The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

3

It was a very demure young woman who received Winter Hall a few minutes after her uncle’s departure. Grunya was intensely serious as she served him tea and chatted with him—if chat it can be called, when the subject matter ranged from Gorky’s last book and the latest news of the Russian Revolution to Hull House and the shirtwaist-makers’ strike.

Winter Hall shook his head forbiddingly at her reconstructed ameliorative plans.

“Take Hull House,” he said. “It was a point of illumination in the slum wilderness of Chicago. It is still a point of illumination and no more. The slum wilderness has grown, vastly grown. There is a far greater totality of vice and misery and degradation in Chicago today than was there when Hull House was founded. Then Hull House has failed, as have all the other ameliorative devices. You can’t save a leaky boat with a bailer that throws out less water than rushes in.”

“I know, I know,” Grunya murmured sadly.

“Take the matter of inside rooms,” Hall went on. “In New York City, at the close of the Civil War, there were sixty thousand inside rooms. Since then inside rooms have been continually crusaded against. Men, many of them, have devoted their lives to that very fight. Public-spirited citizens by thousands and tens of thousands have contributed their money and their approval. Whole blocks have been torn down and replaced by parks and playgrounds. It has been a great and terrible fight. And what is the result? Today, in the year 1911, there are over three hundred thousand inside rooms in New York City.”

He shrugged his shoulders and sipped his tea.

“More and more do you make me see two things,” Grunya confessed. “First, that liberty, unrestricted by man-made law, cannot be gained except by evolution through a stage of excessive man-made law that will well-nigh reduce us all to automatons—the socialistic stage, of course. But I, for one, would never care to live in the socialist state. It would be maddening.”

“You prefer the splendid, wild, cruel beauty of our present commercial individualism?” he asked quietly.

“Almost I do. Almost I do. But the socialist state must come. I know that, because of the second thing I so clearly see, and that is the failure of amelioration to ameliorate.” She broke off abruptly, favored him with a dazzling, cheerful smile, and announced, “But why should we be serious with the hot weather coming on? Why don’t you leave town for a breath of air?”

“Why don’t you?” he countered.

“Too busy.”

“Same here.” He paused, and his face seemed suddenly to become harsh and grim, as if reflecting some stern inner thought. “In fact, I have never been busier in my life, and never so near accomplishing something big.”

“But you will run up for the week end and meet my uncle?” she demanded impulsively. “He was here just a few minutes ago. He wants to make it a—a sort of house party, just the three of us, and suggests the week.”

He shook his head reluctantly.

“I’d like to, and I’ll run up, but I can’t stay a whole week. This affair of mine is most important. I have learned only today what I have been months in seeking.”

And while he talked, she studied his face as only a woman in love can study a man’s face. She knew every minutest detail of Winter Hall’s face, from the inverted arch of the joined eyebrows to the pictured corners of the lips, from the firm unclefted chin to the last least crinkle of the ear. Being a man, even if he were in love, not so did Hall know Grunya’s face. He loved her, but love did not open his eyes to microscopic details. Had he been called upon suddenly to describe her out of the registered impressions of his consciousness, he could have done so only in general terms, such as vivacious, plastic, delicate coloring, low forehead, hair always becoming, eyes that smiled and glowed even as her cheeks did, a sympathetic and adorable mouth, and a voice the viols of which were wonderful and indescribable. He had also impressions of cleanness and wholesomeness, noble seriousness, facile wit, and brilliant intellect.

What Grunya saw was a well-built man of thirty-two, with the brow of a thinker and all the facial insignia of a doer. He, too, was blue-eyed and blond, in the bronzed American way of those that live much in the sun. He smiled much, and, when he laughed, laughed heartily. Yet often, in repose, a certain sternness, almost brutal, was manifest in his face. Grunya, who loved strength and who was appalled by brutality, was sometimes troubled by fluttering divinations of this other side of his character.

Winter Hall was a rather unusual product of the times. In spite of the easy ways of wealth in which he had spent his childhood, and of the comfortable fortune inherited from his father and added to by two spinster aunts, he had early devoted himself to the cause of humanity. At college he had specialized in economics and sociology, and had been looked upon as somewhat of a crank by his less serious fellow students. Out of college, he had backed Riis, both with money and personal effort, in the New York crusade. Much time and labor spent in a social settlement had left him dissatisfied. He was always in search of the thing behind the thing, of the cause that was really the cause. Thus, he had studied politics, and, later, pursued graft from New York City to Albany and back again, and studied it, too, in the capital of his country.

After several years, apparently futile, he spent a few months in a university settlement that was in reality a hotbed of radicalism, and resolved to begin his studies from the very bottom. A year he spent as a casual laborer wandering over the country, and for another year he wandered as a vagabond, the companion of tramps and yegg men. For two years, in Chicago, he was a professional charity worker, toiling long hours and drawing down a salary of fifty dollars a month. And out of it all, he had developed into a socialist—a “millionaire socialist,” as he was labeled by the press.

He traveled much, and investigated always, studying affairs at first hand. There was never a strike of importance that did not see him among the first on the ground. He attended all the national and international conventions of organized labor, and spent a year in Russia during the impending crisis of the 1905 Revolution. Many articles of his had appeared in the heavier magazines, and he was the author of several books, all well written, deep, thoughtful, and, for a socialist, conservative.

And this was the man with whom Grunya Constantine chatted and drank tea in the window-seat of her East Side apartment.

“But it is not necessary for you to keep yourself mewed up all the time in this wretched, stifling city,” she was saying. “In your case I can’t imagine what imperatively compels you—”

But she did not finish the sentence, for at that moment she discovered that Hall was no longer listening to her. His glance had chanced to rest on the afternoon paper lying on the seat. Entirely oblivious of her existence, he had picked up the paper and begun to read.

Grunya sulked prettily, but he took no notice of her.

“It’s very nice of you, I . . . I must say,” she broke out, finally attracting his attention. “Reading a newspaper while I am talking to you.”

He turned the sheet so that she could see the headline of McDuffy’s assassination. She looked up at him with incomprehension.

“I beg your pardon, Grunya, but when I saw that, I forgot everything.” He tapped his forefinger on the headline. “That is why I am so busy. That is why I remain in New York. That is why I can allow myself no more than a week end with you, and you know how dearly I would love to have the whole week.”