His means are multitude. Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary, this "cadet," offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic mill; the restless neurotic native-daughters untrained for work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they call the American language, learn what they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
Where training is as yet too strong or distress too weak to make serve the offer of partnership, the promise of marriage usually suffices. The thing is done, and once done, blows and starvation perpetuate it with the ignorant, and threats of exposure and public shame rivet the shackles on the more knowing. The former suffer for their darkness; the latter are held the faster in proportion to their previous respectability.
One has said that this church is established; in every city it maintains its incestuous marriage to the state. It controls real votes by the thousands and provides false ones by the tens of thousands. It is a church that may be considered to exercise the old ecclesiastical right of trying its own offenders in its own courts. When the magistrates have not begun as slavers, when they own no poor, but highly rented, houses, leased for prostitution, when they do not even accept tithes from the traffic, it is still largely the traffic that elects and can defeat them. What the Black Church owes to the political powers for their protection, the political powers owe to the church for its ballots.
It was this condition that made possible the impunity of such a deed as the Austrian Mirka had done upon Hermann Hoffmann, the bar-keeper; that made certain the assailant's escape, and that made of the entire matter merely a question as to which of several handy means should be employed to free the slaver in the eyes of the law. About those means there had, however, been some debate, and so it befell that, early on the Sunday evening following the shooting, Rafael Angelelli sat in a recognized New York meeting-place of the church's proselyting order, engaged in pleasant converse with Wesley Dyker, candidate for a magistracy. This place was the back-room of a saloon. It was filled with cigarette-smoking young missionaries, who talked shop, and quoted prices, and discussed the prospects of a good season in precisely the businesslike way that men in a livestock-dealers' club talk shop, and quote prices, and discuss the prospects of a good season. Dyker had not at all wanted to come there, but O'Malley had ordered, and so, making peace with the tolerant Angelelli, he had been forced to obey. A special counsel for the sheriff of New York had once been a member of the legal corps of the missionaries and so had two State Senators: O'Malley, remembering Dyker's previous career, could see no reason for present pride.
The room was clouded with smoke. Waiters hurried about serving beer from brass platters and swabbing the small tables with damp rags. There was a buzz of conversation broken by that peculiar form of laughter which responds only to obscenities, and now and then, out of the general clamor, there arose oaths almost technical, descriptions of women that sounded like auctioneers' announcements in a horse-market, and fragments of stories in which the teller bragged of a sharp deal he had effected in capturing a slave or in bargaining with a proprietress.
"I understand," said Dyker, with his eyelids characteristically lowered, "that you want to see me in regard to something about this shooting-affair of your friend Mirka."
Angel's oily head bobbed a ready assent.
"Where's the fellow that was hurt?"
"In Bellevue."
"Is he going to die?"