Part 23 (1/2)

That afternoon, the name of Michael Kalmar was entered upon the roll of the Provincial Penitentiary, and he took up his burden of life, no longer a man, but a mere human animal driven at the will of some petty tyrant, doomed to toil without reward, to isolation from all that makes life dear, to deprivation of the freedom of G.o.d's sweet light and air, to degradation without hope of recovery.

Before him stretched fourteen long years of slow agony, with cruel abundance of leisure to feed his soul with maddening memories of defeated vengeance, with fearful anxieties for the future of those dear as life, with feelings of despair over a cause for which he had sacrificed his all.

CHAPTER IX

BROTHER AND SISTER

Before summer had gone, Winnipeg was reminded of the existence of the foreign colony by the escape from the Provincial Penitentiary of the Russian prisoner Kalmar. The man who could not be held by Siberian bars and guards found escape from a Canadian prison easy.

That he had accomplices was evident, but who they were could not be discovered. Suspicion naturally fell upon Simon Ketzel and Joseph Pinkas, but after the most searching investigation they were released and Winnipeg went back to its ways and forgot. The big business men rebuilding fortunes shattered by the boom, the little business men laying foundations for fortunes to be, the women within the charmed circle of Society bound to the whirling wheel of social functions, other women outside and striving to beg, or buy, or break their way into the circle, and still other women who cared not a pin's head whether they were within or without, being sufficient for themselves, the busy people of the churches with their philanthropies, their religious activities, striving to gather into their several folds the waifs and strays that came stumbling into their city from all lands--all alike, unaware of the growing danger area in their young city, forgot the foreign colony, its problems and its needs.

Meantime, summer followed winter, and winter summer, the months and years went on while the foreign colony grew in numbers and more slowly in wealth. More slowly in wealth, because as an individual member grew in wealth he departed from the colony and went out to make an independent home for himself in one of the farming colonies which the Government was establis.h.i.+ng in some of the more barren and forbidding sections of the country; or it may be, loving the city and its ways of business, he rapidly sloughed off with his foreign clothes his foreign speech and manner of life, and his foreign ideals as well, and became a Canadian citizen, distinguished from his cosmopolitan fellow citizen only by the slight difficulty he displayed with some of the consonants of the language.

Such a man was Simon Ketzel. Simon was by trade a carpenter, but he had received in the old land a good educational foundation; he had, moreover, a shrewd head for affairs, and so he turned his energies to business, and with conspicuous success. For in addition to all his excellent qualities, Simon possessed as the most valuable part of his equipment a tidy, thrifty wife, who saved what her husband earned and kept guard over him on feast days, saved and kept guard so faithfully that before long Simon came to see the wisdom of her policy and became himself a shrewd and sober and well-doing Canadian, able to hold his own with the best of them.

His sobriety and steadiness Simon owed mostly to his thrifty wife, but his rapid transformation into Canadian citizens.h.i.+p he owed chiefly to his little daughter Margaret. It was Margaret that taught him his English, as she conned over her lessons with him in the evenings. It was Margaret who carried home from the little Methodist mission near by, the ill.u.s.trated paper and the library book, and thus set him a-reading. It was Margaret that brought both Simon and Lena, his wife, to the social gathering of the Sunday School and of the church. It was thus to little Margaret that the Ketzels owed their introduction to Canadian life and manners, and to the finer sides of Canadian religion. And through little Margaret it was that those greatest of all Canadianising influences, the school and the mission, made their impact upon the hearts and the home of the Ketzel family. And as time went on it came to pa.s.s that from the Ketzel home, clean, orderly, and Canadian, there went out into the foul wastes about, streams of healing and cleansing that did their beneficent work where they went.

One of these streams reached the home of Paulina, to the great good of herself and her family. Here, again, it was chiefly little Margaret who became the channel of the new life, for with Paulina both Simon and Lena had utterly failed. She was too dull, too apathetic, too hopeless and too suspicious even of her own kind to allow the Ketzels an entrance to her heart. But even had she not been all this, she was too sorely oppressed with the burden of her daily toil to yield to such influence as they had to offer. For Rosenblatt was again in charge of her household. In a manner best known to himself, he had secured the mortgage on her home, and thus became her landlord, renting her the room in which she and her family dwelt, and for which they all paid in daily labour, and dearly enough. Rosenblatt, thus being her master, would not let her go. She was too valuable for that. Strong, patient, diligent, from early dawn till late at night she toiled and moiled with her baking and scrubbing, fighting out that ancient and primitive and endless fight against dirt and hunger, beaten by the one, but triumphing over the other. She carried in her heart a dull sense of injustice, a feeling that somehow wrong was being done her; but when Rosenblatt flourished before her a formidable legal doc.u.ment, and had the same interpreted to her by his smart young clerk, Samuel Sprink, she, with true Slavic and fatalistic pa.s.sivity, accepted her lot and bent her strong back to her burden without complaint. What was the use of complaint? Who in all the city was there to care for a poor, stupid, Galician woman with none too savoury a reputation? Many and generous were the philanthropies of Winnipeg, but as yet there was none that had to do with the dirt, disease and degradation that were too often found in the environment of the foreign people. There were many churches in the city rich in good work, with many committees that met to confer and report, but there was not yet one whose special duty it was to confer and to report upon the unhappy and struggling and unsavoury foreigner within their city gate.

Yes, there was one. The little Methodist mission hard by the foreign colony had such a committee, a remarkable committee in a way, a committee with no fine-spun theories of wholesale reform, a committee with no delicate nostril to be buried in a perfumed handkerchief when pursuing an investigation (as a matter of fact, that committee had no sense of smell at all), a committee of one, namely, John James Parsons, the Methodist missionary, and he worked chiefly with committees of one, of which not the least important was little Margaret Ketzel.

It was through Margaret Ketzel that Parsons got his first hold of Paulina, by getting hold of her little girl Irma. For Margaret, though so much her junior in years and experience, was to Irma a continual source of wonder and admiration. Her facility with the English speech, her ability to read books, her fine manners, her clean and orderly home, her pretty Canadian dress, her beloved school, her cheery mission, all these were to Irma new, wonderful and fascinating. Gradually Irma was drawn to that new world of Margaret's, and away from the old, sordid, disorderly wretchedness of her own life and home.

After much secret conference with all the Ketzels, and much patient and skilful labour on the part of the motherly Lena, a great day at length arrived for Irma. It was the day on which she discarded the head shawl with the rest of the quaint Galician attire, and appeared dressed as a Canadian girl, discovering to her delighted friends and to all who knew her, though not yet to herself, a rare beauty hitherto unnoticed by any. Indeed, when Mr. Samuel Sprink, coming in from Rosenblatt's store to spend a few hurried minutes in gorging himself after his manner at the evening meal, allowed himself time to turn his eyes from his plate and to let them rest upon the little maid waiting upon his table, the transformation from the girl, slatternly, ragged and none too clean, that was wont to bring him his food, to this new being that flitted about from place to place, smote him as with a sudden blow. He laid down the instruments of his gluttony and for a full half minute forgot the steaming stew before him, whose garlic-laden odours had been a.s.sailing his nostrils some minutes previously with pungent delight.

Others, too, of that hungry gorging company found themselves disturbed in their ordinary occupation by this vision of sweet and tender beauty that flitted about them, ministering to their voracity.

To none more than to Rosenblatt himself was the transformation of Irma a surprise and a mystery. It made him uneasy. He had an instinctive feeling that this was the beginning of an emanc.i.p.ation that would leave him one day without his slaves. Paulina, too, would learn the new ways; then she and the girl, who now spent long hours of hard labour in his service, would demand money for their toil. The thought grieved him sore. But there was another thought that stabbed him with a keener pain. Paulina and her family would learn that they need no longer fear him, that they could do without him, and then they would escape from his control. And this Rosenblatt dreaded above all things else. To lose the power to keep in degradation the wife and children of the man he hated with a quenchless hatred would be to lose much of the sweetness of life.

Those few terrible moments when he had lain waiting for the uplifted knife of his foe to penetrate his shrinking eyeb.a.l.l.s had taken years from him. He had come back to his life older, weaker, broken in nerve and more than ever consumed with a thirst for vengeance. Since Kalmar's escape he lived in daily, hourly fear that his enemy would strike again and this time without missing, and with feverish anxiety he planned to antic.i.p.ate that hour with a vengeance which would rob death of much of its sting.

So far he had succeeded only partially. Paulina and Irma he held in domestic bondage. From the boy Kalman, too, he exacted day by day the full tale of his scanty profits made from selling newspapers on the street. But beyond this he could not go. By no sort of terror could he induce Paulina to return to the old conditions and rent floor s.p.a.ce in her room to his boarders. At her door she stood on guard, refusing admittance. Once, indeed, when hard pressed by Rosenblatt demanding entrance, she had thrown herself before him with a butcher knife in her hand, and with a look of such transforming fierceness on her face as drove him from the house in fear of his life. She was no longer his patient drudge, but a woman defending, not so much her own, as her husband's honour, a tigress guarding her young.

Never again did Rosenblatt attempt to pa.s.s through that door, but schooled himself to wait a better time and a safer path to compa.s.s his vengeance. But from that moment, where there had been merely contempt for Paulina and her family, there sprang up bitter hatred.

He hated them all--the woman who was his dupe and his slave, but who balked him of his revenge; the boy who brought him the cents for which he froze during the winter evenings at the corner of Portage and Main, but who with the cents gave him fierce and fearless looks; and this girl suddenly transformed from a timid, stupid, ill-dressed Galician child, into a being of grace and loveliness and conscious power. No wonder that as he followed her with his eye, noting all this new grace and beauty, he felt uneasy.

Already she seemed to have soared far beyond his sordid world and far beyond his grasp. Deep in his heart he swore that he would find means to bring her down to the dirt again. The higher her flight, the farther her fall and the sweeter would be his revenge.

”What's the matter wit you, boss? Gone back on your grub, eh?”

It was his clerk, Samuel Sprink, whose sharp little eyes had not failed to note the gloomy glances of his employer.

”Pretty gay girl, our Irma has come to be,” continued the cheerful Samuel, who prided himself on his fine selection of colloquial English. ”She's a beaut now, ain't she? A regular bird!”

Rosenblatt started. At his words, but more at the admiration in Samuel's eyes, a new idea came to him. He knew his clerk well, knew his restless ambition, his insatiable greed, his intense selfishness, his indomitable will. And he had good reason to know. Three times during the past year his clerk had forced from him an increase of salary. Indeed, Samuel Sprink, young though he was and unlearned in the ways of the world, was the only man in the city that Rosenblatt feared. If by any means Samuel could obtain a hold over this young lady, he would soon bring her to the dust. Once in Samuel's power, she would soon sink to the level of the ordinary Galician wife.

True, she was but a girl of fifteen, but in a year or so she would be ready for the altar in the Galician estimation.

As these thoughts swiftly flashed through his mind, Rosenblatt turned to Samuel Sprink and said, ”Yes, she is a fine girl.

I never noticed before. It is her new dress.”