“It’s over now,” says the new authority to the crowd, and he smiles as blandly as if he had been taking part in an entertainment of some kind. The crowd begins to dissolve. The man who drew the banister leg or stick and who was to have been punished has also disappeared.
“But how is this?” I ask of some one. “How can he do that?”
“Him?” replies an Irish longshoreman who seems to wish to satisfy my curiosity. “Don’t you know who that is? It’s Patsy Finnerty. He used to be a champeen prize-fighter. He won all the fights around here ten years ago. Everybody knows him. He’s in charge over at the steamship dock now, but they won’t fight with him. If they did he wouldn’t give ’em no more work. They both work for him once in a while.”
I see it all in a blinding flash and go to my own room. How much more powerful is self-interest as typified by Patsy than the police!
* * * * *
It is raining one night and I hear a voice in the room above mine, singing. It is a good voice, sweet and clear, but a little weak and faint down here.
“Tyro-al, Tyro-al! Tyro-al, Tyro-al!
Ich hab dich veeder, O mine Tyro-al!”
I know who lives up there by now: Mr. and Mrs. Schmick and a little Schmick girl, about ten or eleven. Being courageous in this vicinity because of the simplicity of these people, the awe they have for one who holds himself rather aloof and dresses better than they, and lonely, too, I go up. In response to my knock a little fair-complexioned, heavily constructed German woman with gray hair and blue eyes comes to the door.
“I heard some one singing,” I say, “and I thought I would come up and ask you if I might not come in and listen. I live in the room below.”
“Certainly. Why, of course.” This with an upward lift of the voice. “Come right in.” And although flustered and red because of what to her seems an embarrassing situation, she introduces me to her black-haired, heavy-faced husband, who is sitting at the center table with a zither before him.