Part 31

“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!

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?”