"You think so?" said Luke. "I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it would be necessary if the right laws were passed and enforced. Wait till your brother-in-law gets the District-Attorney’s office cleaned out and in working order. Then you’ll see I’m right."
§5. At ten o’clock on the following Sunday night, Luke, on a lonely walk through the East Side, noticed that, whereas the front rooms of the saloons were darkened, the back rooms were all alight. The doors to these back rooms were forever swinging to the entrance and exit of unmistakable customers, many of whom came out bearing foaming jugs of beer under the indifferent noses of policemen at the corners. Luke chose a saloon in Essex Street and entered it.
The room was small, but crowded. The walls, which were papered in green, bore a few framed prints in high colors, advertisements of various brands of beer and whisky. All about were small tables at which blowsy women and men in stained clothes were drinking.
Luke hesitated. Nobody had questioned his entrance, there was no guard and no password: the door hung free; but now his startled eye could not see a vacant table, and he knew that he must appear an alien to this place.
Presently a nearby woman smiled at him. She looked to be about fifty years old. There was a mangy peacock feather in her straw hat, which was set a-slant of dank black hair touched with gray.
"Hello, sweetheart," she said. "Come over here a minute." Her smile was toothless.
"Shut up, Mame," somebody else commanded. "You’re drunk."
Luke looked at the man that had spoken. He was sitting alone at a table the length of the room away. He had a puffed face, red from liquor and blue from an unshaven beard; his coat, once black, had turned green; he wore no collar, and a part of the rim of his greasy derby-hat was torn away.
"Thank Gawd," the woman assented. Her acknowledgment of the accusation was fervent; she returned her attention to the glass of whisky that stood on the table before her.
"You can sit here, if you want to," said the man, addressing Luke, and nodding at a chair beside him.
Luke crossed the room and took the chair. The other people in the room were indifferent to his entrance with the same indifference that the guests of Mrs. Ruysdael had shown. The woman that had invited him did not look his way; even the man that had invited him remained for some time silent. Luke ordered a glass of beer from an aproned waiter, who came with a tray full of whisky glasses in one hand, and five foaming beer-mugs in the fingers and thumb of the other.