Men of No Property (16 page)

In the afternoon when the custom was slowest and the day seemed longest she took the occasion to retire into the comfort room off the kitchen. Valois, in his passion for cleanliness, had installed a great tin tub there, and Peg bucketed herself a bath. She was returning to the shop at her leisure when she heard voices before she reached the swinging door, and one of them made her heart leap. Stephen Farrell was at the counter. She tiptoed to the door and watched and listened unobserved. He looked thinner, she thought, and pale and intense as on the night he had come into the ship’s hold to her rescue.

“… Ridiculous,” Val was exclaiming. “How can I? And if I could call it off I would not.”

“Tell me, Mr. Valois,” Farrell said quietly, and Peg could see the anger making a white line about his mouth, “did you anticipate this inflammatory mischief when you sought the signatures for your petition?”

“I will say I knew the potential for it. Yes, in honesty I must admit that. Tammany never misses a chance to make trouble when they’re not in office.”

“And the Native Americans have nothing to do with it, do they?” Farrell said sarcastically, and Peg wondered then if Valois wasn’t a Native American himself, with his scorn of the Irish and the Catholic Church. “You know of course I should not have signed it under the circumstances. I have been the dupe of all you estimable gentlemen.”

“Is it dupery to be on the side of law and order?”

“You are manipulating the law as surely as the politicians are manipulating the people. Can’t you see that, Valois?”

“I am afraid, Farrell, you are accommodating logic to your fears. You are soliciting me to prevent a performance which but yesternight you swore with me must go on. Why not address yourself to the Catholic clergy? Why not solicit them to muster their flocks in the churches tonight? To exhort their faithful not to riot? Why not?”

“It is too late for that,” said Farrell. “I have tried.”

“It was too late in the beginning and you know it. The churchmen are as wily as politicians…which they are and nothing more. What they cannot carry off they will not attempt. They will have power only so long as they pretend to no more power than they have. Be glad that you signed the petition, Farrell. Be glad that one Irishman’s name will be upon it at least.”

“I will not be glad of it,” Farrell said. “I did not realize that I had come three thousand miles to betray my people. Better I had died for them at home.”

Ah, Stephen Farrell, Peg thought, better not. You might have died at their hands.

“Look at it this way,” Valois said, and Peg could have spit upon him. He had the soothing manner of a priest giving Extreme Unction. “If they riot—and after all they may not with the promise of grapeshot—but if they do, they will betray you.”

“To whom will they betray me? To you? Are you my enemy?”

“Indeed not,” said Valois almost preening himself. “I should like to be your friend.”

“They betray me then to a friend, and I them to their enemies. Good day, sir.” He turned quickly. Peg would have pursued him now were it not for Valois. She had never known a man more to her liking, and she never liked him more than when the odds were greatest against him.

“You will be with us tonight?” Valois called out, and Peg strained after his answer.

“I will,” Farrell said, “come what may.”

And I shall be there as well, Peg thought, come what may.

Rowdy, shouting gangs milled into a mob outside the Opera House long before time for the curtain. Their tempers swelled with their numbers, and some who came for no more than bantery riled up at the demagogues’ bating and screamed for admission to the theatre. As soon as Valois led her into the crowd Peg knew the dire mistake of it. “Make way for more aristocrats, boys, and one of them a lady-oh!” A wedge opened but closed upon them like a giant maw. “Hold back, hold back! God almighty, hold back!” But the crush of groaning, howling, churning flesh pushed in on them, carried them forward now, now backwards, as though the sea itself were back of them. Fear welled into Peg’s throat sour and sudden as retch. Swallowed alive they were. She could not lift her arms from her sides and all she could see in the twilight were the towering, heaving men on all sides; she could smell their sweat, their whiskeyed breath, the foul stench of decayed fruit and vegetables, spoiled entirely crushed in their pockets. Valois she saw for an instant only, his face distorted and twisted against the back of a giant. Suddenly she felt the thrust of two great hands beneath her ribs. She was squeezed up into the air and even there she could scarcely breathe for the sobs of relief she must let escape. A great man had lifted her to his shoulder and she clutched his hair for steadiness. He rocked back and forth and then lifted his knees like a prancing horse. Men squealed and cursed as he trod upon them, but he plowed through the mob and over them until a cordon of star-breasted police stayed him and lifted her down. He was gone before ever she saw his face. “You should never’ve come here, lady. What kind of a man let you out of the house?” a policeman said as he hurried her into the lobby.

No kind of a man at all, Peg thought, straightening the clothes upon her back. He had the power of an angry mouse. She inquired the way to the lady’s retiring room of a distracted usher. Everywhere workmen were rushing among the patrons with boards and hammers and she looked in vain for another woman in the house save for the black attendant in the ladies’ room who was rocking herself to and fro like a mourner. Peg’s hands trembled so that the comb escaped them. The attendant managed the comb and between them they repaired the damage to Peg’s coiffure.

“I think it’s exciting,” Peg said, more to convince herself than the woman.

“It’s killin’ excitement, that’s what it is,” the woman said. “And them out there don’t like black people.”

“There’s plenty of whites they don’t like either,” Peg said, and gave the woman twopence.

However they were getting through, patrons had begun to fill the theatre. Peg strained her height in her search for Valois. For pride’s sake she wanted desperately to be on a gentleman’s arm when first she encountered Stephen Farrell. But a woman alone was easier discovered than the most extraordinary man and it was Farrell who saw her and made his way to her.

“How appropriate, Miss Margaret, that I should find you here!”

“I’m looking for my escort, Mr. Valois. You know him, I think. Or was it not you I saw in his shop?”

“Well enough,” Farrell said. “Come, it will be easier for him to find you, and our seats are likely to be near each other.”

He had come alone, Peg realized, as most men had. She laid her gloved fingers on the arm he offered. “It’s lovely meeting you again, Mr. Farrell.”

“I’ve thought often of you and your sister,” he said. “Is she as well as yourself?”

“Blooming,” Peg said. “She married Dennis Lavery, you know.”

He nodded, giving his seat number to the usher. “I wondered which of you might.”

You don’t know me very well, Stephen Farrell, to say that, she thought.

The men amongst whom they settled rose at Peg’s arrival as Farrell nodded around, but the words exchanged were few.

“It may be Val was hurt in the crowd,” Peg said, “and won’t make it at all.”

“That would be a great pity, he was so determined the performance should be given.”

“I heard you this afternoon. I work for him, you know,” Peg said.

Farrell looked down at her. “How did you conceal from him that you are Irish?”

His eyes, even his smile, she thought, still had that sort of distant sympathy in them. In another man she’d have called it condescension. But really it was not that: it was just his manner of keeping people at their distance. Shyness, perhaps. “I did not conceal it,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it and he knows it.”

“Forgive me,” Farrell said. “I did not realize you were so fond of him.”

“I’m not so fond of him at all,” Peg snapped.

The people in the next row glanced back at them, much, Peg thought, as though they were talking in church. She noticed then the deadly silence within the house. No one save themselves had a word to say, themselves and the policemen walking each aisle who now and then leaned down to mutter something to an uneasy patron. Farrell looked up at the boarded windows. So did she. A hundred watches were read every minute, the staccato snapping of their cases plucking at the silence. There was a crash of glass somewhere off and with it the sound of the mob. Peg shivered. Farrell laid his hand on her wrist for a moment.

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

“I am…for them.”

A disturbance blew up in the gallery. Only Farrell and Peg turned in their seats. Above, two policemen had collared a man and were carting him out, whacking him on the head and shoulders with their sticks. “He’ll be a model of behavior when they’re done with him,” Farrell said with irony.

Those within hearing laughed, needing the laughter for their nerves, but Peg saw the white line again about Farrell’s mouth. “There,” she said. “They’re putting down the lights.”

The great curtains parted and a murmur of relief ran through the audience. When the main curtain went up a patter of clapping welcomed the players, but when Macready stepped upon the stage, the house rose in a body to pay his courage tribute, and perchance to screw their own. Farrell kept his seat and Peg stayed in tune with him. “I should as soon stand now,” he said, “for
God Save the Queen.
”

Peg could think of but one thing for which she was grateful: Valois had not found them. She wished now that the mob would disperse. They had had their sport. Let them go home to bed. She could think of a dozen things to say about the play to Stephen, and she would dare call him Stephen in such a conversation. But the mob did not disperse. Their anger seemed to rise on their discovering that the curtain had gone up on Macready despite them. One window after another was shattered, the people within cringing at each crash although the boards deflected both brick and glass. The play at times was a pantomime. It was a puppet show, the players lurching, jerking, all, Peg thought, as though they could fall in a heap at one blow. It near came when the doors were cracked and the police spilled back from the lobby into the aisles. They dug their hobnailed boots into the carpeting and heaved against each other until they surged out again, a human barricade. Acts one, two and three. Was it heraldry backstage or fire trumpets out? No, a bugle, a regimental bugle, and a ghostly stillness in its wake. Was it a player intoning lines not quite Shakespeare? The man next to Farrell whispered to him, and Stephen then whispered to Peg: “They’re reading the riot act in the street.” Peg did not fully understand. But one great howl went up when it was done, and then the crackle of gunfire. Stephen flinched as though he himself had been struck, and Peg put her hand on his arm. He caught it and held it hard in his own for a moment. On the stage a pitiable Dunsinane awaited Birnam Wood. Outside the crowd had fallen back, but the shrieking recommenced. A captain of police appeared on the stage as the play finished. “Remain in your seats…” he started, but another volley of fire drowned his words while the smell of the powder of the first round seeped into the house. The stillness was sudden and awful and as soon as the doors were opened upon it, jagged screams of pain could be heard in the distance.

People huddled in the aisle, dumb and patient, waiting their own delivery. Farrell, his hand shadowing his eyes, did not move for some moments. Finally he said: “It’s too bad your Mr. Valois missed it. He must be very proud of the night’s achievement.”

Peg rose from the seat and pushed away from him toward the side aisle. She was clammy and nauseated. She looked back at him. “What good is it, sitting there keening? I’m going out and see what’s up.”

He followed her then. “It’s no place for a woman, Margaret.”

“By the sounds,” she said, “it was no place for a man either.”

He put his arm about her and the pressure, ever so light, gave her more courage than she knew she had.

The lights in the theatre were full behind them by the time they reached the door, making the darkness of the street more intense. Only an occasional torch glowed in it. The rioters had smashed the street lamps. The police were herding everyone south, away from the scene of bloodshed. “Watch your feet, watch the lady’s feet. They’ve busted the water hydrants.”

Farrell guided her to the paving’s edge and then carried her across the flooded street. But as soon as he put her down, Peg followed the cries and the torchlight to where the wounded and dead still lay as they had fallen. Here and there amongst them the bully boys were trying to haul away a fallen chum, or to find one, striking matches in the faces of the prostrate. But no one thought to attend them where they lay! To one and another of the stricken Peg went, sorting the living from the dead. Some had fallen with the bricks still in their hands and some were washed by the water they had loosed. An ambulance came then, the horses stumbling and balking through the flood, the litter-bearers running ahead. Peg took her shawl to stanch the wounds of one man, biting her lip against sickness when she felt the warmth of his blood.

She tore off her underskirt and moved to another. “I’m shot through like a sieve!” the man shrieked as she tried to plug the grape holes in his back. Farrell hastened to her side and held the man. “You’ll see daylight through me if I live till dawn,” the man groaned. “You’ll live,” Peg said, “as sure as you’re Irish.” But he was dead when they laid him down. “I’ve wasted my skirt on him,” she said, and put her hand beneath the dead man to snatch the bandage away and carry it to the next one. A pair of litter-bearers came to take him. “Leave him to the priest,” Farrell said, “and take the living.”

Peg stood a moment to wipe the sweat from her face. There was much she could understand now that talk would never have told her. Nine out of ten of the fallen were Irish. Whoever baited them and whatever the bait, no honest man could deny their origins. And the priests had come out at last, bringing the church with them in holy charity. In the light of heaven maybe it was better than not coming at all, but to the dark plundered ignorance of them lying here, what was charity now when a little wisdom might have kept them home? Paddy did their dirty work in America, all right, even to the dirtiest work of all, destroying himself.