H. R. Edwin Lefèvre
sent a sign-painter to decorate the ground-glass doors, and ordered some official stationery in a rush. He promised the agent to return with the president and sign the lease.
Where everybody distrusts everybody else there is nothing like promising to sign documents!
He bought some office furniture on exactly the same plan.
On Friday night the unionized sandwich-men took their signs and boards to the trysting-place, Twenty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, to have new advertisements of Hendrik's composition painted thereon. The boards did not belong to the members, but in a good cause all property is the cause's. Each of the original fourteen brought recruits. The street was almost blocked. The two sign-painters worked like nine beavers, and Hendrik and the young man in steel-rimmed spectacles helped. When the clamor became threatening Hendrik counted his men twice, aloud. There were eighty-four of them. They knew it was eighty-four, having heard him say it, as he intended they should. He then took them to the corner boozery.
He had only two dollars. There were eighty-four thirsty. Therefore, "Eighty beers!" he yelled, majestically.
"Eighty-four!" shouted eighty-four voices.
"That's twenty cents more," said Hendrik to himself in the plain hearing of the hitherto distrustful bartender. He had a small green roll in his left hand consisting of two dollars and two clippings. With his right he loudly planked down two large dimes on the counter and shoved them toward the bartender, who took them while Hendrik began to count his greenbacks.
The bartender saw the exact change and began to draw beer. He even yelled for assistance.
Hendrik knew better than to enforce discipline now, but he could not officially countenance disorder.
"Give the other fellows a chance," he said, paternally, to those near by. Then he saw the rear entrance. It inspired him.
He waited until there were about sixty glasses on the bar. Then he yelled in the direction of the front door: "Come in, boys! Everybody gets one!"
The tidal-wave carried him and twenty others to the end of the room. But while the twenty others fought to get back to the schooners, he intelligently went out by the back door.
The police reserves were called. They responded. Then six ambulances.
Those who survived sought Hendrik to complain, but he beat them to it by scolding them angrily. He all but licked them on the spot, so that they forgot their grievance in their haste to defend themselves. He then divided them into squads of five and took them to another saloon—one squad and a quarter of a dollar at a time. He only used one dollar and fifty cents cash that way.
He then promised all of them forty beers a day beginning on Monday. He told them to get recruits, who would not be admitted to the union, but could have the privilege of parading. They must be thirsty men and look it. They would receive two beers apiece.
On Saturday morning there was not a sandwich-man to be seen at work in Greater New York.
At noon the city editors of all the metropolitan dailies received neatly typewritten notices that the sandwich-men had formed a union and would "peacefully strive for higher wages, shorter hours, and reduced peregrinations. The sandwich-men had no desire to precipitate another internecine strife between Labor and Capital." They were "willing to submit their differences to a board of arbitration consisting of John D. Rockefeller, Charles F. Murphy, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Hendrik Rutgers."
These notices were one and all thrown into waste-paper baskets as cheap humor—to be dug up later and used.
IV
On Saturday afternoon at 3.35 the Harlem contingent, carrying their armor under one arm, their tickets given into the conductor's own hand by the lieutenant, Fleming, entrained at the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.
Ten minutes later they arrived at the Grand Central Station. And as the first pair of sandwiches descended, the waiting band burst into a joyous welcome.
The exits were crowded. Martial music and parading men always draw crowds. So long as there is no charge, gaping audiences automatically supply themselves in New York.
And so, along Forty-second Street, following the musicians, himself followed by his starving sandwiches, Hendrik Rutgers walked into Fifth Avenue and into history at one and the same time.
The procession turned southward. The band played Chopin's "Funeral March." Hendrik Rutgers at the head of his pauperized cohorts, anger in his heart, light in his soul, defiance in his eyes, marched down Fifth Avenue with an effect as of a man in armor treading on prostrate millionaires as over so many railroad-ties. Men who had money in their pockets for a minute felt the wind squeezed out of them by his foot. And as they saw the led sandwiches they looked thoughtful.
The first of Rutgers's infantry was an old man. His long, gray beard was dirty and ragged, like his clothes and the rest of him. In his eyes you saw the unutterable weariness of a man who has lived fifty suffering years too long. Underneath his eyes were dark rings; from the sidewalk his sockets looked finger-deep. On his cheeks was the pallor of death.
H. Rutgers, fighting for fairness and justice, had justly picked out the old fellow to be his Exhibit "A." Society must see what it did to human beings! Therefore the old man slid one foot along the asphalt and let the other follow it, with a spent, mechanical movement, as an engine, after the power is turned off, keeps on going from the momentum of years. The legs seemed to move from force of habit—a corpse on foot, with a concealed galvanic battery somewhere.
And on the breastplate and backplate of this armored corpse, printed in funereal black, beautiful women and intellectual men on Fifth Avenue, where the unforgivable crime is to be poor and show it, read:
Yesterday I walked 19 miles.
They paid me 35 cents cash
And 2 meal tickets.
He had been well coached as to his gait and, thrilled by the success he was making, the old chap became an artist and limped worse.
Behind him was our friend Mulligan, pale, thin to emaciation. He looked famished. It came from the possession of a tapeworm, as before stated. To him Hendrik Rutgers had given this standard to bear:
They call us Sandwich-men because:
We don't know what a Square Meal is!
He was followed by the raggedest human being that Anthony Comstock ever allowed to exhibit himself in public. On his boards the Fifth Avenue crowd on this fair spring day saw this:
Do you thank God you are alive?
So do we!
And notice the DIFFERENCE!
The shabby-genteel man, ex-Republican, with steel-rimmed spectacles, who now looked for all the world like a bookkeeper out of a job, had this:
I am the Result.
The Cause was not Drink.
It was HUNGER.
A young fellow who looked so much as if he had just left a hospital that thousands of spectators imagined they smelled iodoform carried this:
All men must die.
Knowing this, WE HOPE!
An octogenarian, not over four and one-half feet tall, very frail-looking, was next. To him H. Rutgers had assigned this banner:
If Society won't feed us