What Shall We Do About It?

OCTOBER, 1923

BY JOHN CAMPBELL HAYWOOD

A good archer is not known by his arrows, but by his aim. ENGLISH PROVERB

I

I TELL these stories just as I saw them lived.

One seat was unoccupied in the smoker. It became mine by prompt possession. The window seat held a man who at once addressed me by name.

‘How are you?’ he said. I have not seen you for years.’

I turned and took his outstretched hand. His face was familiar, but I could not place him, and frankly said so.

‘I’m Charley.’ He smiled amiably and folded up his papers. ‘You used to be pretty good to me in the old days when we met on West Street.’

Then I remembered Charley. Always seedy, a sort of hack accountant, often out of a job, pockets empty, but with a smiling face ‘going forth to meet the future without fear and with a manly heart’; perhaps getting his deserts from life, but with an attractive attitude toward misfortune, never a whine, never a rail against fate; always seeing the silver lining though the clouds were drab; always sober.

As he said when we met, I was ‘pretty good to him,’ according to his lights. I never knew his full name. I do not now! But this was a different Charley, fatter of face, richly, even expensively, dressed. Prosperity oozed. The cheerful smile was genuine — not, as it had sometimes been, clearly forced against fate. His hands were gloved and folded over the head of an expensive cane. He was going, he told me, ‘down-state to see his mother.’

‘I am mighty glad, Charley,’ I said, ‘to see that you are evidently doing well. Can’t keep a good man down, can they?’

Charley laughed. ‘Well, I played in pretty hard luck for some time after I last saw you. That must be six or seven years ago, is n’t it ? But a fellow got me my present job, and I ‘ve made more money in the last twelve months than I made in twelve years before. And if it keeps up, I won’t have to worry for a few years to come, anyway.’

‘Good for you!’ I spoke heartily. ‘Don’t retire too soon from whatever it is. Idleness has killed stronger men than you. Work never did.’ You see, I had studied Charley and am old enough to have fathered him.

He looked quizzically at me for a moment, his eyes twinkling.

‘I’m a dry agent. I work for the Government.’

Then he lay back in his seat and grinned widely. He had meant to startle me — and did. But I love what is interesting in my fellow man, and this was intensely interesting. I am also a seeker after knowledge.

‘I did not know they paid such handsome salaries — or you are extravagant. That cane must have set you back twenty dollars.’

The tone of my voice checked Charley’s grin. ‘They don’t,’ he said, and looked out of the window.

‘Then it must be graft.’

He did not tell more of the story at once. I drew it out of him by adroit questioning and direct accusation. He was in the window seat, too, so could not get away, and was going farther than I was. And, as he had Said, I had been pretty good to him when luck was against him. It is nice to find remembrance and gratitude in small affairs — and rare. It had comforted him to bare his soul to me. It was always clean and decent.

‘Grafter, yes, I suppose you would call it that if you consider taking illgotten gains and part of his hundredper-cent profit from a lawbreaker grafting. I don’t, and there are scores like me in this game who think the same as I do, just as there are millions like you, who do not hesitate to take a drink of bootleg stuff when you can get it. It is easy picking, anywhere from a hundred to a thousand dollars a week, according to the town you’re in. Of course, we make raids and that sort of thing, and the fellow gets fined a couple of hundred and opens up next day. Mike’s turn one week and Pietro’s the next. And if they come across after that, we let them alone for several months. Handle any hooch ourselves? [That in answer to my question.] Not so you would notice it. That’s the chief’s job and too risky for an underling. Of course, if a chap gets too raw and someone complains to the chief, you get shifted to another tow n, or fired. Depends on the chief’s digestion, I guess.’

My station was approaching.

’Well, good-bye, Charley. It seems a rotten business all round. Hope you keep out of jail.’

We shook hands. ‘Sure it’s rotten,’said Charley, ‘but you never heard of an agent going to jail, did you?’

I had to answer no.

‘Well, why? I am not the only one in the game.’

II

The next scene was in the parlor of a well-furnished house in a residential neighborhood of well-to-do people. The house was surrounded by half an acre of ground, well-kept lawns, trim hedges, and neat shrubbery. A wide driveway led to a three-car garage in the rear.

My host was a man of about thirtyfive, an American, an ex-soldier with an excellent war record after tw o years’ service overseas; a clean-cut, splendidlooking fellow, with a charming wife. Two volatile children played jack-inthe-box with me through the folding doors that led into the dining-room. It was a lovely home of unquestionably refined people. The man’s business had been for eighteen months, and is still for all I know to the contrary, operating three trucks on regular trips to and from Canada with liquors. He is assisted by six ex-soldiers. Only one of the seven ever touches hard liquor in any form. They are beer drinkers — but not ‘near.’

My host entertained me with many interesting stories of his road life. He explained that there were thirty-six places where the Canadian Government allows one bottle per man. The restrictions are severe, the price moderate, the liquor unadulterated. His men visit at these places as often as t he law allows, conceal the goods until the desired quantity is obtained, then bring it in. He has never had any trouble with the revenue or police officers, to whom, when he is stopped, he pays from twenty-five to one hundred dollars, ‘according,’ as he told me, ‘to what kind of breakfast they have had.’ He explained this joke to my innocence by saying that he ran by night with one stop, and the officers whom he met came on duty for the early morning watch and breakfasted before they left their homes. But he used to be afraid of ‘hi-jackers’— road pirates — until he hit on a contrivance that keeps them away. He showed me this,— I am not going to explain it., — in fact, gave me an exhibition of its use. For the purpose of the play, I simulated a hi-jacker holding him up on the road. Then the joke was on me. It certainly was. It cost me a clean collar. He also showed me five bulletholes in the back of his car — a hijacker’s mark of disrespectful attent ion.

What the wife said was interesting, also: ‘After the war and his wounds my husband developed a restless, unhappy disposition, His old firm did not take him back, and he was out. of work for a long time. He is naturally adventurous and when this silly law of Bryan’s [that is what she said] made this business possible and profitable for him, he went into it, and I’m glad he did. He is better in mind and body. His boys are, too. Afraid of the risk? Who, me? Tommy there was born three months after he went overseas. And he was away two years — fighting.’

III

Still another scene: up five flights of stairs in an Italian tenement — a noisy tenement, with children’s voices predominating. Now and then as I toiled upward, the shrill tones of an Italian mother vibrated through the narrow hallways. Black-eyed youngsters rushed from some doorway to peer curiously at me, perhaps to say, ‘How do, meester?’ with the nice courtesy that is a part of them. I know many little Pietros and Mariettas and their fathers and mothers, and sometimes wish our paternal government understood them as well as I think I do, and treated our aliens with the consideration that is their due as our guests in a land whose ways, language, and laws are all foreign to them.

On the fifth floor I found the people I sought — a big, broad-shouldered Italian and his buxom wife; also her two brothers, a boarder, and four children. In the living-room, ranged against the wall, stood four fiftygallon puncheons — all full, or nearly so, as I verified with my cane. The man said it was ‘ver’ fine wine. I maka hcem myself.’

There were johns and demijohns in all four rooms — the bath, from the color of it, I judged, supported the wine press. Yes, you have guessed rightly. The men made the wine and distributed it as called for. It was not for family use only. Marco said he had bought three tons of grapes. Just how much wine that will make, he did not say, but it was excellent claret.

They were a fine family, full of vigor, clean and sweet. They were intelligent and thoughtful and I enjoyed my visit to them. But they were criminals. I wondered as I talked to them, and heard them heatedly discuss the restrictions they were under and the forfeiture of one hundred and twenty-five bottles of wine on its way to a celebration that was held in Jersey in honor of the marriage of their Princess Yolande, because ‘sometime some damma fool getta droonk,’ what the moral of it all was. I wondered more when I heard Marco say, ‘Our blessed Lord maka da wine. He maka merry at da marriage fiesta.’

IV

And again: an old wharf in a little seaport town, with a shed at the end of it. I had two hours to wait for a train. My work was done. A stroll to the shore line showed me the wharf, and at the end of it, seated on a stringpiece, an old sailorman smoking a pipe. I walked toward him, clattering my feet on the old boards that I might not take him unaware. As I drew alongside him, I saw that he was looking down upon a broad, staunchly built launch, painted gray inside and out, and that a younger man was tinkering with its engine.

I am an old sailorman myself. Several years’ service and seven voyages around the world in clipper windjammers taught me the freemasonry of the sea, so it was not long before the old man and I were seated side by side, swapping tobacco and yarns of the deep waters.

He said he had ‘follered the sea for thirty-eight years, then joined his two sons lobst’rin’.’ He was a fine old salt, owned to sixty-five years, and wore a white fringe known as ‘Cape Cods’ round his bronzed and weatherbeaten face. We had much in common. It appeared that he was mate of the Neptune (not the real name), when she lay at a wheat wharf in Vallejo, California, and I was on the Illawarra just astern, after a record run from Australia. I spoke of the trimness of the American boat, her iron ratlins, the broad reach of her yardarms, the whiteness of her cotton canvas as it dried in the sun. And he remembered my ship and the ‘brass bounders,’ as he called our aristocratic middies and apprentices, who were a nuisance to him in many ways.

Then he told me that he had ‘roetired from lobst’rin’ ‘ and, with his sons, ran two lighter launches out to the rum licet. No, it was not his venture. His chief had put a new engine in the one boat they owned and had bought them another. They went only to one particular ship. When she came up from wherever she hailed from, the chief notified them and ‘we gets it ashore.’ No boats were allowed alongside their ship without the password, and that was changed every trip. No, no danger at all; he’d be mighty glad of my company any time I wanted to go along. His boats were fast and beamy, and any chap that followed him was likely to get left in the shallows. He showed me a contrivance or two in the boat at the wharf that would be aggravating to a chaser, to say the least. It was when I questioned the morality of it that the old salt grew choleric.

‘Hell’s bells!’ he said, knocking out his pipe as if to leave me in wrath. ‘You ast the same question a passel o’ women asts, an’ I answers you the same way. I bin a God-fearin’ man all my life. I ain’t abused licker, but I’ve had my grog pretty reg’lar ashore and afloat. Now a lot o’ holier-than-thouso-foller-me landlubbers comes along an’ says my pussonal habits is a disgrace an’ a crime, an’ pass a law sayin’ it’s a crime to drink a glass o’ grog. To hell with them! Why, our own man knows where there’s four thousand cases cached in this town right now, an’ fur’s I know he voted for the law — an’ gets a case fur th’ askin’. I ain’t found nobody in sympathy with this licker law what I’d trust with a nickel roun’ th’ corner if I wanted change. A passel o’ dum hypocrites!’

The man was prejudiced. There is no getting round that. I am not responsible for his views; I only quote what he said. When he had cooled off, he told me further that there were a great many up and down the coast who had given up Iobst’rin’ and fishing and waited upon the rum fleet. He knew most of them, as he had the Wanderlust of a sailor, and often went among them to compare notes when his ship was away, loading up. Most of them had their regular ships, or a ship, assigned to them, same as he had. He did not believe the yarns about sea pirates. He shrewdly said that much of that talk was like a lot you read in the papers ‘put in by the drys an’ meant to be discouragin’. Besides,’ he said, ‘most of their rails is greased.’

The old salt walked with me to the station, and pointed out the neat little cottage he lived in, and the Methodist Church he attended.

V

Again: a farmhouse standing out bleak and barren against the sky line. To the left, a mass of burned wood and twisted iron show’d where the barns had stood. Over the ruins a solitary upright, charred to its centre, held above the débris a piece of the tin roof that clanged dismally as each wintry blast struck it. Within the farmhouse the farmer, a weather-seared man of nearly sixty years. In the corner of the big living-room, a box stove cracked and sizzled with warmth. On the table, between the host and a visitor who was making himself much at home, a bottle of homemade apple-whiskey, glasses, and a bowl of crullers. The long, deep windows of the living-room presented to the view a wind-swept lawm and a picket fence and gate, and beyond them a snow’-banked lane, w’hich led, perhaps half a mile below the house, into the State highway.

Through the window I saw, body bent to the wintry blasts, a horseman coming up the lane. As he drew’ near, I recognized his uniform and wondered what my host would do. The horseman dismounted and threw his bridle over the gatepost. The farmer went into the kitchen in the rear. I felt uneasy. State police! The bottle was on the table. The horseman came into the room — no knock, no greeting. He threw his half-frozen gauntlets on a chair. Then the farmer came in, a steaming cup in his hand. Into the cup he poured some of the apple-whiskey.

While the horseman was drinking what, to my imagination, seemed a rather nauseous mixture of tea and liquor, I saw through the window the farmer take a steaming bucket to his horse. The State policeman, a fine, stalwart fellow, whose eyes brightened with the warmth and comfort of the drink, made one remark in my presence. As he drew on his gauntlets and buttoned his cape to go out into the bitter wintry day, he said: ‘ By&emdasssh;, that puts new life into a man!’ And then I saw him and his horse canter down the snow-bounded and wind-swept lane.

That is nothing, you say. Oh, no, of course not; except that the farmer knew, and I knew, and the State policeman knew, where there were several gallons of the contraband. But he has not reported it yet.

There have been silhouetted for you half a dozen widely varying types: Charley, the revenue agent of the sullied soul; the ex-soldier rum-runner and his wife; Marco, the Italian winemaker; the choleric old salt; the friendly farmer and the State policeman. In none of them does there seem any inherent wickedness. They are all like a lot of children playing hooky from their consciences, and rather glorying in the ease with which their self-appointed monitors can be circumvented. None of them would report a violation if they saw it, yet none of them would hesitate a moment in calling a halt, if they saw or knew of any infraction of any other criminal law. Whatever is the measurement of their moral obliquity, it is quite clear that it bears no relation to other forms of criminal inclination.

The situation which confronts us is not a pleasant one. What shall we do about it?