Children of the Whirlwind

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CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND

by Leroy Scott

CHAPTER I

It was an uninspiring bit of street: narrow, paved with cobble; hot
and noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling
and snow-slimed months of winter. It looked anything this May after
noon except a starting-place for drama. But, then, the great dramas of
life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which
conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in
unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming
tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of
contradictions--a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its
graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead
lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a
storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and
the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter
travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.

Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their
beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop
from them or what their stories were to be.

The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a
uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left
side as you came down the street toward the little Square which
squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that
three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges
emanated a weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also
in that the personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a
character of its own.

The street did business with her when pressed for funds, but it knew
little definite about the Duchess except that she was shriveled and
bent and almost wordless and was seemingly without emotions. But of
course there were rumors. She was so old, and had been so long in the
drab little street, that she was as much a legend as a real person. No
one knew exactly how she had come by the name of "Duchess." There were
misty, unsupported stories that long, long ago she had been a shapely
and royal figure in colored fleshings, and that her title had been
given her in those her ruling days. Also there was a vague story that
she had come by the name through an old liking for the romances of
that writer who put forth her, or his, or their, prolific
extravagances under the exalted pseudonym of "The Duchess." Also there
was a rumor that the title came from a former alleged habit of the
Duchess of carrying beneath her shapeless dress a hoard of jewels
worthy to be a duchy's heirlooms. But all these were just stories--no
more. Down in this quarter of New York nicknames come easily, and once
applied they adhere to the end.

Some believed that she was now the mere ashes of a woman, in whom
lived only the last flickering spark. And some believed that beneath
that drab and spent appearance there smouldered a great fire, which
might blaze forth upon some occasion. But no one knew. As she was now,
so she had always been even in the memory of people considered old in
the neighborhood.

Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also
a fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to
her neighbors. One was that in the far past there had been a daughter,
and that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared.
It was rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent
and that later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never
appeared again in the quarter. Another fact was that there was a
grandson, a handsome young devil, who had come down occasionally to
visit his grandmother, until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing
Sing. Another fact--this one the best known of all--was that two or
three years before an impudent, willful young girl named Maggie
Carlisle had come to live with her.

It was rather a meager history. People wondered and talked of mystery.
But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was
the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs,
and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to question...

And down here it was, in this unlovely street, in the Duchess's
unlovely house, that the drama of Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard
began its unpromising and stormy career: for, though they had thought
of it little, their forebears had been sowers of the wind, they
themselves had sown some of that careless seed and were to sow yet
more--and there was to be the reaping of that seed's wild crop.

CHAPTER II

When Maggie entered the studio on the Duchess's third floor, the big,
red-haired, unkempt painter roared his rebukes at her. She stiffened,
and in the resentment of her proud youth did not even offer an
explanation. Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silently
crossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single
mongrel tree before the house and down the narrow street and across
the little Square, at the swirling black tide which raced through East
River. That painter was a beast! Yes, and a fool!

But quickly the painter was forgotten, and once more her mind reverted
to Larry--at last Larry was coming back!--only to have the painter,
after a minute, interrupt her excited imagination with:

"What's the matter with your tongue, Maggie? Generally you stab back
with it quick enough."

She turned, still sulky and silent, and gazed with cynical superiority
at the easel. "Nuts"--it was Barney Palmer who had thus lightly
rechristened the painter when he had set up his studio in the attic
above the pawnshop six months before--Nuts was transferring the seamy,
cunning face of her father, "Old Jimmie" Carlisle, to the canvas with
swift, unhesitating strokes.

"For the lova Christ and the twelve apostles, including that piker
Judas," woefully intoned Old Jimmie from the model's chair, "lemme get
down off this platform!"

"Move and I'll wipe my palette off on that Mardi Gras vest of yours!"
grunted the big painter autocratically through his mouthful of
brushes.

"O God--and I got a cramp in my back, and my neck's gone to sleep!"
groaned Old Jimmie, leaning forward on his cane. "Daughter, dear"--
plaintively to Maggie--"what is the crazy gentleman doing to me?"

"It's an awful smear, father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a
tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been
taught to like--yet the picture did possess an intangible something
that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do look one old
burglar!"

"Not a cheap burglar?"--hopefully.

"Naw!" exploded the man at the easel in his big voice, first taking
the brushes from his mouth. "You're a swell-looking old pirate!--ready
to loot the sub-treasury and then scuttle the old craft with all
hands on board! A breathing, speaking, robbing likeness!"

"Maggie's right, and Nuts's right," put in Barney Palmer. "It's sure a
rotten picture, and then again it sure looks like you, Jimmie."

The smartly dressed Barney--Barney could not keep away from Broadway
tailors and haberdashers with their extravagant designs and color
schemes--dismissed the insignificant matter of the portrait, and
resumed the really important matter which had brought him to her.

"Are you certain, Maggie, that the Duchess hasn't heard from Larry?"

"If she has, she hasn't mentioned it. But why don't you ask her
yourself?"

"I did, but she wouldn't say a thing. You can't get a word out of the
Duchess with a jimmy, unless she wants to talk--and she never wants to
talk." He turned his sharp, narrowly set eyes upon the lean old man.
"It's got me guessing, Jimmie. Larry was due out of Sing Sing
yesterday, and we haven't had a peep from him, and though she won't
talk I'm sure he hasn't been here to see his grandmother."

"Sure is funny," agreed Old Jimmie. "But mebbe Larry has broke
straight into a fresh game and is playing a lone hand. He's a quick
worker, Larry is--and he's got nerve."

"Well, whatever's keeping him we're tied up till Larry comes." Barney
turned back to Maggie. "I say, sister, how about robing yourself in
your raiment of joy and coming with yours truly to a palace of jazz,
there to dine and show the populace what real dancing is?"

"Can't, Barney. Mr. Hunt"--the name given the painter at his original
christening--"asked the Duchess and me to have dinner up here. He's to
cook it himself."

"For your sake I hope he cooks better than he paints." And sliding
down in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra,
the elegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle patience
swung his bamboo stick.

"You're half an hour late, Maggie," Hunt began at her again in his
rumbling voice. "Can't stand for such a waste of my time!"

"How about my time?" retorted Maggie, who indeed had a grievance. "I
was supposed to have the day off, but instead I had to carry that tray
of cigarettes around till the last person in the Ritzmore had finished
lunch. Anyhow," she added, "I don't see that your time's worth so much
when you spend it on such painty messes as these."

"It's not up to you to tell me what my time's worth!" retorted Hunt.
"I pay you--that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I
stuck Old Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through
with the old cut-throat in ten minutes. Be ready to take his place."

"All right," said Maggie sulkily.

For all his roaring she was not much afraid of the painter. While his
brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly
watching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt
whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and
whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large
to be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed
more in harmony. He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggie
guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish
hair he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work--
though of course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his
way--he bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny
in a bargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him
as one of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab
region.

Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this
neighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers,
people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred to
live near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity,
and even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a
matter of course, the only fear being that secretly they might be
police or government agents, which Maggie and the others knew very
well Hunt was not. When Hunt had rented this attic as a studio they
had accepted his explanation that he had taken it because it was cheap
and he could afford to pay no more. Likewise they had accepted his
explanation that he was a mechanic by trade who had roughed it all
over the world and was possessed with an itch for painting, that
lately he had worked in various garages, that it was his habit to
hoard his money till he got a bit ahead and then go off on a painting
spree. All these admissions were indubitably plausible, for his
paintings seemed the unmistakable handiwork of an irresponsible, hard-
fisted motor mechanic.

Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases
which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the
Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn
over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the
eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over
the hair--even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the
Duchess's--the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her
chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty,
the good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker
next door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who
sometimes swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal
lord. There was a Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull-
capped. There was an Italian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in
the gutter, smiling down at the baby that was hungrily suckling at her
milk-heavy breast. And so on, and so on. Just the ordinary,
uninteresting things Maggie saw around the block. There was not a
single pretty picture in the lot.

Hunt swung the canvas from his easel and stood it against the wall.
"That'll be all for you, Jimmie. Beat it and make room for Maggie.
Maggie, take your same pose."

Old Jimmie ambled forward and gazed at his portrait as Hunt was
settling an unfinished picture on his easel. It had rather amused
Jimmie and filled in his idle time to sit for the crazy painter; and,
incidentally, another picture of him would do him no particular harm
since the police already had all the pictures they needed of him over
at Headquarters. As he gazed at Hunt's work Old Jimmie snickered.

"I say, Nuts, what you goin' to do with this mess of paint?"

"Going to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, you old sinner!" snapped
Hunt.

Old Jimmie cackled at the joke. He knew pictures; that is, good
pictures. He had had an invisible hand in more than one clever
transaction in which handsome pictures alleged to have been smuggled
in, Gainsboroughs and Romneys and such (there had been most profit for
him in handling the forgeries of these particular masters), had been
put, with an air of great secrecy, into the hands of divers newly rich
gentlemen who believed they were getting masterpieces at bargain
prices through this evasion of customs laws.

"Nuts," chuckled Old Jimmie, "this junk wouldn't be so funny if you
didn't seem to believe you were really painting."

"Junk! Funny!" Hunt swung around, one big hand closed about Jimmie's
lean neck and the other seized his thin shoulder. "You grandfather of
the devil and all his male progeny, you talk like that and I'll chuck
you through the window!"

Old Jimmie grinned. The grip of the big hands of the painter, though
powerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the
painter never presaged violence. They had grown to like him, to accept
him as almost one of themselves; though of course they looked down
upon him with amused pity for his imbecility regarding his paintings.

"Get out of here," continued Hunt, "or cut out all this noise that
comes from your having a brain that rattles. I've got to work."

Hunt turned again to his easel, and Old Jimmie, still grinning,
lowered himself into a chair, lit a cigar, and winked at Barney. Hunt,
with brush poised, regarded Maggie a moment.

"You there, Maggie," he ordered, "chin up a bit more, some flash in
your eyes, more pep in your bearing--as though you were asking all the
dames of the Winter Garden, and the Charity Ball, and the Horse Show,
and that gang of tea-swilling women at the Ritzmore you sell
cigarettes to--as though you were asking them all who the dickens they
think they are ... O God, can't you do anything!"

"I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than you
look like a painter!"

"Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back to
me. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard I
had to work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand. Wash
off that scowl and try to look as I said ... There, that's better.
Hold it."

He began to paint rapidly, with quick glances back and forth between
the canvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-
waist and skirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had
ordered it so. She was above the medium height, with thick black hair
tinted with shadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of
eyebrows, a full, firm mouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it--
all effective points for Hunt in what he wished to do. But what had
attracted him most and given him his idea was her look; hardly
pertness, or impudence--rather a cynical, mature, defiant certainty
in herself.

Erect in her cheap shirt-waist, she gazed off into space with a
smiling, confident challenge to all the world. Hunt was trying to make
his picture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things
which still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising
from the gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign
above it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the
upper stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or
conquering it. Leading families replaced by other families, classes
replaced by other classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was
the inevitable social process--so read the records of the fifty or
sixty centuries since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying
to say a lot in this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less
than ordinary--in her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!

And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be
a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She
had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful.
Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered
at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a
landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer
and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.

But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she
developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her
cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he
painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he
watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but
with keen speculation upon the future.

CHAPTER III

Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer
and Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious
about every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature
though he was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously
thrusting himself into other people's affairs without arousing their
resentment. He was keen to learn Maggie's attitude toward Larry; and
he spoke not so much to gain knowledge of Larry as to draw her out.

"This Larry--what sort of chap is he, Maggie?" As with most artists,
talking did not interfere with Hunt's painting.

Warm color slowly tinted Maggie's cheeks. "He's clever," she said
positively. "You already know that. But I was only a girl when he was
sent away."

Hunt smiled at her idea of her present maturity, implied by her last
sentence. "But you lived with the Duchess for a year before he was
sent away. You must have seen a lot of him, and got to know him well."

"Oh, he used to come down now and then to see his grandmother--I was
only fifteen or sixteen then--just a girl, and he didn't pay much
attention to me. Father can tell you better just how smart he is."

Old Jimmie spoke up promptly. He knew Hunt was not a police stool, and
he liked the painter as much as it was in him to like any man; so he
felt none of the reserve or caution that might have controlled him in
other company.

"You bet Larry's smart! Got the quickest brain of any con man in the
business--and him only about twenty-seven now. Some think I'm a smooth
proposition myself, but Larry puts it all over me. That's why I'm
willing to let him be my boss. He's a wonder at thinking up new
stunts, and then at working out safe new ways of putting them across."

"But the police landed him at last," commented Hunt.

"Yes, but that was only because another man muffed his end of the
job."

The handsome Barney Palmer had been restless during Old Jimmie's
eulogy. "Oh, Larry's all to the good--but he's not the only party
that's got real ideas."

"Huh!" grunted Old Jimmie. "But you'll remember that we haven't put
over any big ones since Larry's been in stir."

"That's been because you wouldn't listen to any of my ideas!" retorted
Barney. "And I handed out some peaches."

Even during the period of Larry's active reign it had irked Barney to
accept another man as leader, and it had irked him even more during
the interregnum while Larry was guest of the State. For Barney
believed in his own Napoleonic strain.

"Don't let yourself get sore, Barney," Old Jimmie said appeasingly.
"You'll have plenty of chances to try out your ideas as the main guy
before you cash in. You know the outfit wanted to lay low for a while,
anyhow. But we'll be putting over a lot of the big stuff when Larry
gets out."

Hunt had noted a quick light come into Maggie's dark eyes while her
father praised the absent leader. He himself suddenly perceived a new
possibility.

"Maggie, ever think about teaming up with Larry?" he demanded, with
his audacious keenness.

She flushed, and hesitated. He did not wait for her slow-coming reply,
but turned to her father.

"Jimmie, did Larry ever use women in his stunts?"

"Never. Whenever we suggested using a skirt, Larry absolutely said
there was nothing doing. That's one point where he was all wrong.
Nothing helps so much, when the sucker is at all sentimental, as a
clever, good-looking woman. And Larry'll come around to it all right.
He'll see the sense of it, now that he's older and has had two years
to think things over."

Old Jimmie nodded, showing his yellow teeth in a sly grin. "You said
something a second ago: Maggie and Larry! They'll make a wonder of a
team! I mean that she'll work under him with the rest of us. I've been
thinking about it a long while. Mebbe you haven't guessed it, but
we've been coaching her for the part, and she's just about ripe. She's
got the looks, and we can dress her right for whatever job's on hand.
Oh, Larry'll put over some great things with Maggie!"

If Hunt felt that there was anything cynically unpaternal in this
father planning for his daughter a career of crime, he gave no sign of
it. His attention was just then all on Maggie. He saw her eyes grow
yet more bright at these last sentences of her father: bright with the
vision of approaching adventure.

"The idea suits you, Maggie?" he asked.

"Sure. It'll be great--for Larry is a wonder!"

Barney Palmer suddenly rose, his face twisted with anger. "I'm all fed
up on this Larry, Larry, Larry! Come on, Jimmie. Let's get uptown."

Wise Old Jimmie saw that Barney was near an outburst. "All right,
Barney, all right," he said promptly. "Not much use waiting any
longer, anyhow. If Larry comes, we'll fix it with the Duchess to meet
him tomorrow."

"Then so-long, Maggie," Barney flung at her, and that swagger
ex-jockey, gambler, and clever manipulator of the confidence of people
with money, slashed aside the shabby burlap curtains with his wisp of
a bamboo walking-stick, and strode out of the room.

"Good-night, daughter," and Old Jimmie crossed and kissed her. She
kissed him back--a perfunctory kiss. Maggie had never paused to think
the matter out, but for some reason she felt little real affection for
her father, though of course she admired his astuteness. Perhaps her
unconscious lack of love was due in part to the fact that she had
never lived with him. Ever since she remembered he had boarded her
out, here and there, as he was now boarding her at the Duchess's--and
had only come to visit her at intervals, sometimes intervals that
stretched into months.

"Barney is rather sweet on you," remarked Hunt after the two were
gone.

"I know he is," conceded Maggie in a matter-of-fact way.

"And he seems jealous of Larry--both regarding you, and regarding the
bunch."

"He thinks he can run the bunch just as well as Larry. Barney's clever
all right, and has plenty of nerve--but he's not in Larry's class.
Not by a million miles!"

Hunt perceived that this daring, world-defying, embryonically
beautiful model of his had idealized the homecoming nephew of the
Duchess into her especial hero. Hunt said no more, but painted
rapidly. Night had fallen outside, and long since he had switched on
the electric lights. He seemed not at all finicky in this matter of
light; he had no supposedly indispensable north light, and midday or
midnight were almost equally apt to find him slashing with brush or
scratching with crayon.

Presently the Duchess entered. No word was spoken. The Duchess,
noteworthy for her mastery of silence, sank into a chair, a bent and
shrunken image, nothing seemingly alive about her but her faintly
gleaming, deep-set eyes. Several minutes passed, then Hunt lifted the
canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall.

"That's all for to-day, Maggie," he announced, pushing the easel to
one side. "Duchess, you and this wild young thing spread the banquet-
table while I wash up."

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