Up on the top floor Miss Sleybells knocked and knocked again. Miss Gwin put her ear to the locked, barred door and listened and listened for betraying sounds within; and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass raised her coo to yet a flutier pitch. And while they were thus engaged the Finkelstein family, one and all, vanished into the cloaking, protecting dusk where Pike Street runs toward the river.
Did I say Finkelstein family? I was wrong there.
For purposes of better concealment Papa Finkelstein had changed the name. The inspiration had come to him even as he gripped the topmost round of the fire-escape ladder. Changing it, he had seen fit to honour, by virtue of self-adoption, a race of Irish kings, and notably a policeman of his acquaintance, a descendant of that kingly line. He changed it to Finnigan. Loss to the Finkelsteins would thenceforth be gain to the Finnigans.
So they vanished away—Papa Meyer Finnigan, Mamma Leah Finnigan—née Pincus—Miriam [302] Finnigan, Solly Finnigan, the Finnigan twins, Izzy and Izzy; Benjamin Finnigan, Rebecca Finnigan, Lena Finnigan, and so on down to Baby Leopold Finnigan—and were gone!
For does it not stand written that——? But see Corinthians—first, thirteenth and fourth—and notably the first three words of the same. Only it should have been written there, in amplification, that there is a limit.
[303]
CHAPTER VIII
ENTER THE VILLAIN
It is conceded, I believe, that every story should have a moral; also, whenever possible, a heroine or a hero, a villainess or a villain, a plot and a climax. Now this story has a villain of sorts, if you choose to look upon him in that light; but no hero, and no climax. And certainly there is no moral to adorn the tale. So far as I have been able to discover it is absolutely moral-less. So then, reader, if you, being thus foreadvised regarding these avowed shortcomings of my narrative, choose to go further with it, the responsibility must be yours and not mine. Don’t you come round afterward saying I didn’t warn you.
The rise of the curtain discloses the city room of The Clarion, a New York morning newspaper. The hour is six-thirty P. M., the period is the approximate present, and the season is summer time. At a desk in the foreground is discovered the head office boy in the act of scissoring certain marked passages out of [304] copies of the afternoon papers and impaling them upon spindles. Beyond him, at a big oaken table shaped like half of a pie, a lone copy reader is humped in his chair, chewing on a cold pipestem and editing a bad piece of copy with a relentless black lead. In this case the copy reader is named Hemburg. He is of a type of which at least one example is to be found in nearly every large newspaper shop—a competent failure, gone alcoholically to seed; usually holding down a desk job; rarely quite drunk and rarely quite sober, and in this mid-state of befuddlement performing his work with a strange mechanical accuracy; but once in a while he comes on duty cold sober—cause unknown—and then the chances are he does something unpardonably wrong, something incredibly stupid, which costs him his job. Just such a man is this present man Hemburg. As, shoving his pencil, he carves the very giblets out of the last sheet of the belated typewritten manuscript lying under his hand, the sunlight, slanting in at a west window behind him, falls over his shoulders in a streaked flood, making his reddened face seem redder than ever—as red as hearth paint—and turning his ears a bright, clear, pinkish colour, as though they might be two little memorial panes set there in dedication to the wasted life and the frittered talents of their owner.
Farther up stage the city-hall reporter, who because he has passed his fortieth birthday and [305] has grey in his hair is known as Pop, and the ship-news reporter, who because he is the ship-news reporter is known as Skipper, the same as in all well-regulated newspaper offices, are pasting up their strings, both of them being space men. Otherwise the big bare room with its rows of desks and its scrap-strewn floor is quite empty. This hour, coming between six and seven, in the city room of The Clarion or any other big paper, is apt to be the quietest of all hours between starting time, early in the afternoon, and quitting time, early in the morning. The day city editor, having finished his stint, has gone off watch, leaving behind for his successor, the night city editor, a single scrawled sheet upon which is recorded the tally of things accomplished, things undertaken and things failed at. The reporters who got afternoon assignments have most of them turned in their stories and have taken other assignments which will keep them out of the office until much later. So almost an ecclesiastical quiet fills the city room now.