From Place to Place Part 19

"That'll be all right," said Ginsburg crisply. It was his business to avoid the issue of a clash. "And it'll be all right your calling me a Jew. I am a Jew and I'm proud of it. And I'm wearing the same name I started out with too."

"Is that so?"

Except in the inspired pages of fiction city thugs are singularly barren of power to deliver really snappy, really witty retorts.

"Is that so, Jew?" He stared at Ginsburg and a derisive grin opened a gap in his broad dark face. "Oh, be chee! We ain't strangers--you and me ain't! We've met before--when we was kids. Down in Henry Street, it was. I put me mark on you oncet, and if I ever feel like it I'll do it again sometime."

Like a match under shavings the words kindled half-forgotten memories in the young detective's brain and now--for his part--recognition came flashing back out of the past.

"I thought so," he said, choosing to ignore the gangster and addressing Casane. "I thought from the first Gorman wasn't his right name. I've forgotten what his right name is, but it's nothing that sounds like Gorman. He's a wop. I went to the same school with him over on the East Side a good many years ago."

"Don't forget to tell him how the wop licked the Jew," broke in the prisoner. "Remember how the sc.r.a.p started?"

He spat again and this time he did not miss. Ginsburg put up his gloved hand and wiped clean a face that with pa.s.sion had turned a mottle of red-and-white blotches. His voice shook from the strain of his effort to control himself.

"I'll get you for that," he said quietly. "And I'll get you good. The day'll come when I'll walk you in broad daylight up to the big chief, and I'll have the goods on you too."

"Forget it," jeered the ruffian triumphantly. Before the eyes of his satellites he had--by his standards--acquitted himself right creditably. "You got nothin' on me now, Jew, and you never will have.

Well, come on, you bulls, let's be goin' along. I wouldn't want the neither one of you for steady company. One of you is too polite and the other'n too meek for my tastes."

The man who was called Stretchy Gorman spoke a prophetic word when he said the police had nothing on him. Since they had nothing on him, he was let go after forty-eight hours of detention; but that is not saying they did not intend, if they could--and in such cases they usually can--to get something on him.

No man in the department had better reason to crave that consummation than Hyman Ginsburg had. With him the hope of achieving revenge became practically an obsession. It rode in his thoughts. Any hour, in a campaign to harry the gangster to desperation by means of methods that are common enough inside the department, he might have invoked competent and willing a.s.sistance, for the word had filtered down from on high, where the seats of the mighty are, that those mysterious forces aloft would look complacently upon the eternal undoing of the Stretchy Gormans and their t.i.tular leader, no matter how accomplished.

But this notion did not match in with the colour of Ginsburg's desires.

Single-handed, he meant to do the trick. Most probably then the credit would be all his; a.s.suredly the satisfaction would. When he considered this prospect his mind ran back along old grooves to the humiliating beating he had suffered in front of the Henry Street school so long before and of a most painful strapping that followed; these being coupled always with a later memory scar of a grievous insult endured in the line of duty and all the more hateful because it had been endured.

Once Ginsburg had read a book out of a public library--a book which mentally he called Less Miserables. Through the pages of that book there had walked a detective whom Ginsburg in his mind knew by the name of Jawbert. Now he recalled how this Jawbert spent his life tracking down an offender who was the main hero of the book. He told himself that in the matter of Stretchy Gorman he would be as another Jawbert.

By way of a beginning he took advantage of leisure hours to trace out the criminal history of his destined victim. In the gallery he found numbered and cla.s.sified photographs; in the Bertillon bureau, finger prints; and in the records, what else he lacked of information--as an urchin, so many years spent in the protectory; as a youth, so many years in the reformatory; as a man, a year on Blackwell's Island for a misdemeanour and a three-year term at Sing Sing for a felony; also he dug up the entry of an indictment yet standing on which trial had never been held for lack of proof to convict; finally a long list of arrests for this and that and the other thing, unproved. From under a succession of aliases he uncovered Gorman's real name.

But a sequence of events delayed his fuller a.s.sumption of the role of Jawbert. He was sent to Rio de Janeiro to bring back an absconder of note. Six months he worked on the famous Gonzales child-stealing mystery. He made two trips out to the Pacific Coast in connection with the Chappy Morgan wire-tapping cases. Few of the routine jobs about the detective bureau fell to him. He was too good for routine and his superiors recognised the fact and were governed thereby.

By the rules of tradition, Ginsburg--as a successful detective--should have been either an Irishman or of Irish descent. But in the second biggest police force in the world, wherein twenty per cent of the personnel wear names that betoken Jewish, Slavic or Latin forebears, tradition these times suffers many a body wallop.

On a night in early April, Ginsburg, coming across from New Jersey, landed off a ferryboat at Christopher Street. He had gone across the river to gather up a loose end of the evidence acc.u.mulating against Chappy Morgan, king of the wireless wire-tappers. It was nearly midnight when he emerged from the ferryhouse. In sight was no surface car; so he set out afoot to walk across town to where he lived on the East Side.

Going through a side street in a district which mainly is given over to the establishments of textile jobbers, he observed, half a block away, a fire escape that bore strange fruit. The front line of a stretch of tallish buildings stood out in relief against the background of a wet moon and showed him, high up on the iron ladder which flighted down the face of one house of the row, two dark clumps, one placed just above the other.

Ginsburg slipped into a protecting ledge of shadow close up against the buildings and edged along nearer. The clumps resolved into the figures of men. One--the uppermost shape of a man--was receiving from some unseen sources flat burdens that came down over the roof coping and pa.s.sing them along to the accomplice below. The latter in turn stacked them upon the grilled floor of the fire balcony that projected out into s.p.a.ce at the level of the fourth floor, the building being five floors in height. By chance Ginsburg had happened upon a loft-robbing enterprise.

He shifted his revolver from his hip pocket to the side pocket of his overcoat and crept closer, planning for the pair so intently engaged overhead a surprise when they should descend with their loot. There was no time now to seek out the patrolman on the post; the job must be all his.

Two doors from the building that had been entered he crept noiselessly down into a bas.e.m.e.nt and squatted behind an ash barrel. It was inky black in there; so inkily black he never suspected that the recess held another tenant. Your well-organised loft-robbing mob carries along a lookout who in case of discovery gives warning; in case of attack, repels the attack, and in case of pursuit acts as rear guard. In Stretchy Gorman's operations Stretchy acted as his own lookout, and a highly competent one he was, too, with a preference for lurking in areaways while his lieutenants carried forward the more arduous but less responsible shares of the undertaking.

In the darkness behind Ginsburg where he crouched a long gorilla's arm of an arm reached outward and downward, describing an arc. You might call it the long arm of coincidence and be making no mistake either. At the end of the arm was a fist and in the fist a length of gas pipe wrapped in rags. This gas pipe descended upon the back of Ginsburg's skull, crushing through the derby hat he wore. And the next thing Ginsburg knew he was in St. Vincent's Hospital with a splitting headache and the United States Government had gone to war against the German Empire.

Ginsburg did not volunteer. The parent who once had wielded the disciplinary strap-end so painstakingly had long since rejoined his bearded ancestors, but there was a dependent mother to be cared for and a whole covey of younger brothers and sisters to be shepherded through school and into sustaining employment. So he waited for the draft, and when the draft took him and his number came out in the drawing, as it very soon did, he waived his exemptions and went to training camp wearing an old suit of clothes and an easy pair of shoes. Presently he found himself transferred to a volunteer outfit--one of the very few draft men who were to serve with that outfit.

In camp the discipline he had acquired and the drilling he had done in his prentice days on the force stood him in good stead. Hard work trimmed off of him the layers of tissue he had begun to take on; plain solid food finished the job of unlarding his frame. Shortly he was Corporal Ginsburg--a trim upstanding corporal. Then he became Sergeant Ginsburg and soon after this was Second Sergeant Ginsburg of B Company of a regiment still somewhat sketchy and ragged in its make-up, but with promise of good stuff to emerge from the ma.s.s of its material. When his regiment and his division went overseas, First Sergeant Ginsburg went along too.

The division had started out by being a national guard division; almost exclusively its rank and file had been city men--rich men's sons from uptown, poor men's sons with jaw-breaking names from the tenements. At the beginning the acting major general in command had been fond of boasting that he had representatives of thirty-two nations and pract.i.tioners of fifty-four creeds and cults in his outfit. Before very long he might truthfully expand both these figures.

To stopper the holes made by the wear and tear of intensive training, the attritions of sickness and of transfers, the losses by death and by wounding as suffered in the first small spells of campaigning, replacements came up from the depots, enriching the local colour of the division with new types and strange accents. Southern mountaineers, Western ranch hands and farm boys from the Middle States came along to find mates among Syrians, Jews, Italians, Armenians and Greeks. Cotton Belt, Corn Belt, Wheat Belt and Timber Belt contributed. Born feudists became snipers, counter jumpers became fencibles, yokels became drillmasters, sweat-shop hands became sharpshooters, aliens became Americans, an ex-janitor--Austrian-born--became a captain, a rabble became an organised unit; the division became a tempered mettlesome lance--springy, sharp and dependable.

This miracle so often repeated itself in our new army that it ceased to be miraculous and became commonplace. During its enactment we as a nation accepted it with calmness, almost with indifference. I expect our grandchildren will marvel at it and among them will be some who will write large, fat books about it.

On that great day when a new definition for the German equivalent of the English word "impregnable" was furnished by men who went up to battle swearfully or prayerfully, as the case might be, a-swearing and a-praying as they went in more tongues than were babbled at Babel Tower; in other words, on the day when the never-to-be-broken Hindenburg line was broken through and through, a battalion of one of the infantry regiments of this same polyglot division formed a little individual ground swell in the first wave of attack.

That chill and gloomy hour when condemned men and milkmen rise up from where they lie, when sick folk die in their beds and the drowsy birds begin to chirp themselves awake found the men of this particular battalion in shallow front-line trenches on the farther edge of a birch thicket. There they crouched, awaiting the word. The flat cold taste of before sunup was clammy in their throats; the smell of the fading nighttime was in their nostrils.

And in the heart of every man of them that man over and over again asked himself a question. He asked himself whether his will power--which meant his soul--was going to be strong enough to drag his reluctant body along with it into what impended. You see, with a very few exceptions none of this outfit had been beyond the wires before. They had been under fire, some of them--fire of gas sh.e.l.ls and of shrapnel and of high explosives in dugouts or in rear positions or as they pa.s.sed along roads lying under gun range of the enemy. But this matter would be different; this experience would widely differ from any they had undergone. This meant going out into the open to walk up against machine-gun fire and small-arm fire. So each one asked himself the question.

Take a thousand fighting men. For purposes of argument let us say that when the test of fighting comes five men out of that thousand cannot readjust their nerves to the prospect of a violent end by powder and ball from unseen sources. Under other circ.u.mstances any one of the five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him.

Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger's pet tabby cat.

But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until his flesh revolts to the point where it refuses the dare. It is such a man that courts-martial and the world at large miscall by the hateful name of coward.

Out of the remaining nine hundred and ninety-five are five more--as we allow--who have so little of perception, who are so stolid, so dull of wit and apprehension that they go into battle unmoved, unshaken, unthinking. This leaves nine hundred and ninety who are afraid--sorely and terribly afraid. They are afraid of being killed, afraid of being crippled, afraid of venturing out where killings and cripplings are carried on as branches of a highly specialised business.

But at the last they find that they fear just one thing more than they fear death and dismemberment; and that this one supremest thing is the fear that those about them may discover how terribly afraid they are. It is this greater fear, overriding all those lesser terrors, that makes over ordinary men into leaders of forlorn hopes, into holders of last ditches, into bearers of heroic blazons, into sleepers under memorial shafts erected by the citizens of a proud, a grateful and a sorrowing country. A sense of self-respect is a terrific responsibility.

Under this double stress, torn in advance of the actual undertaking by primitive emotions pulling in opposite directions, men bear themselves after curious but common fashions. To a psychologist twenty men chosen at random from the members of the battalion, waiting there in the edge of the birch thicket for their striking hour to come, would have offered twenty contrasting subjects for study.

Here was a man all deathly white, who spoke never a word, but who retched with sharp painful sounds and kept his free hand gripped into his cramping belly. That dread of being hit in the bowels which so many men have at moments like this was making him physically sick.

Here again was a man who made jokes about cold feet and yellow streaks and the chances of death and the like and laughed at his own jokes. But there was a quiver of barely checked hysteria in his laughing and his eyes shone like the eyes of a man in a fever and the sweat kept popping out in little beads on his face.

Here again was a man who swore constantly in a monotonous undertone.

Always I am reading where a man of my race under strain or provocation coins new and apt and picturesque oaths; but myself, I have never seen such a man. I should have seen him, too, if he really existed anywhere except in books, seeing that as a boy I knew many steamboat mates on Southern waters and afterward met socially many and divers mule drivers and horse wranglers in the great West.

But it has been my observation that in the matter of oaths the Anglo-Saxon tongue is strangely lacking in variety and spice. There are a few stand-by oaths--three or four nouns, two or three adjectives, one double-jointed adjective--and these invariably are employed over and over again. The which was undeniably true in this particular instance.

This man who swore so steadily merely repeated, times without number and presumably with reference to the Germans, the unprettiest and at the same time the most familiar name of compounded opprobrium that our deficient language yields.

For the fiftieth time in half as many minutes, a captain--his name was Captain Griswold and he was the captain of B Company--consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch where he stooped behind shelter. He spoke then, and his voice was plainly to be heard under the whistle and whoop of the sh.e.l.ls pa.s.sing over his head from the supporting batteries behind with intent to fall in the supposed defences of the enemy in front. Great sounds would have been lost in that crashing tumult; by one of the paradoxes of battle lesser sounds were easily audible.

"All right," said Captain Griswold, "it's time! If some d.a.m.n fool hasn't gummed things up the creeping barrage should be starting out yonder and everything is set. Come on, men--let's go!"

They went, each still behaving according to his own mode. The man with the gripes who retched was still retching as he heaved himself up over the parapet; the man who had laughed was still laughing; the man who had sworn was mechanically continuing to repeat that naughty pet name of his for the Fritzies. n.o.body, though, called on anybody else to defend the glory of the flag; n.o.body invited anybody to remember the _Lusitania_; n.o.body spoke a single one of the fine speeches which the bushelmen of fiction at home were even then thinking up to put into the mouths of men moving into battle.

Indeed, not in any visible regard was the scene marked by drama. Merely some muddied men burdened with ironmongery and b.u.mpy with gas masks and ammunition packs climbed laboriously out of a slit in the wet earth and in squads--single filing, one man behind the next as directly as might be--stepped along through a pale, sad, slightly misty light at rather a deliberate pace, to traverse a barb-wired meadowland which rose before them at a gentle incline. There was no firing of guns, no waving of swords. There were no swords to wave. There was no enemy in sight and no evidence as yet that they had been sighted by any enemy. As a matter of fact, none of them--neither those who fell nor those who lived--saw on that day a single living individual recognisable as a German.

A sense of enormous isolation encompa.s.sed them. They seemed to be all alone in a corner of the world that was peopled by diabolical sounds, but not by humans. They had a feeling that because of an error in the plans they had been sent forward without supports; that they--a puny handful--were to be sacrificed under the haunches of the Hindenburg line while all those thousands of others who should have been their companions upon this adventure bided safely behind, held back by the countermand which through some hideous blunder had failed to reach them in time. But they went on. Orders were to go on--and order, plus discipline, plus the individual's sense of responsibility, plus that fear of his that his mates may know how fearful of other things he is--make it possible for armies to be armies instead of mobs and for battles to be won.

They went on until they came to an invisible line drawn lengthwise across the broad way of the weed field, and here men began to drop down.

Mainly those stricken slid gently forward to lie on their stomachs. Only here and there was there a man who spun about to fall face upward. Those who were wounded, but not overthrown, would generally sit down quite gently and quite deliberately, with puzzled looks in their eyes. Since still there was neither sign nor sight of the well-hidden enemy the thought took root in the minds of the men as yet unscathed that, advancing too fast, they had been caught in the drop curtain of their own barrage.