The Breaker

Front matter

THE BREAKER

By ARTHUR STRINGER

ILLUSTRATED BY WILL GREFÉ

Part I

[ PART I ]

I

WIDDER was a failure. And Widder, with the salt-and-pepper beginning to show above his ears, no longer made any effort to blink that fact. For he saw that he had come to accept the conditions of failure, to accept them impassively, as a man emerging from a fever accepts weakness.

It was useless now even to worry about it. He had lost the habit of thinking ahead. By limiting his ambitions, he found, he no longer affronted his pride. He had become a time-marker. He found life too tumultuous a tide to battle against. It was more comfortable to drift along with the current, snatching at what the back-currents of existence left within his reach.

There were times when his sense of failure was more poignant than at others. But if he was not actively and aggressively happy, he was not altogether unhappy. Time had taught him that he could always have a roof over his head, a roof of some sort, and two meals and a free-lunch tide-over every day, and enough clothes from the residuary Rialto of Seventh Avenue to keep him warm, to say nothing of the luxury of a penny evening paper to keep him in touch with life and romance, and an occasional rainy day in the public library to keep him posted as to the mechanical inventions of his luckier confreres.

In other words, Widder was respectably pauperized. The accumulation of stores was no longer essential to his scheme of life. He was as improvident as a park squirrel, with his instinct for garnering vitiated. For no matter how long the lean spells and the cold of winter, somewhere in a great city there were always casual hands to sustain his brisk incompetency.

Widder knew he was a failure, because he had become reconciled to the compromises of failure. If he had succeeded in feathering a nest of his own, it was a nest not worth the feathering. He no longer beat against the bars of his cage. His captivity was that confirmed captivity of the spirit which restrained him from seeking freedom even when the door stood open. For Widder no longer rebelled against the thought of his top-floor den in a dilapidated East Twenty-fourth Street rooming house, or at the consciousness of washing and drying his own underwear, or at the memory that many of his less meager meals were cooked by his own hand.

The cooking of his own meals, in fact, was the perpetuation of a sort of personal triumph for Widder, in that arid rooming house where the edict of Mrs. Feeney ordained there should be neither breakfasting nor supping above-stairs. And woe betide the lodger who essayed gustatory audacities over any of her gas jets and brought that gross and asthmatic figure up from her own Plutonian regions, whence issued, day by day, the ever provocative odor of fried bacon and boiling cabbage! But with Widder in his aerie at the top of the house it was somewhat different. For nearly two years ago, when Widder had taken that top-floor front, he had come with all the earmarks of a "permanent," and the astute Mrs. Feeney had sacrificed principle on the altar of expediency. Her abhorrence of transients, who as often as not were fly-by-nights given to screwing empty trunks to the floor and having poolroom slips behind the washstand, was immutable and immovable. She had a weakness for lodgers who carried open and unmistakable signs of anchorage. So when Widder and his wagonload of traps moved in she was prepared to make concessions.

"Would You Mind Waiting a Minute or Two? I'm Afraid There's Somebody Outside"

A man with two trunks, and a canary cage, and an iron-bound carpenter's chest, and racks and tripods and a barrel of photographic plates, and a vise and anvil combined, and boxes of odd-looking models, and bottles of hypo and acids and paint mixtures, and heaven knows what, seemed a man likely to put up with a leaky roof and a room without heat. Widder, in fact, had promptly and neatly soldered a piece of tin over the leak in the roof, being a handy man with tools, for—although at that particular time in the ebb tide of his efforts as a commercial photographer—he still technically designated himself as an inventor.

So sweeping, indeed, were Mrs. Feeney's concessions that she allowed her new lodger to cut a door between the top-floor front and what she still perversely called the skylight room, although for the latter room she exacted a rent of six dollars a month, notwithstanding the fact that the sealing up of its skylight had for two years' time left it quite untenable. This, Widder had explained, in pensively persuading her to let him pipe running water into that abode of darkness, would be just the place for developing his plates and pursuing his experiments in mechanics. And before winter set in he had given an Italian two dollars to install a ruinous grate and mantel, carried bodily from a neighboring house in the hands of "wreckers," into the empty fireplace of his own bleak-walled living room.

This innovation was endured, however, only after a distinct understanding with Mrs. Feeney that the aforementioned grate and mantel, once installed, were to remain where they had been put, no matter what became of Widder himself. When Mrs. Feeney darkly hinted at the danger of fire Widder triumphantly demonstrated the merits of Widder's Fireproof Paint, showing how even cigar boxes, once covered with his invention, stubbornly and persistently refused to be incinerated. So impressed was Mrs. Feeney with this seeming miracle that, in a moment of weakness, she extended to Widder permission to do a bit of cooking, provided he paid for the installation of his own meter and the use of his own gas. Yet this generous concession was achieved only after Widder had assuaged Mrs. Feeney's fixed apprehension as to mice and rats with the confident declaration that he could make a trap to catch any rat or mouse that so much as showed its nose above the third floor. The new lodger even explained that he preferred keeping his own quarters in order with his own hands, provided a rubbish box was left in the hall immediately outside his door.

Through the material matutinally carried belowstairs from this rubbish-box, however, Mrs. Feeney prospected both eagerly and assiduously, cradling and sifting it as patiently as a placer miner washes his Klondike sand for a speck of color. But outside of divers signs attesting that Widder's cooking activities were more extensive than he had implied, she found nothing to confirm her earlier suspicion that this top-floor lodger was a bomb maker secretly devoted to the fashioning of high explosive. So Widder stayed on.

The roots of Widder's existence, in fact, struck deeper and deeper into that top-floor room, for with it he seemed finally able to solve life's final problem. He learned to live meagerly on what proved to be meager earnings. He had, almost without knowing it, achieved a sort of philosophic calm which inured him to the daily attritions of penury. It was not so much that he was without motor power as it was that he stood without incentive. The schemers and climbers of life all had something to scheme and climb for. Widder was alone in the world. His wants were few. When his work as a commercial photographer no longer proved profitable he pensively directed his attention to the retailing of wall maps and then to the peddling of a patented gas jet which, according to the circular that accompanied it, saved eighty per cent in gas consumption. Widder suspected that it did not save six per cent; but people accepted it, for people were romantically inclined and, being ever hopeful of miracles, were ever open to being hoodwinked. And when the gas jet was no longer profitable it became an egg beater, and the egg beater was in time displaced by an instantaneous tap filter that made Croton as clear as crystal and saved you from swallowing germs which one glance at the pamphlet pictures promptly persuaded you were as malignant to the human system as they were repulsive to the human eye.

Yet gas jets and egg beaters and tap filters had kept the pot boiling, and once a month, in cold weather, a quarter of a ton of coal was carried up and packed away in the lidded box with the corduroy-cushion top, and shoes were half-soled, and a larder replenished, and cuttle bone bought for the canary hung in the bit of sunlight which showed at the window on a clear day. He liked very much to hear the singing of that blithe-hearted little bird, for it was a true Harz Mountain canary and not one of the dyed sparrows that Sixth Avenue peddlers dispose of to the unwary. He liked those bird notes almost as much as he liked the mellow chime from the Metropolitan Tower, which he could always hear.

But there were times when he stared in puzzled reproof at that little yellow-feathered singer, seeming conscious of the fact that it was in some way a seal on his failure, a tacit avowal of subjugation, an acknowledgment of resignation, like a flower plot in which prisoners become forlornly interested. Moods such as this, however, never stayed long with him, for he had the habit of somewhat optimistically assuring himself that he was one man in a million, merely to have a roof over his head. He even consorted with a ghostly sense of well-being when his fire was lighted of a winter night and he compared himself with his neighbors, since that mansion of Mrs. Feeney's stood strangely like a second Mount Ætna, luxuriant enough at its base perhaps, but betraying ever-increasing sterility as one ascended, until at the fourth floor, with the exception of Widder's tight-walled crater of warmth, its arctic baldness marked it as a peak of eternal impoverishment.

Troubled and brief, as a rule, were the lodgments in the two rooms at the back, and especially in the little hall room whose open door stared so wistfully into the open door of Widder's abode, since privacy in a hall room can be purchased only at the price of warmth denied.

It was at the beginning of his second winter in the top-floor front that the great event of all Widder's life occurred. It came, as so many of life's great events seem to come, from a clear sky, without warning, without a tub thumper to proclaim its imminence. And with its arrival Widder felt that he and Romance had in some way joined hands. He may have been a mere snag in the current of city life, but thereafter it was a snag beside which the Lorelei were known to have sung. He suddenly found himself living cheek by jowl with Adventure. Even the fixed star of his fireproof paint's success, which was always with him because it was always so remote, seemed eclipsed by the radiance of this more meteoric event.

For hidden away in his cat-eyed little dark room, behind the double lock and key of his iron-bound carpenter's chest, lurked a vast hazard. There, so close to his bottles of hypo and his plate racks and the models that crowded his acid-stained worktable, waited a current of high emprise which could be turned on, if he chose, as easily as he turned on his water tap. There it lurked, giving a secret dignity to his quiet-eyed and ineradicable humility, touching with the wine glow of perilous days his pensive and patient habit of self-deprecation. And what it was and how it came there is not altogether unworthy of record.

It sprang out on him, like a tiger out of a jungle, from the dingy door of a dingy tenement of a dingy quarter of Williamsburg. Having "worked" Brooklyn with his patented tap filter, which could be bought from the jobbers along with a district right for fifteen cents apiece and peddled out at the rate of a dollar each, he patiently and pensively entered the more northerly district plumed by the factory chimneys that shrouded the Williamsburg Bridge from the rising sun. He worked dispiritedly but not despairingly, for he realized that one sale a day meant safety and three sales a day spelt munificence, although there were, indeed, days when entire suburban districts united in their distrust of a filter that could be attached to any tap without materially affecting its flow. From door to door he went with gentle doggedness, accepting defeat without bitterness and rebuffs without complaint.

It was at the end of an empty and altogether unprofitable morning that a door, not unlike the two hundred humdrum doors at which he had already applied, finally opened in answer to his knock. Widder, as was his wont, artfully advanced his right foot, thus gently interposing an obstacle against the inopportune shutting of that door. But the maneuver in this instance was unnecessary, for the hollow-cheeked Calabrian who occupied the flat not only examined Widder's tap filter with interest, but invited the mild-eyed peddler into his little dining room, There, after more talk over Widder's mechanical marvel in particular and the vicissitudes of house-to-house canvassing in general, the Calabrian not only bought a filter for one dollar but extended to his visitor an invitation to join him in his midday dinner. That alone would have made it a red-letter day for Widder. But during that meal of macaroni drenched with tomato sauce, and washed down with half a bottle of rather tepid Marsala, the Calabrian had watched his visitor closely and questioned him pointedly. Life, it was plain to see, had treated Widder none too handsomely. And when two rat-tailed cigars were handed out, the Calabrian even hinted that there were easier ways of making money than peddling tap filters.

Widder, with his tongue a little loosened by the tepid Marsala, thereupon resounded the possibilities of his fireproof paint, and his collapsible shoe-tree and razor-blade sharpener and music-sheet turner. But there was easier money, his host still proclaimed, than trying to market new inventions. When Widder meekly asked what this might be, the Calabrian slapped his leg—in a bandage from acid burns, he had explained—and declared the pensive-eyed filter peddler as exactly the type of man he wanted. And when Widder for the second time asked what this declaration might mean he was told that it would all be made plain at the proper hour. On the following day, when he came back, everything would be explained.

Widder went back. He went back because the dragnet of the unusual compelled him to go back. But the Calabrian still temporized and cross-questioned and talked airily of easy money, of money enough to sink a ship. The time, however, was not right for particulars. There were certain enemies who must not be forgotten. It would take a few days more to make sure that the coast was clear. And in the meantime an offer was an offer. If Widder would carry home a suitcase and take care of it for a week the Calabrian would buy his entire stock of twelve tap filters for twelve good dollars. Then, when the coast was clear, they could get down to business. The Calabrian would come to Widder's room and talk things over.

Twenty Four Thousand Dollars—More Money Than He Had Ever Seen in All His Life

Widder, as he stood viewing the suitcase in question, scarcely knew what to say. Even while the aroma of romance widened before his nostrils the cynic philosophy which life had imposed on him drove his ardor back into its kennel of skepticism. It was an innocent-looking suitcase, as the Calabrian pointed out for the second time, and Widder could carry it away without fear of interception and harbor it without a shadow of suspicion. And it would be a test. It would prove that Widder was the sort of man he wanted. And if there were anything wrong about carrying a suitcase into New York, why, what a beehive of evil, for example, the Grand Central Terminal must be! That was what suitcases were made for—to be carried. And not many men got twelve good dollars for carrying one.

It was probably the hazard of the thing, rather than the unprecedented sale of twelve tap filters, that appealed to Widder's imagination. He finally consented to take the suitcase and keep it until the Calabrian called for it. Yet as he lugged it to a street car and sat with it between his knees as he sped homeward across the Williamsburg Bridge high above the housetops and the crawling East River shipping, he felt that he was in some way a marked man. When a second passenger crowded in beside him he even tingled with secret apprehension, and it was not often that the mice feet of alarm scampered up and down Widder's sedentary body. Why he was apprehensive he could not quite say. Nor could he say just why there was a distinct overtone of pleasure to those primarily disturbing excitements. But for the first time in his life he felt he was a fellow passenger with peril. A ruddier light in some way flared across the gray tenor of his monotonous days.

It was not until the second day that he began to worry about the suitcase. Then, for the twentieth time, he looked it over. It was a large-sized case of yellow cowhide, and its heaviness told him that it was well filled. But what it held he had no means of knowing. There was nothing equivocal about its lock. A hammer and chisel, of course, could demolish that fastening, just as a razor blade could have cut away the entire cowhide and canvas side of the case. But that, naturally, was not to be thought of. So once again Widder turned the suitcase over and over, and weighed it in his hand, and stood it up on his table. Then he sat studiously contemplating it, as though by staring at it he might finally come into some miraculous power of X-raying its contents.

Then the thought flashed through him that it might be packed with stolen silverware, and, this being traced, would surely lead him to being charged with being an accessory after the fact. Or it might be packed with nitro-glycerine or an infernal machine. Then an even more disturbing possibility took possession of his mind as he got up to light the gas. What was to prevent it from being—he hesitated, even, over articulating the thought—a dismembered human body? More than once his penny evening paper had told of such things, and had even printed corroborative photographic evidence, over which he had often enough pored with indifferent and half-incredulous eyes. They were, he remembered, invariably designated as Trunk Murders. And if there were trunk murders, why could there not also be suitcase murders?

Widder turned the gas a little higher. Then, having measured his own meager dimensions in comparison with the suitcase's, he saw, with a sigh of relief, that even a pygmy could not be fitted into such a receptacle. But his sleep that night was not peaceful, even after stowing the suitcase away in his carpenter's chest and carefully locking it there. And after another day of disquieting theorizing and another night of even more disquieting dreams, he decided that he had had enough of mystery. He journeyed over to Williamsburg to have that mystery solved, and solved to his own satisfaction. Otherwise the suitcase would have to be taken out of his possession and taken at once. Unless he could be given either a key or some definite knowledge of what the thing held, the compact would have to be called off. That much he intended to insist upon.

Yet he insisted on no such thing. For he found the Calabrian's street door surrounded by a crowd, who explained that an Italian "coiner" had shot a Treasury Department detective during a raid on his quarters, and would inevitably go to Sing Sing for life.

"And if the cop croaks he'll sure get the chair!" grimly announced an unshaven citizen close to Widder's elbow.

Widder filtered away through that crowd as quickly as water through one of his own tap strainers. He vanished promptly and discreetly from the neighborhood and returned palpitating to the haven of his top-floor quarters, where, having securely locked his door, he sat down and tried to think it all out. Then, having cautiously disinterred the suitcase from its hiding place, he sat viewing it with more concern than ever. He sat viewing it, in fact, with something akin to hatred, as he might have viewed a snake that he had neither the power nor the right to kill. But being unable to banish it, he determined that it should at least be kept caged. So he emptied his carpenter's chest, placed the suitcase in the bottom, and buried it under an array of photograph plates, and faded newspapers, and empty bottles, and underwear that had long since been put on the retired list. Then he double locked the chest, secreted it under his worktable, and made assurance trebly sure by even locking his dark-room door.

Then he waited. Day by day he waited, pausing apprehensively at every footstep that sounded on Mrs. Feeney's stairways and on the street, shrinking inwardly at every stranger who for the second time might happen to glance in his direction. And, in the meantime, he scanned his evening paper meticulously, column by laborious column, wondering why the wheels of the law should move so slowly. But as week by uneventful week dragged by and no hand was laid accusingly on his shoulder his apprehensions gradually subsided. He got so he could once more step down into East Twenty-fourth Street without even changing color, and pass a policeman without holding his breath. Yet the tension was not entirely relaxed until he finally read of the sentencing of the counterfeiter, Nicolo Piazzia, to life imprisonment, with a sufficiently detailed recapitulation of the case to leave no doubt in Widder's mind as to the identity of the criminal.

So vast, indeed, was the former's relief at this news that he promptly and determinedly unearthed the suitcase, and with it started for a Fourth Avenue basement locksmith with whom he had more than once done business in the past. It would be easy enough, he concluded, to tell this locksmith that he had lost the key to his traveling bag. But on Mrs. Feeney's front steps he came abruptly to a stop, suddenly realizing that having a key fitted to that lock implied that the key would have to be tried. And the end of any such trial, he remembered, would mean the opening of the suitcase itself. That, concluded Widder, involved risks that he had neither the intention nor the courage to face. So he went dejectedly back to his top-floor room, locked himself in, and once more sat in a brown study before that enigmatic receptacle that still spelt for him a great Perhaps.

He pondered the matter for several hours. By midnight curiosity had overcome his last scruples. He quietly filed down the point of a buttonhook and started to work on the suitcase lock.

It took him some time. But in the end he was able to pick the lock and open the case.

Widder sat for several minutes without moving, staring down at the contents of that suitcase. He was trembling a little. And it took him some time, he found, to digest his discovery. It was, on the whole, the most dramatic moment of all Widder's meager life.

For in that compactly packed case he found an electro-bath and several dry cells and two bank-note plates carefully wrapped in tinfoil.

Then came a bottle of cyanide of potassium, four tubes of colored ink, two fine files, and a melting pot wrapped up in an Italian newspaper. Then came two plaster-of-Paris coin molds, a cardboard box filled with a silvery-white metallic substance which he recognized as antimony, a cigar box nearly filled with tin, and several pounds of bar lead wrapped in paper.

But what made Widder actually catch his breath was a collection of six compact columns wrapped in Manila paper, which, upon investigation, proved to be three hundred and sixty freshly minted half dollars. Beside these he found a compact bale of oddly tinted paper which, when untied, brought Widder's heart suddenly up into his mouth. For this bale, he found, was made up of twelve smaller packages neatly corded together; and each package, he soon discovered, held exactly one hundred yellow-backs, one hundred bank notes, all in the denomination of twenty. That, Widder computed, meant twenty-four thousand dollars, not counting the one hundred and eighty dollars in silver. And that was more money than he had ever seen in all his life.

It was counterfeit, of course. It had to be counterfeit. There was no chance of its being anything else. But those yellowbacks looked startlingly like all other twenty-dollar bills that he had ever seen, and even being able to sit and stare at them left Widder a little light-headed. If it was not wealth it was at least a persuasively theatrical representation of wealth. And people have thrilled, long before Widder did, at well-staged imitations of reality.

The imitations before him, he decided, were remarkably well done. Nothing about the yellowbacks openly proclaimed them as counterfeit. They satisfied the eye and felt authentic to the finger. As for the coins, there was no doubt about their trickiness. They were a mold product, he knew, yet their edges were as sharp and clear as though freshly cut by a Federal die. The two fine files, he was mechanic enough to suspect, had been used to retouch their milling and cut away the mold drag where the hot metal had been poured into the plaster-of-Paris form. And after that, undoubtedly, the entire coin had been subjected to an acid wash to sharpen it up. And the alloy itself was a very good one. It rang true, and it approximated to the weight of a genuine half dollar. Widder himself would never have questioned it—and Widder had learned to challenge all dubious half dollars, paying for that tuition in the sad school of experience.

It Was an Innocent Looking Suitcase, and Widder Could Carry it Away Without Fear

The next day Widder examined the plates and the colored inks. Having done so, he realized that with a hand press he could turn out several hundred of them a day. And before the week was out he attached the melting pot to his gas cooker, and experimented with alloys, and made a mold or two in the plaster forms, and reinvestigated the mysteries of electroplating. At the end of this work he awakened to the fact that Fate had thrust upon him the power of being the King Midas of Twenty-fourth Street.

If there was something intoxicating in that thought there was also something intimidating. It involved vistas too big for his imagination. It gave him little chills up and down the spine, and after thinking it over for an hour or two he carefully gathered up his newly made coins of alloy and reconsigned them to his melting pot. And with their reduction to base metal there returned to him a shadowy yet indisputable sense of peace. Then he repacked the suitcase and stowed it carefully away in its hiding place. The next morning he once more started on his rounds as a peddler of tap filters. He realized, as he went doggedly back to work, that he had many days of lost time to make up. Yet eight laborious hours of enlarging on the virtues of his filter resulted in only one sale. Honest money, Widder remembered, was not so easy to make.

During all his labors, however, he still carried with him the memory of that hidden wealth. It was something to have up one's sleeve, something to come home to. Merely to nurse the knowledge of so vast a fortune proved a phantasmal consolation. It threw a halo of adventure over the humdrum grayness of things. If it no longer thrilled him as it had done in the earlier days of its possession, it still endowed him with a perverse sense of fortitude as he reckoned up his weekly accounts and by much ingenuity and industry managed to live within his legal income.

As winter deepened and the bite of the frost grew sharper it cast a vague radiance over the bleakness of existence, as an open fire lights up the emptiest of rooms. It became as ghostly an abstraction as an old love affair, not to be sullied by sordid handling. It merged into the realm of pure romance. For Widder made no attempt to use any of his hidden wealth. He was afraid to. He was without the courage to take one of those authoritative looking yellowbacks and pass it across a counter or push it in under a subway wicket. That would mean the end of his peace of mind, the sullying of an abstraction by sordid handling. Widder's code of ethics had never been definitely articulated. But he felt in his bones that honesty was in some way the best policy. And he was not crazy about having the law against him.

II

IT WAS snowing a little as Widder made his way homeward at the end of a day that had been the best in a week of desultory activities. The sale of three filters in an afternoon meant the prompt and reckless replenishing of his cupboard shelf, so, as he mounted the steps to Mrs. Feeney's rooming house and guardedly reached into his left-hand trousers pocket for his keys, he balanced on his right arm a parcel of laundry, a quart bag of sweet potatoes topped with three red onions, a can of condensed milk, a loaf of bread and a half pound of tub butter. Bulging from his pocket also were a pound of Hamburg steak and a half pound of bacon cut thin—for to Widder's way of thinking nothing was more fortifying of a sharp winter morning than the smell of frying bacon.