The Empty Sack Part 39

Corinne, whose real name was Mamie Callaghan, emerged from a miniature forest of upright metal rods crowned with hats at various roguish angles. A dark, wavy-nosed woman of cajoling Irish witchery, she could hardly keep the prank from her voice even at such a time as this.

"So, Gussie, you don't know! Well, some one's got to break it to you, and I guess it'll have to be me."

But it was broken already, even before Corinne had brought forward the paper she was hiding behind her back.

"Teddy!" Gussie cried out. "There's something about him in that thing.

Let me see it! Let me see it!"

Corinne let her see it, and the work was done. Gussie couldn't read beyond the headlines with their "Robbery" and "Murder" in Italic capitals, but she grasped enough. The snapshot of Teddy taken in the road, just as he had been dragged, a ma.s.s of slime, out of the mora.s.s, made her reel backward as if about to fall; but when Eily O'Brien sprang to her support she waved her away gently. She was not going to faint.

Her physical strength wouldn't leave her, whatever else was gone.

"I'm-I'm going home," was all she said, crus.h.i.+ng the paper against her breast.

"Oh, Gus, lemme go with you!" Eily had begged; but this kindness, too, Gussie put away from her.

She could go alone, and alone she went, with one consuming thought as she sped along.

"Oh, momma! Poor momma! This'll about finish her."

And yet when she entered the living-room her mother was sitting, calm and serene, while Mr. Brunt told the tale of the New Jersey marshes.

Jennie, white, tearless, terrified, crept up to Gussie, and the two clung together as their mother said, in her steady voice.

"So I understand that only one of them is dead-the Irish one."

Mr. Brunt a.s.sented.

"Yes, Flynn, the Irish one."

"I'm not surprised. I told him when he was here the other day that what he called 'law and order' would bring him to grief, as they bring most of us, though I didn't expect it to be so soon. And my son, you say, is in jail."

"At Ellenbrook."

"They'll try him, I suppose."

"I'm afraid so."

"And then they'll send him to the chair." Mr. Brunt didn't answer. "Oh, you needn't be afraid to speak of it. I know they will. I'm not sorry.

Teddy will be sorry, of course-till it's over. But I'd rather he'd suffer a little now and be done with it than go through the h.e.l.l of years his father and I have had. If there was going to be any chance for him, it would be different; but there's no chance, not the way the world is organized now."

The girls crept forward together.

"Momma darling-"

But Lizzie resumed, calmly:

"Where there's nothing but government by the strong for the strong, people like ourselves must go under. You'll go under, too, Mr. Brunt.

You belong to the doomed cla.s.s. The workingman will soon be getting share and share alike with the capitalist; and the white-collar crowd will be kicked about by both. If we had the pluck to fight as the workingman has fought, we might save something even now; but we haven't, and so there's no hope for us. Law and order have us by the throat, and we must suffer till they strangle us. Well, my boy will soon be out of it-thank G.o.d!-and all I ask is to follow him."

When Mr. Brunt got himself to the door, Jennie went with him, as she had done with Flynn and Jackman two days earlier. She did this in the dazed condition of a woman who performs some little act of courtesy during s.h.i.+pwreck, while waiting for the vessel to go down.

"You must excuse my mother, Mr. Brunt. Ever since my father died her mind's been unsettled, and we don't know what to make of her."

But Mr. Brunt's demeanor did not encourage conversation. To do him justice, the mission on which Collingham had sent him had been repugnant for other reasons than the breaking of bad news. His mind being of the cast Bickley had a.n.a.lyzed that morning, Teddy's theft filled him with more horror than his killing of a man. To come so near to crime against the owners.h.i.+p of bank notes inspired him with a physical loathing which even Jennie's loveliness couldn't mitigate. It was as if she herself was tainted by some horrible infection, making it a relief to him to get away from her.

But turning to re-enter the house, she felt again that access of new strength which had come to her repeatedly during the past few days. It was as if resources of her being never taxed before were now offering themselves for use. What she had to do was in the forefront of her thought rather than what some one else had done. What some one else had done was already in the past. That was made for her and couldn't be helped; whereas her own duties imperatively summoned her to look ahead.

"Teddy will need a suitcase of clean things," was the direct expression of these thoughts before she had recrossed the threshold.

Having said this aloud to Gussie, Gussie's mind could also tackle the minor concrete details to the exclusion of the bigger considerations involved in Teddy's plight. That the honest, loving, skylarking boy whom they had grown up with could be a thief and a murderer was something the intelligence rejected as it rejected dreams. They could, therefore, take the new straw suitcase which had once been a family present to Gussie, and which she had never used, pack it with Teddy's other suit and the necessary linen, as if he were really at Paterson or Philadelphia.

"How shall we get it to him?" Gussie asked, when the work was done.

"I'll take it," Jennie answered, "if you'll stay and look after momma."

"Momma won't need much looking after-the way she is."

"Well, that's one comfort anyhow. With this to go through with I'm glad her mind's not what it used to be."

So, stunned and dry eyed, they caught on to the new conditions by doing little perfunctory things, consoling and helping each other.

CHAPTER XXI

Teddy's first night in a cell was more tolerable than it might have been for the reason that his faculties seemed to have stopped working. As nearly as possible he had become an inanimate thing, to be struck, pulled, hustled, and chucked wherever they chose. Not only had he no volition, but little or no sensation. A dead body or a sack of flour could hardly have been more lost to a sense of rebellion or indignity.

It was not that he didn't suffer, but that suffering had reached the extreme beyond which it makes no further impression. Nothing registered any more-no horror, no brutalities, no curses or kicks. As far as he could take account of himself, the Teddy Follett even of the shack had been left behind in some vanished world, while the thing that had hands and feet was a clod unable to resent the oaths and blows and flingings to and fro which were all it deserved.

Once he had heard that shout, "I see him!" in the road, he had been like an insect paralyzed by terror that doesn't dare to move. He had lain there till they came and got him. It was not fear alone that pinned him to the spot; his bodily strength had given out. For forty-eight hours he had eaten but little and drunk only the two gla.s.ses of water in the pastry shop. Though he had slept the first night, the second had been pa.s.sed in a fevered, intermittent doze. Furthermore, the agony of approaching suicide had drained his natural forces.

So he lay still while the hue and cry of the man hunters quickened and waxed behind him. Escape was out of the question, since, even if he had the strength to drag himself a few yards farther, they would run him down in the end. Resistance, too, would be hopeless, with, as he judged, some twenty or thirty in the posse.

He could feel their fury growing as they slipped and slithered through the gra.s.ses. Oaths, obscenities, and laughter accompanied every grotesque accident, as one man fell with the weedy tangle about his feet, or another went knee-deep into the swamp. The very fear of "a dose of lead" intensified their excitement till, as they caught sight of him, a helpless thing with face hidden in the mud, they gave vent to a yell of satisfaction.

They didn't let him rise; they didn't so much as pull him to his feet.

They dragged him by his collar, by his hair, by his arms, by his legs, by anything they could seize, kicking, beating, and cursing him. He made no outcry; he didn't speak a word. For aught they knew, he might be drunk or insane or dead. Only once, when a man kicked him in the face, was he powerless to suppress a groan. Otherwise, he was just a sodden lump of flesh as, now head first, now feet first, now with face upward, now with face downward he was tugged and tumbled and hurtled and rolled over the five hundred yards of slime between the spot where they had caught him and the road.

There he had a new experience. He learned what it was not only to be outside the human race, but to be held as its foe. Already, while still far out on the marsh, he had heard the yells: "Kill him! Kill him! Kick the d.a.m.n skunk to death!" But when actually surrounded by these howling, screaming, outraged citizens, with their teams and motor cars banked in the roadway, he tasted the peculiar astonishment of the man who has always been liked when a.s.sailed by a storm of hatred. While the three or four police who by this time had appeared did their best to defend him, men fought with one another to get at him. A well-dressed girl of not more than eighteen reached over the shoulder of one of the police and struck him on the head with her sunshade. An elderly woman squeezed herself near him and spat in his face.

"Ah, say, people," one of the police called out, "give the young guy a chanst. Can't you see he's only a kid?"

"'Kid' be d.a.m.ned!" came the response. "Say, fellows, here's the telegraph pole! Let's lynch him!"

"Lynch him! Lynch him! String him up!"

"No! Let's make a bonfire and burn him alive!"