Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (4 page)

Hari dove into his hat.

“Let’s see ‘em!”

There were eight telegrams, two of them death messages. Hari had been instructed to visit the bereaved Armenian and Greek families first. He mentioned this fact to Officer Mulligan.

“Git along with yer,” said that individual with sudden animation. “Yuh c’n chew de fat some other time. You’ll be gettin’ fired if yuh ain’t keerful.”

Hari started to elbow his way through the crowd. He was almost on the point of running.

“Hold on,” shouted Officer Mulligan. Hari wondered what next.

“Say, you ain’t such a dumb bastard. Chuck this job! Come around and see me tomorrow; I’ll get you an elevator job. C’n yer run a switchboard?”

Hari thanked him profusely and shook the officer’s hand. It was necessary for Officer Mulligan to switch his club to his left hand. Hari looked down at the symbol of the majesty of the law with deference and misgivings.

“Gwan now, git aboutcha bisnis, or I’ll be minded to give yuh a polite fannin’.”

The way the club was maneuvered back and forth from one hand to the other was astonishing. It made Hari Das shiver with expectancy.

“Come on now, you guys, git along, beat it, scuffle Shoo!”

Officer Mulligan shuffled along on his beat in a coma. He was thinking of what a fine, upstanding, soft-lipped, educated, black bastard of a heathen that Hindoo was, what a “foine countree” Ireland was before the blimey English got hold of it. Occupied with these thoughts, he ducked into the back door of a saloon and called for a thimbleful of rum.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TELEGRAPH COMPANY HOUSED
its messenger employment department in a low ramshackle building in the downtown section of the city. On the top floor was a wardrobe depot; on the floor below a tailor shop, where the discarded uniforms of the messengers were renovated, cleaned, and pressed. The tailor-in-chief was the Vice-President’s factotum. He traveled all over the United States, instructing his subordinates in the art of economy, equipping offices with blacking brushes, authorizing patches, and so on. He also wrote voluminous reports in pidgin English, informing the Vice-President that the office in Omaha, for instance, on a certain morning of the year was not opened until 8:15 a.m.; that in Denver he had found writing tables unequipped with chain and pencil; that the receiving clerk in New Orleans had dirty fingernails and chewed tobacco. For information of this sort he received a handsome salary.

Naturally, wherever he went he was welcomed like a leper.

The ground floor of this building was sectioned off into the employment office proper, facing the street, and a dressing room which occupied the rear of the premises. Along the side wall of this rear room tiny cubicles were partitioned off so as to permit the newly appointed messengers to dress and undress. At the rear exit was a table covered with sheet metal on which was fastened a huge roll of wrapping paper and a ball of twine. After a messenger was engaged, and had changed into the uniform, he was obliged to wrap his citizen clothes into a neat bundle and make his departure through the rear exit. If the office he was dispatched to was beyond walking distance, he was allowed carfare. This carfare allowance was theoretical. Usually Moloch reserved it for his lunch money, dolling it out only to “repeaters” who knew of its existence and were cheeky enough to demand it.

The employment office itself was exposed to the public eye. Two enormous plate-glass windows permitted the curious passerby a full sweep of the drama that was constantly being enacted within. Ofttimes it was necessary to send the porter outside to persuade the idlers and vagabonds who collected to remove their noses from the windowpanes. A life-size cardboard figure of a bright, handsome-looking youngster, attired in the full regalia of the service, was placed conspicuously in each of the show windows. This piece of bait served two purposes: it pretended to persuade the idler and the nitwit that in the service of the telegraph company there was ever open a glorious career; it also helped to break down an erroneous popular conception. All messengers, it seemed to say, are not idiots or septuagenarians.

It must be mentioned, in passing, that the rosy-cheeked youngster who had posed for this cardboard effigy (which was on display in every office of the Great American Telegraph Company throughout the United States) was no longer in possession of that bloom and hustle which was so ostentatiously exploited. Through an excess of zeal he had acquired tuberculosis of the foot, and was at this period languishing at home, vainly begging
for disability compensation. To be sure, such unfortunate circumstances were not uncommon, nor were they particularly remarkable considering the thousands of individuals who were put through the hopper.

To lighten the burdens of the legal department a “Safety First” campaign had been inaugurated. Large posters were tacked on the bulletin boards in the offices, and on the partitions of the dressing booths, giving the latest country-wide statistics relating to messengers killed, crippled, or incapacitated. To lend a touch of realism, snapshots showing the most prevalent ways in which accidents occurred were often sandwiched in among the statistics. The question of whether or not this gruesome liability roll should be displayed in the dressing booths had been debated for a long while between the Vice-President and the General Manager. The Vice-President had a theory that these announcements acted as a boomerang. Perhaps the Vice-President had been given this impression through reading Moloch’s monthly report of “resignations and dismissals.” The report showed that no less than ten percent of the force resigned after working less than a day. To the Vice-President this was an inexplicable situation. Perhaps the latter had really convinced himself that the telegraph company offered a career to the messengers in its employ.

Moloch returned to his desk after the razzle-dazzle of the Bowery in a fever of excitement. He had left the office toward noon to make an investigation. One of the messenger force had gone bughouse.

It was now going on to three o’clock. The day was warm and sultry and he was perspiring freely. His discomfiture was made more acute by the pungent, acrid odor of camphor and Lysol escaping from the dressing room and the wardrobe depot. Moreover, he was annoyed to find so many applicants lined up on the benches, waiting for him with that stolid patience which one so often observes in the anteroom of a charity bureau. He looked at the clock impatiently.

Opposite him at the big, double desk sat his friend and assistant. Matt Reardon. Reardon was incompetent, recalcitrant, and
temperamental. Moloch had given him the job out of friendship.

It was apparent that Reardon was excited about something.

“We just had a helluva time here a few minutes ago,” he said breathlessly.

Matt had an endless string of anecdotes, none of them particularly beguiling.

“Hold it, Matt … later. I’ve a lot of work to plow through first.”

Matt glowered rebelliously and turned sour. Moloch was forever squelching him, as if he were the office boy and not the assistant employment manager.

“And look here,” Moloch fired, without the least regard for his friend’s injured feelings, “tell Lawson to get rid of that gang out there. This place looks like a waxworks exhibit!”

“
You’re
making this place an Eden Musée, not I,” thought Matt, as he rose, sullen and dispirited, to carry out instructions. He was bitterly opposed to Moloch’s high-handed way of doing things. He had a dozen arguments up his sleeve, but none of them were worth a damn. He was tired of arguing; they did nothing else but wrangle the whole day long. And in the end, Moloch always had his way. Moloch could be one god-damned son-of-a-bitch, when he wanted to....

Matt Reardon approached the railing which separated the applicants from the office staff, and began telling off the youngsters one at a time. He puffed away at a cigarette as he disposed of one batch after another. “Make it snappy!” he growled, chafing over the tedious drift of each appeal. About a minute and a half was allotted to each plea, followed by a brusque “Tomorrow morning at eight sharp!”

“Say, Matt, what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? Didn’t I tell you to let Lawson take care of that? What’s he here for?” shouted Moloch, suddenly observing Matt’s tactics.

Matt grumbled and got off something about Lawson taking all day to do a trifle. “Besides,” he went on, “I think we ought to show these kids a little courtesy. They’re not asking for a handout. They want jobs.”

“Who’s running this joint?”

“Aw, hell, don’t be a crab,” said Matt coaxingly. “Do you know you’re getting to be an old crab? I say,” he cooed, “you missed something funny. You got here ten minutes too late.”

Moloch’s irritation was increasing. “Well, get it off your chest … what was it?”

“Ah,
can that!
”
said Matt. “Listen a minute, like a regular guy, will you? I had a guy in here after you left—see? I spotted him right away. At first I didn’t say much to him … let him fill the application out in the usual way. Every now and then I’d throw out a harmless question. He was leery of me all right, I could see that, but after a while when he saw how damn nice I treated him he didn’t know what the hell to think. Anyhow we chewed the fat a while, about this and that—Christ, I dragged in everything I could think of except what was on my mind…. All of a sudden I says to him, ‘Let me look at your throat.’ He jumped when I said that, but I passed right over it and mumbled something about having his tonsils removed. What I was after, of course, was to get a good look at his tongue.”

Moloch smiled a caustic smile. Matt always thought he knew so god-damned much. He was like a young intern.

“Sure enough,” Matt continued, “his tongue was all scarred.”

“Ah … the hell with it,” blurted Moloch. “I don’t give a damn about the rest of it.”

“No, wait a minute—let me finish…. What was I saying? Oh, yes! Listen, are you following me? As 1 was telling you, I was kiddin’ him along nicely, pattin’ him on the back and tellin’ him what a good egg he was.... Jesus! it was a shame to do it! Well, anyhow, I’m talkin’ to him in a calm, even voice—just like I’m talkin’ to you now—and suddenly I pop this at him:
‘
When did you have your last fit?
’
Boy, you should have been here! He flies up in the air and grabs the application out of my hand … tears it to bits. I keep one eye on him while he makes for the door. I’m not sayin’ a word, mind you.... Instead of goin’ out I see him comin’ back towards me wavin’ his hands and shoutin’ at the top of his voice—’It’s a lie … it’s a lie.’ With that his lips began to twitch and he went into a spasm … one spasm after another. Then his fingers grew rigid and he seemed to claw the air like.
And with that, b’Jesus, he doubles up and keels over. God, it was weird! For half an hour he was stretched out on the floor, foamin’ at the mouth.... You know, Dion, I must have just touched the button. It was perfect!”

“He isn’t lying around in the back somewhere, is he?” said Moloch.

“Hell no! I got rid of him all right. But we had one bitch of a time bringing him to. There were about twenty kids in here, and Christ knows, they were falling all over one another. Mrs. McFadden fainted. She’s no damned good, do you know it, Dion? We ought to get rid of her. … I thought we’d have the cops in on us. Jesus, the whole place went kerflooey. All because I asked him a simple question! Listen—all I said was: ‘When did you have your last fit?’ Just like that. That’s all.”

Moloch looked at his assistant with unmitigated sarcasm.

“Of course you never expected anything like that to happen, did you?
No!
You know what I think of you, Matt? I think you’re one crazy bastard yourself. You had one hell of a good time, I can see that.”

Matt feigned remorse. Inwardly he felt very pleased with himself. He felt that he had missed his calling.

“Well,” said Moloch after a pause, “I suppose I ought to be thankful you didn’t put him to work.” He assumed a sly, malicious grin. “As Twilliger says, we can’t afford to have epileptics falling on the subway tracks and getting all cut up. By the way,” he added, “do you know the difference between the sham and the true epileptic?”

Matt Reardon shook his head.

“Well, it’s this way, Matt: one always manages to fall in a safe spot; the other isn’t so careful.”

“Anyway, they both block traffic,” Matt responded.

Moloch laughed. So did Matt. It was a hell of a good joke. Moloch knew it wasn’t true. Matt didn’t.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you—I’ve got a letter here for you,” said Matt suddenly. “From the Egyptian …
that nut, Sarwat
.”

“Sarwat? Sarwat?”

“Sure, you remember the bird. Here, read it. I wanted to laugh my head off.”

He made no apologies for opening Moloch’s private mail. Moloch took the letter and read:

Washington, D. C. 

Esteemed and Most Honourable Sir:

I must write and let you know what sorrow’s hand has done in my heart, and it grieves me very much to overburden you with my internal pains, but I feel extremely gratified to know that you are a rare and gracious soul.

Here I am; a wrecked ship dashed and broken into pieces, by the huge rocks in the wide, dark, and rolling ocean of America. My dear sir—I have often heard people speak highly of this country, that its imaginary beauty had infatuated me, and drew me hither from the calm East, very vehemently.

Very shortly after I had landed here, I found what I have taken for granted is but a mere poetic sentiment; and the magnificent and gigantic mansions of hopes were but dreams and foundationless. I am very much disappointed, Mr. Moloch. There is a quotation of a Persian poet that runs: “And there must be a humanitarian soul in which you have to deposit your pains and sufferings, and in which you will find a balsam to relieve your ulcerated heart. ” And this is the reason why, Mr. Moloch, I am daring to write this to you today explaining in the first place my warm love and great wishes to see you, and then explaining my sentiments and impressions.

You know I left New York City, as I was unsuccessful to earn the means of my livelihood there. I found myself lost among the crowds of the Materialistic rush in the very busy streets of the Western Metropolice. Then I have carried my knapsack of travel in the psychological attitude of Jean Vol Jean the hero personage of “Les Miserahles” by the French “Hugo” and stepped forward hither with the absolute hope to earn easily the means of my living, but to my ill luck and
misfortune I found all of Washington is like what I have previously had an introduction.