I'll go upstairs after the old lady's sparklers, and then we'll both go down and get the silver," she whispered, as she unlocked the cabinet with one of her keys. "I'll meet you here in a little while."

A sudden fear of being alone leaped up in David. He clutched Kate's arm and threw the lantern's light into her face. Of the face he saw only a narrow slit between her handkerchief and hat-brim, amid which her eyes gleamed like black diamonds.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "You're trembling."

"It must be – my nerves are gone," he whispered, with an effort.

"Oh, you'll be all right when you've been fed up and done another job or two."

He watched her little figure glide out of the room behind its headlight, then he turned to the contemplation of the miniature portraits in gem-set frames, the old hand-painted fans, the heavy old-fashioned lockets and earrings and bracelets, that lay upon the glass shelves of the cabinet.

He had no distinct thought toward the articles – there was no thought, not even a vague one, in his mind. His throat and lips were dry, his eyes were wide and fixed. His dizzy, unpowering emotion had so increased that he would not have been surprised had he slipped to the floor and spread out like a boneless sea creature. He was mental and emotional incoherence.

The intention to steal had brought him here. That intention was over an hour old, but since it had been neither fulfilled nor countermanded, it was stored energy; and presently it began to move his will-less members, as the stored energy of a coiled spring sets an automaton at its appointed task. He took from the floor the plunder-bag Kate had given him, and holding the lantern and the edge of the bag's mouth in his left hand, he swung open the plate-glass door of the cabinet. His eyes selected a golden bracelet, and his hand moved slowly forward and took it up.

Then suddenly his fingers unclosed, the bracelet clicked back upon the glass shelf, and his hand withdrew from the cabinet. The coiled spring of his intention had snapped. The touch of what was another man's had readjusted his confused senses. His blurred feelings became definite, his dumb brain articulate. He saw what he was doing, saw it clearly, as a bare act, unjustified by the arguments his bitterness had urged upon him an hour before – saw that he was committing a theft!