Moloch: Or, This Gentile World Read online

  “Like rushing the growler, I suppose,” Matt remarked in a sedate manner, meaning to imply that such a custom was eminently respectable—quite the proper thing, in fact.

  But Prigozi refused to permit the conversation to drift into such channels. He was for dredging at once, to see what lay buried in the rich silt at the bottom. He moved closer to the man and laid a sweaty affectionate paw on his shoulder.

  “You said a minute ago, Luther, that you used to belong to the Christian Endeavor Society once. Is that right?”

  He spoke in an ominous, threatening tone, as though to convey the impression that such an admission constituted a breach of the law.

  But Luther was impervious—to cajolery and threats alike.

  Meanwhile, unnoticed by the others, Matt Reardon had invited Moloch’s secretary to join the group and report the conversation verbatim.

  “Never mind the Christian Endeavor Society,” said Moloch, suddenly taking a hand in the pleasantries, and radiating a warm, protective assurance which increased Prigozi’s aggravation.

  “Is he your office boy?” asked Luther, indicating Prigozi.

  “No,” said Moloch dryly, “he’s an undertaker—a friend of mine. He just dropped in to pay me a visit.”

  While this had been going on, Luther was busy fumbling in his pockets, evidently in search of some object of vital importance. As he emptied one pocket after the other a collection of miscellaneous trifles spilled on to the floor. Among them were two stale ham sandwiches, a pair of pliers, a vest-pocket dictionary, some tacks, three yacht-club buttons which had been polished assiduously, a harmonica, hairpins, marbles … God knows what unthinkable gimcracks he might have exhumed if he hadn’t fortunately come across the object of his search.

  Tenderly he placed a worn-looking gilt-edged book in Moloch’s hands. The New Testament!

  “They gave it to me at the hospital,” Luther began, in his unruffled, habitually detached manner. “I always keep it with me so as I can read a few lines before going to bed … to keep me good. I don’t really need it, friend, because I never did a wrong in my life, but I believe in bein’ a good Christian…. There ain’t nobody can take my religion away from me, ain’t that right, friend?”

  Moloch nodded.

  “You see, friend, everything was all right after I got out of the hospital, only Tillie got wronged up account of her mother’s bad example. The judge himself said it was bad for the missus to be sittin’ on the coal scuttle all day when she oughter been scrubbing floors....”

  “You mean she drank?”

  “Exactly, friend.” The same placid demeanor—impossible to ruffle him. One might have said “murdered” instead of “drank.”

  “My wife wasn’t exactly a good woman,” Luther continued. “About two-thirds good and one-third bad, I guess. Her mother had Indian blood. Nobody could live with her, friend … nobody.”

  “What was her father?” demanded Prigozi, inquisitive and menacing again. He seemed dissatisfied with Luther’s obliquity. He was itching, as he expressed it later, to get a “reaction.”

  “I don’t know what her father was,” Luther offered blandly. “I heard her say once that he was an engineer on the Santa Fe line. But you couldn’t believe her much. She told so many lies”

  “I don’t care whether he was an engineer or an evangelist,” cried Prigozi, in an exasperated voice. ” What nationality—that’s what I mean.”

  “He was a Pawnee Indian, too … some of him. I guess that makes her two-thirds Indian, don’t it?”

  “No, about seven-eighths,” croaked Matt.

  Luther preserved a solemn exterior as the others exchanged witticisms about the proportion of Pawnee chromosomes in the Becklein family. The secretary begged them not to talk so rapidly … she couldn’t catch all that Luther had to say.

  Luther was chatting on again about the various jobs which he held before “they” took him to the hospital. He used the word “they” frequently now. It had the validity which Euripides imparted to the “Fates” in his dramaturgic machinery.

  “I tried to get a job,” he was saying, “but they wouldn’t let me. Every time I went to look for work, something happened. This last time they put me in the hospital for six months with a broken leg. I had hay fever, too. But, look here, friend, I need a job. I’m no drinkin’ man. I want to work, honest I do. Why, say—I did a day’s washin’ for a lady down the street.” (He forgot that he was not in Paterson anymore.) “That’s enough, ain’t it, friend? And I ran errands once. You see, I can’t hang shades anymore— my back ain’t what it used to be....”

  “How are your legs?” asked Moloch.

  “The left one is all right, but this here one”—he patted his right leg affectionately—”is kinda stiff. .. from layin’ in bed so long, you understand?”

  “That’s all very well, Luther, but do you understand what you would have to do, if I were to give you a job?”

  “Yes, sir. Couldn’t you put me in an office where they don’t have so many telegrams to deliver?”

  Matt Reardon broke in: “You wouldn’t like a carriage to take you around in, would you, Luther?”

  “Honest, friend, I want to work, only …”

  “Here,” said Moloch, slipping a half-dollar into the man’s hand. “Take that and get a haircut tonight. See me tomorrow morning. Take a bath, too, if you have time, and leave your overcoat home.” He was about to turn away. “And say, friend,” he added as an afterthought, “tell me—have you got a home?” It was the first indication he gave that he was talking to a human being.

  Luther answered ruefully: “I had one once, but the judge he …”

  Moloch interrupted him. “Mr. Lawson,” he called, “will you give this man a couple of dollars for me? I’ll return it to you Saturday.” He whispered the last.

  Luther seemed to lose interest in the job and walked over to get the money. When he had gone Moloch slipped over to Law-son. “Don’t let him in again, savvy?”

  “Sure,” said Lawson. His head moved eloquently. He had a way of being at once profound and lugubrious. “I knew the minute I laid eyes on him that you’d want to say a few words to him. I don’t let them all in, you know. Only the choice ones.”

  Moloch grinned. “That’s the idea, Lawson—only the choice ones.”

  Returning to his desk, he found Prigozi capering about like Silenus and bleating a babble of strange words—synapses, parathyroids, involutional melancholia, euphorias … whatnot. The man behaved like an automaton that had been wound up and would go on muttering outlandish jargon until the spring ran down. He was bending hysterically over Matt, his cheeks hot and flushed, tears welling up, his lips slavering.

  “What I say”—he slammed the desk with his clammy fist— “what I say,” he repeated vociferously, “is this: you ought to hang that poor bugger up to dry … hang him up in the toilet, he won’t know the difference. Or say, I tell you what—send him up to Dr. Nussbaum in the morning. I’ll tip the old codger off. Cripes, we haven’t had a decent case for the last two weeks. Nothing but paranoids … and cretins.”

  Restive because Moloch was paying no attention to him, he threw the remains of a voice to the ceiling.

  “Gonna doll that guy up in a uniform tomorrow, eh? You ought to make a wardrobe attendant out of him.”

  Moloch appeared to be absorbed in his papers.

  “I say, Mister Moloch! Feelin’ pretty good now … satisfied with the world, heh? Jesus, but you like to play the good Samaritan!”

  Prigozi was now fairly launched on his pet theme: playing the good Samaritan. It was his favorite instrument of torture, for Moloch could stand most any other gaff but being dubbed a little Jesus. He was inclined to look upon his charitable impulses as a weakness. Prigozi understood this thoroughly. What he wanted was to see Moloch reduced to a soft, pulpy, Christian mass of flesh and principles. In the ordinary Gentile he saw no hope of resuscitating the Christ spirit. Moloch he recognized as a Christian “sport,” a case
of religious atavism, one might say. This callous shell in which Moloch encased his tender spirit could not deceive Prigozi. Oh, no. He knew a real Christian when he met one. And the flesh of a real Christian was ever so much more succulent than a priest’s or a pope’s.

  Moloch listened to Prigozi’s tirades for a while with mild amusement. That irritated Prigozi, took the wind out of his sails, as it were. Finally Moloch turned to Matt:

  “Look here, Matt, do me a favor, will you? Chase this dirty Grand Street savant out of here. Send him home to his wife and guinea pigs.”

  “There you go!” Prigozi exclaimed, rubbing his hands like Lady Macbeth. “Now that’s what I call a normal reaction. You’re not psychotic—yet, Mister Moloch.” He chuckled as though he had made a quick sale.

  “No,” said the other, “I suppose my behavior is indicative of nothing more than a mild neuroticism. Take yourself now … you’re a healthy specimen of the ‘normal.’ How about it, Matt?”

  “Slightly tainted,” responded Matt.

  “Gwan, gwan!” ranted Prigozi, waving his hands excitedly as if he were shooing away a swarm of horseflies. “Someday I’m gonna submit my plan to Twilliger, and then you guys better watch out or you’ll be losing your jobs.”

  This eternal question of normality versus abnormality was intimately linked with the messenger problem. Prigozi had certain unique theories about the status of the messenger boy with which Moloch entirely disagreed. In order to give Prigozi material with which to formulate his theories, Moloch had permitted him to don the uniform for a few months as a part-time messenger. Prigozi found the experience thrilling. His solution to the problem could be boiled down to one word: Revolution.

  Matt Reardon found Prigozi’s ideas stimulating and entertaining. He hadn’t an ounce of faith in them, but he made it a principle to encourage Prigozi in order to take some of the conceit out of Moloch. At the same time he utilized this ceaseless strife to enlarge his afternoon’s recreation. He commenced usually by twitting Prigozi about his various schemes.

  “That plan of yours,” he said, “what plan is that? You don’t mean the idea of substituting pigeons for messengers, do you?”

  “Get out of here!” Prigozi snarled. “Where do you get that stuff? I know the guy who invented that pigeon stunt… that crazy manager of yours up in the third district, that guy with the big belly, looks like a eunuch. What’s his name again, Dion?” He snapped his fingers to jog his memory.

  “You mean Boylan?”

  “Yeah, that’s the bloke. He was going to buy up those religious paintings your friend Dun brought over from Europe.”

  As Prigozi’s ebullience rose his ideas became more dissociated, and what slight command he held over the English language threatened to relax and disintegrate entirely. However, he lost none of his picturesque qualities. In fact, Moloch and the others derived the utmost enjoyment from these explosions. As a daily ritual, however, it was apt to become monotonous. In an hour or so Prigozi would quiet down, become earnest in a rather dignified way (if one could ever believe this possible of him—dignity!), and converse reasonably and charmingly about the vegetation in the Arctic regions, or the scientific means of determining the weight of the earth. But first, it seemed, he had to work off his grosser indulgences, those mad, lyric extravagances which he brought with him from somewhere—from the ghetto, possibly. About his past Prigozi was awkwardly reticent, and out of a feeling of sympathy and delicacy Moloch, despite the intimacy that existed between them, never alluded to the subject. Several times Prigozi had been on the verge of unbosoming, but Moloch’s attitude of complete indifference nettled him and forced him to shrink back.

  Prigozi soon forgot about Boylan and his pigeons in the pursuit of his own chimeras. “If you fellows are serious,” he went on, “I’m going to tell you about this plan of mine … and I mean it when I say that I’m going to present it to Twilliger someday.” He cleared his throat and looked about for a cuspidor. “That jackass on the thirteenth floor—” referring to Vice-President Twilliger— “he wants to raise the standard of the messenger force, don’t he?’

  Moloch nodded.

  “Well, then, he’s got to recognize this fact,” and Prigozi embarked on a flood of ideas which, when the excitement abated, would land him in a telegraphic Utopia.

  Moloch never refused an opportunity to listen to these panaceas. No matter how crack-brained the idea, there were always crumbs of information which he found valuable and practicable. It was an admitted fact that the one problem which all the telegraph companies had never adequately met was the business of providing a reliable, intelligent, and steady corps of messengers. Much energy and invention, not to speak of enormous sums, had been spent for the perfection of mechanical and electrical devices, but the messenger problem remained unsolved, almost untouched. It was more acute now than it had ever been in the past.

  In the three years that he had been at his desk, Moloch had been given the opportunity to become acquainted with most of the disturbing factors involved; and, if he had not solved the problem for the company, he had at least effected a radical improvement. The chief obstacle in his path, for he had plans up his sleeve to improve the situation further, was that jackass, as Prigozi called him, on the thirteenth floor. Twilliger, who had been a messenger in his youth, believed that the only solutions of any value were those of his own making, or those which his so-called efficiency experts presented to him for approval. He saw no violation of logic in spending a fortune to reduce the transmission time to San Francisco only to have the message lie at the receiving office for a few hours because of a shortage of messengers. If, for instance, you received a message from California, a sticker informed you pompously that it took less than forty-five minutes to speed this greeting across the continent. Yet that same message might be brought you by a half-wit who had stopped on his way for three-quarters of an hour to watch a ball game—we will say nothing of those messages thrown down the sewer daily by aggrieved youngsters who had discovered that it was impossible to earn the twenty or twenty-five dollars a week on a piecework basis which the newspaper advertisements promised.

  When Moloch took over the reins he found that it was customary to hire ten thousand messengers a year in order to preserve a working force of a thousand. Two months ago he had succeeded in reducing this extravagant turnover to almost fifty percent. And there were indications that it might be further reduced.

  Then along came Twilliger with a mandate to slash wages. “There is such a thing as a healthy turnover!” That was Twil-liger’s dictum. The very next month they were obliged to hire over two thousand raw recruits. Even this staggering influx was insufficient to keep the gaps plugged. It was like a dam bursting. There was scarcely a veteran left. That was the very devil of it! Twilliger’s tactics were such that there wasn’t even a substantial nucleus on which to build up a mobile, skeleton force. The very bottom had dropped out. Ads appeared like mushrooms—not only in the metropolitan papers, but in suburban papers, weeklies, church papers, foreign papers, school papers, college magazines. Twilliger would have advertised in Purgatory had he not been a Unitarian.

  In conjunction with this frantic newspaper activity, roundup squads were inducted to canvass the schoolyards, playgrounds, lots, pool parlors, movie houses—any place and every place that a boy was likely to be encountered, buttonholed, and appealed to.

  But none of these expedients relieved the deplorable mess. The hard labor of three years, the effective welfare and educational work that Moloch had introduced, the confidence in the integrity of the organization which he had gradually instilled—all this evaporated overnight. The Great American Telegraph Company became a good joke. You couldn’t pay the ordinary boy to work for it.

  Naturally he was interested in any program of amelioration. But he was skeptical, too. “Can anyone supply that jackass up there in his swivel chair with a new set of brains?” That was the thought which shot through his head as he listened to Prigozi. That seemed the on
ly solution of any moment now. As for Prigozi, tethered as he was to a skein of psychoanalytical theories, what was he to expect from him? Some Freudian-Marx solution, no doubt, which required a categorical affirmative, a stout libido, and a box of Seidlitz powders.

  The “revolution” which Prigozi broached with sound and fury turned out upon analysis to be about as radical as the constitution which the Czar Alexander threw to his groveling moujiks. His plan consisted of a string of half-baked ideas which, assuming their feasibility, required at least fifteen years to work out. His campaign of reform had for its object the education of the general public. His goal was the visionary hope of wiping out the stigma attached to the uniform. Even Matt had to smile as he took in Prigozi’s involved explanation for the origin of “these civilized taboos.”

  “We’ve heard that junk before,” Matt started to say.

  “Leave him be,” urged Moloch. “We’ll give Osawatomie ten more minutes to conclude.” Even Dave chuckled at this.