The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

by Jack London

  An elevator took Constantine to the top floor, and a push-button caused the door to be opened for him by a young woman who threw her arms around his neck, kissed him, and showered him with Russian diminutives of affection, and whom, in turn, he called Grunya.

  They were very comfortable rooms into which he was taken—and remarkably comfortable and tasteful, even for a model apartment house in the East Side. Chastely simple, culture and wealth spoke in the furnishing and decoration. There were many shelves of books, a table littered with magazines, while a parlor grand filled the far end of the room. Grunya was a robust Russian blonde, but with all the color that her caller’s blondness lacked.

  “You should have telephoned,” she chided, in English that was as without accent as his own. “I might have been out. You are so irregular I never know when to expect you.”

  Dropping the afternoon paper beside him, he lolled back among the cushions of the capacious window-seat.

  “Now Grunya, dear, you mustn’t begin by scolding,” he said, looking at her with beaming fondness. “I’m not one of your submerged-tenth kindergarteners, nor am I going to let you order my actions, yea, even to the extent of being told when to wash my face or blow my nose. I came down on the chance of finding you in, but principally for the purpose of trying out my new cab. Will you come for a little run around?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not this afternoon. I expect a visitor at four.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.” He looked at his watch. “Also, I came to learn if you would come home the end of the week. Edge Moor is lonely without either of us.”

  “I was out three days ago,” she pouted. “Grosset said you hadn’t been there for a month.”

  “Too busy. But I’m going to loaf for a week now and read up. By the way, why was it necessary for Grosset to tell you I hadn’t been there in a month, unless for the fact that you hadn’t been there?”

  “Busy, you inquisitor, busy, just like you.” She bubbled with laughter, and, reaching over, caressed his hand.

  “Will you come?”

  “It’s only Monday, now,” she considered. “Yes; if—” She paused roguishly. “If I can bring a friend for the week end. You’ll like him, I know.”

  “Oh, ho; it’s a him, is it? One of your long-haired socialists, I suppose.”

  “No; a short-haired one. But you ought to know better, Uncle, dear, than to be repeating those comic-supplement jokes. I never saw a long-haired socialist in my life. Did you?”

  “No; but I’ve seen them drink beer,” he announced with conviction.

  “Now you shall be punished.” She picked up a cushion and advanced upon him menacingly. “As my kindergarteners say, ‘I’m going to knock your block off.’—There! And there! And there!”

  “Grunya! I protest!” he grunted and panted between blows. “It is unbecoming. It is disrespectful, to treat your mother’s brother in such fashion. I’m getting old—”

  “Pouf!” the lively Grunya shut him off, discarding the cushion. She picked up his hand and looked at the fingers. “To think I’ve seen those fingers tear a pack of cards in two and bend silver coins.”

  “They are past all that now. They . . . are quite feeble.”

  He let the members in question rest limply and flaccidly in her hand, and aroused her indignation again. She placed her hand on his biceps.

  “Tense it,” she commanded.

  “I—I can’t,” he faltered. “—Oh! Ouch! There, that’s the best I can do.” A very weak effort indeed he made of it. “I’ve gone soft, you see—the breakdown of tissue due to advancing senility—”

  “Tense it!” she cried, this time with a stamp of her foot.

  Constantine surrendered and obeyed, and as the biceps swelled under her hand, a glow of admiration appeared in her face.

  “Like iron,” she murmured, “only it is living iron. It is wonderful. You are cruelly strong. I should die if you ever put the weight of your strength on me.”

  “You will remember,” he answered, “and place it to my credit, that when you were a little thing, even when you were very naughty, I never spanked you.”

  “Ah, Uncle, but was not that because you had moral convictions against spanking?”

  “True; but if ever those convictions were shaken, it was by you, and often enough when you were anywhere between three and six. Grunya, dear, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but truth compels me to say that at that period you were a barbarian, a savage, a cave-child, a jungle beast, a—a regular little devil, a she-wolf of a cub without morality or manners, a—”

  But a cushion, raised and threatening, caused him to desist and to throw up his arms in arches of protection to his head.

  “ ’Ware!” he cried. “By your present actions the only difference I can note is that you are a full-grown cub. Twenty-two, eh? And feeling your strength—beginning to take it out on me. But it is not too late. The next time you attempt to trounce me, I will give you a spanking, even if you are a young lady, a fat young lady.”

  “Oh, you brute! I’m not!” She thrust out her arm. “Look at that. Feel it. That’s muscle. I weigh one hundred and twenty-eight. Will you take it back?”

  Again the cushion rose and fell upon him, and it was in the midst of struggling to defend himself, laughing and grunting, dodging and guarding with his arms, that a maid entered with a samovar and Grunya desisted in order to serve tea.

  “One of your kindergarteners?” he queried, as the maid left the room.

  Grunya nodded.

  “She looks quite respectable,” he commented. “Her face is actually clean.”

  “I refuse to let you make me excited over my settlement work,” she answered, with a smile and caress, as she passed him his tea. “I have been working out my individual evolution, that is all. You don’t believe now what you did at twenty.”

  Constantine shook his head.

  “Perhaps I am only a dreamer,” he added wistfully.

  “You have read and studied, and yet you have done nothing for social betterment. You have never raised your hand.”

  “I have never raised my hand,” he echoed sadly, and, at the same moment, his glance falling on the headlines of the newspaper announcing McDuffy’s death, he found himself forced to suppress the grin that writhed at his lips.

  “It’s the Russian character,” Grunya cried. “—Study, microscopic inspection and introspection, everything but deeds and action. But I—” Her young voice lifted triumphantly. “I am of the new generation, the first American generation—”

  “You were Russian born,” he interpolated dryly.

  “But American bred. I was only a babe. I have known no other land but this land of action. And yet, Uncle Sergius, you could have been such a power, if you’d only let business alone.”

  “Look at all that you do down here,” he answered. “Don’t forget, it is my business that enables you to perform your works. You see, I do good by . . .” He hesitated, and remembered Hausmann, the gentle-spirited terrorist. “I do good by proxy. That’s it. You are my proxy.”

  “I know it, and it’s horrid of me to say such things,” she cried generously. “You’ve spoiled me. I never knew my father, so it is no treason for me to say I’m glad it was you that took my father’s place. My father—no father—could have been so—so colossally kind.”

  And, instead of cushions, it was kisses this time she lavished on the colorless, thin-thatched blond gentleman with iron muscles who lolled on the window-seat.

  “What is becoming of your anarchism?” he queried slyly, chiefly for the purpose of covering up the modest confusion and happiness her words had caused. “It looked for a while, several years ago, as if you were going to become a full-fledged Red, breathing death and destruction to all upholders of the social order.”

  “I—I did have leanings that way,” she confessed reluctantly.

  “Leanings!” he shouted. “You worried the life out of me trying to persuade me to give up my busin
ess and devote myself to the cause of humanity. And you spelled ‘cause’ all in capitals, if you will remember. Then you came down to this slum work—making terms with the enemy, in fact—patching up the poor wrecks of the system you despised—”

  She raised a hand in protest.

  “What else would you call it?” he demanded. “Your boys’ clubs, your girls’ clubs, your little mothers’ clubs. Why, that day nursery you established for women workers! It only meant, by taking care of the children during work hours, that you more thoroughly enabled the employers to sweat the mothers.”

  “But I’ve outgrown the day-nursery scheme, Uncle; you know that.”

  Constantine nodded his head.

  “And a few other things. You’re getting real conservative—er, sort of socialistic. Not of such stuff are revolutionists made.”

  “I’m not so revolutionary, Uncle, dear. I’m growing up. Social development is slow and painful. There are no short cuts. Every step must be worked out. Oh, I’m still a philosophic anarchist. Every intelligent socialist is. But it seems more clear to me every day that the ideal freedom of a state of anarchy can only be obtained by going through the intervening stage of socialism.”

  “What is his name?” Constantine asked abruptly.

  “Who?—What?” A warm flush of maiden blood rose in her cheeks.

  Constantine quietly sipped his tea and waited.

  Grunya recovered herself and looked at him earnestly for a moment.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, “on Saturday night, at Edge Moor. He—he is the short-haired one.”

  “The guest you are to bring?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll tell you no more till then.”

  “Do you . . . ?” he asked.

  “I . . . I think so,” she faltered.

  “Has he spoken?”

  “Yes . . . and no. He has such a way of taking things for granted. You wait until you meet him. You’ll love him, Uncle Sergius, I know you will. And you’ll respect his mind, too. He’s . . . he’s my visitor at four. Wait and meet him now. There’s a dear, do, please.”

  But Uncle Sergius Constantine, alias Ivan Dragomiloff, looked at his watch and quickly stood up.

  “No; bring him to Edge Moor Saturday, Grunya, and I’ll do my best to like him. And I’ll have more opportunity then than now. I’m going to loaf for a week. If it is as serious as it seems, have him stop the week.”

  “He’s so busy,” was her answer. “It was all I could do to persuade him for the week end.”

  “Business?”

  “In a way. But not real business. He’s not in business. He’s rich, you know. Social-betterment business would best describe what keeps him busy. But you’ll admire his mind, Uncle, and respect it, too.”

  “I hope so . . . for your sake, dear,” were Constantine’s last words, as they parted in an embrace at the door.

  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.