Carmen Ariza Part 170

It's a makeshift. But it helps a bit--and I like it.

"But," he continued more seriously, "there's going to be trouble here.

A strike is coming. And it's going to be a bad one. I wish I could convince Mr. Ames."

"Have you tried?" she asked.

"I've written him several times of late. It doesn't do any good. His secretary writes back that Mr. Ames is doing all he can. But it's not much I see he's doing, except to go on sucking the blood from these poor devils down here!"

They soon reached the tenement where Tony lived, and Carmen asked the priest to go up with her. He raised a hand and smiled.

"No," he said, "the good woman doesn't like priests. And my labors don't reach the women anyway, except through the men. They const.i.tute my field. Some one else must work among the women. I'll wait for you here."

It was only by making many promises that Carmen could at last get away from the little group on the fourth floor. But she slipped a bill into Tony's hands as she went out, and then hurriedly crossed the hall and opened the unlocked door of the widow Marcus's room. The place was empty. Carmen pinned a five-dollar bill upon the pillow and hastened out.

"Now," said the priest, when the girl had joined him in the street below, "it ain't right to take you to the Mission--"

"We'll go there first," the girl calmly announced. "And then to the Hall. By the way, there's a telephone in your place? I want to call up the health officer. I want to report the condition of these tenements."

The priest laughed. "It won't do any good, Miss. I've camped on his heels for months. And he can't do anything, anyway. I see that. If he gets too troublesome to those higher up, why, he gets fired. They don't want his reports. He isn't here to report on conditions, but to overlook 'em. It's politics."

"You mean to say that nothing can be done in regard to those awful buildings which Mr. Ames owns and rents to his mill hands?" she said.

"That's it," he replied. "It's criminal to let such buildings stand.

But Ames owns 'em. That's enough."

They went on in silence for some minutes. Meanwhile, the priest was studying his fair companion, and wondering who she might be. At length he inquired if she had ever been in Avon before.

"No," replied the girl. "I wish I had!"

"Haven't seen Pillette's house then? He's resident manager of the Ames mills. We can go a little out of our way and have a look at it."

A few minutes later they stood at the iron gate of the manager's residence, a ma.s.sive, brown stone dwelling, set in among ancient trees in an estate of several acres, and surrounded by shrubs and bushes.

"Fine place, eh?" remarked the priest.

"Beautiful," replied Carmen. "Does he know all about those tenements down there?"

"Ah, that he does; and cares less. And he knows all about the terrible hot air in his mills, and the flying lint that clogs the lungs of the babies working there. He sees them leave the place, dripping with perspiration, and go out into the zero temperature half naked. And when they go off with pneumonia, well he knows why; and cares less. He knows that the poor, tired workers in that great prison lose their senses in the awful noise and roar, and sometimes get bewildered and fall afoul of belts and cogs, and lose their limbs or lives. He knows; and doesn't care. So does Mr. Ames. And he wouldn't put safety devices over his machines, because he doesn't care. I've written to him a dozen times about it. But--

"And then Pillette," he continued; "I've asked him to furnish his hands with decent drinking water. They work ten and twelve hours in that inferno, and when they want to drink, why, all they have is a barrel of warm water, so covered with lint that it has to be pushed aside in order to get at the water. Why, Pillette don't even give 'em change rooms! He won't give 'em decent toilet rooms! Says Mr. Ames can't afford it. Seems to me that when a man can give a ball and send out invitations on cards of solid gold, he can afford to give a thought to the thousands who have toiled and suffered in order to enable him to give such a ball, don't you?"

Carmen did. She had attended that reception. The memory came back now in hot, searing thoughts.

"Oh, he catches 'em coming and going!" the priest went on. "You see, he manipulates Congress so that a high tariff law is pa.s.sed, protecting him from imported goods. Then he runs up the prices of his output. That hits his mill hands, for they have to pay the higher prices that the tariff causes. Oh, no, it doesn't result in increased wages to them. Ha! ha! Not a bit! They're squeezed both ways. He is the only one who profits by high tariff on cotton goods. See how it works?"

Yes, Carmen saw. She might not know that Ames periodically appeared before Congress and begged its protection--nay, threatened, and then demanded. She might not know that Senator Gossitch ate meekly from the great man's hand, and speciously represented to his dignified colleagues that the benefits of high protective duties were for "the people" of the United States. She might not know how Hood, employed to evade the laws enacted to hedge and restrain his master, bribed and bought, schemed and contrived, lobbied, traded, and manipulated, that his owner might batten on his blood-stained profits, while he kept his face turned away from the scenes of carnage, and his ears stopped against the piteous cries of his driven slaves. But she did know how needless it all was, and how easy, oh! how pitiably easy, it would be to remedy every such condition, would the master but yield but a modic.u.m of his colossal, mesmeric selfishness. She did not know, she could not, that the master, Ames, made a yearly profit from his mills of more than two hundred per cent. But she did know that, were he less stupidly greedy, even to the extent of taking but a hundred per cent profit, he would turn a flood of sunshine into hundreds of sick, despairing, dying souls.

"This is the place," she heard the priest say, his voice seeming to come from a long distance. "This is the Mission."

She stopped and looked about her. They were in front of an old, two-story building, decrepit and forbidding, but well lighted. While she gazed, the priest opened the door and bade her enter.

"This down here is the reading room," he explained. "The door is never locked. Upstairs is my office, and sleeping rooms for men. Also a stock of old clothes I keep on hand for 'em when I send 'em out to look for work. I've clothed an average of four men a day during the past year, and sent 'em out to look for jobs. I board 'em, and keep 'em going until they land something. Sometimes I have to lend 'em money. I just help 'em to help themselves. No, I never bother about a man's religion. Come up to my office."

Carmen climbed the rough steps to the floor above and entered the small but well-kept office of the priest.

"Now here," he said, with a touch of pride, "is my card-index. I keep tab on all who come here. When they get straightened up and go out to hunt work, I give 'em identification cards. Just as soon as I can get funds I'm going to put a billiard table back there and fit up a little chapel, so's the Catholic men who drift in here can attend service.

You know, a lot of 'em don't have the nerve to go to a church. Too proud. But they'd attend Ma.s.s here."

Carmen looked at the man in admiration. Then a thought came to her.

"We haven't either of us asked the other's name," she said.

The priest's eyes twinkled. "I've been dying to know yours," he replied. "I'm Father Magee, Daniel Magee. But the boys generally call me Danny. What shall I call you? Oh, give any name; it doesn't matter, just so's I'll know how to address you."

"I am Carmen Ariza. And I am from South America," said the girl simply. "Now sit down here. I want to talk to you. I have a lot to ask."

An hour later the girl rose from her chair. "I shall have to wait and visit the Hall another time," she said. "I must catch the eight-thirty back to the city. But--"

"I'll never see you go down this tough street to the depot alone!"

averred the priest, reaching for his hat.

Carmen laughed. But she gratefully accepted the proffered escort. Two of Father Magee's a.s.sistants had come in meanwhile, and were caring for the few applicants below.

"You're right, Miss Carmen," the priest said, as they started for the train. "Mr. Ames _must_ be reached. Perhaps you can do it. I can't.

But I'll give you every a.s.sistance possible. It eats my heart out to see the suffering of these poor people!"

At eleven o'clock that night Carmen entered the office of the city editor of the Express. "Ned," she said, "I've been with Dante--no, Danny--in Inferno. Now I'm going to Washington. I want expense money--a good lot--so that I can leave to-morrow night."

Haynerd's eyes dilated as he stared at the girl. "Washington!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Well--! But what did you find down in Avon?"

"I'll write you a detailed report of my trip to-morrow. I'm going home now," she replied.

CHAPTER 12

It is sometimes said of the man who toils at forge or loom in this great commonwealth that he is fast forgetting that Washington is something more significant to him than what is embraced in the definition of the gazetteers. Not so, however, of that cla.s.s of the genus _h.o.m.o_ individualized in J. Wilton Ames. He leaned not upon such frail dependence as the _Congressional Record_ for tempered reports of what goes on behind closed legislative doors; he went behind those doors himself. He needed not to yield his meekly couched desires to the law-builders whom his ballot helped select; he himself launched those legislators, and gave them their steering charts. But, since the interpretation of laws was to him vastly more important than their framing, he first applied himself to the selection of judges, and especially those of the federal courts. With these safely seated and instructed at home, he gave himself comfortably to the task of holding his legislators in Washington to the course he chose.

Carmen had not spent a day at the Capital before the significance of this fact to the common citizen swept over her like a tidal wave. If the people, those upon whom the stability of the nation rests, looked as carefully after appointments and elections as did Ames, would their present wrongs continue long to endure? She thought not. And after she had spent the day with the Washington correspondent of the Express, a Mr. Sands, who, with his young wife, had just removed to the Capital, she knew more with respect to the mesmerism of human inertia and its baneful effects upon mankind than she had known before.

And yet, after that first day of wandering through the hallowed precincts of a nation's legislative halls, she sat down upon a bench in the shadow of the Capitol's great dome and asked herself the questions: "What am I here for, anyway? What can _I_ do? Why have I come?" She had acted upon--impulse? No; rather, upon instinct. And instinct with her, as we have said, was unrestrained dependence upon her own thought, the thought which entered her mentality only after she had first prepared the way by the removal of every obstruction, including self.

At the breakfast table the second morning after her arrival in the city, Mr. Sands handed her a copy of the Express. Among the editorials was her full report upon conditions as she had found them in Avon, published without her signature. Following it was the editor's comment, merciless in its exposition of fact, and ruthless in its exposure of the cruel greed externalized in the great cotton industry in that little town.

Carmen rose from the table indignant and protesting. Hitt had said he would be wise in whatever use he made of her findings. But, though quite devoid of malignity, this account and its added comment were nothing less than a personal attack upon the master spinner, Ames. And she had sent another report from Washington last night, one comprising all she had learned from Mr. Sands. What would Hitt do with that? She must get in touch with him at once. So she set out to find a telegraph office, that she might check the impulsive publisher who was openly hurling his challenge at the giant Philistine.