IXIt was several days before Marriott saw Gibbs again, and then he appeared at Marriott's office with a companion and leaned for an instant unsteadily against the door he had carefully closed. Marriott saw that he was changed, and that it was the change drink makes in a man. Gibbs sank helplessly into a chair, and stared at Marriott blankly. He was not the clean, well-dressed man Marriott had beheld in him before. He was unshaven, and the stubble of his beard betrayed his age by its whiteness; the pupils of his eyes were dilated, his lips stained with tobacco. His shoes were muddy, one leg of his trousers was turned up; and his lack of a collar seemed the final proof of that moral disintegration he could not now conceal. When he had been there a moment the atmosphere was saturated with the odor of alcohol."My friend, Mr. McDougall," said Gibbs, toppling unsteadily in his chair, as he waved one fat hand at his companion, a heavy blond fellow, six feet tall, well dressed and dignified."I've gone to the bad," said Gibbs. Marriott looked at him in silence. The fact needed no comment."The way those coppers jobbed Mason was too much for me," Gibbs went on. "Worst I ever seen. I couldn't stand for it, it put me to the bad.""Well, you won't do him any good, at that--" McDougall began."Aw, to hell with you!" said Gibbs, waving McDougall aside with a sweep of his arm. The movement unsettled him in his chair, and he steadied himself by digging his heels into the rug. Then he drew a broken cigar from his coat pocket, struck a match, and held it close to his nose; it took him a long time to light his cigar; he puffed hurriedly, but could not keep the cigar in the flame; before he finished he had burned his fingers, and Marriott felt a pain as Gibbs shook the match to the floor."He hasn't touched a drop for five years," said McDougall indulgently. "But when they kangarooed Mason--"McDougall looked at Gibbs, not in regret or pity, nor with disapproval, but as one might look at a woman stricken with some recent grief. To him, getting drunk seemed to be as natural a way of expressing emotion as weeping or wringing the hands. Marriott gazed on the squalid little tragedy of a long friendship, gazed a moment, then turned away, and looked out of his window. Above the hideous roofs he could see the topmasts of schooners, and presently a great white propeller going down the river. It was going north, to Mackinac, to the Soo, to Duluth, and the sight of it filled Marriott with a longing for the cold blue waters and the sparkling air of the north.Gibbs evidently had come to talk about Mason's case, but when he began to speak his voice was lost somewhere in his throat; his head sank, he appeared to sink into sleep. McDougall glanced at him and laughed. Then he turned seriously to Marriott."It was an outrage," he said. "Mason has been right here in town--I saw him that day. He ought to be alibied.""Couldn't you testify?" asked Marriott.McDougall looked at Marriott with suspicion, and hesitated. But suddenly Gibbs, whom they had supposed to be asleep, said impatiently, without opening his eyes:"Oh, hell!--go on and tell him. He's a right guy, I tell you. He's wise to the gun." And Gibbs slumbered again."Well," said McDougall with a queer expression, "my business is unfortunately of such a nature that it can't stand much investigation, and I don't make the best witness in the world."Gibbs suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and drew an enormous roll of money from his pocket."How much do I owe you?" he asked, unrolling the bills. "It comes out of me," he said. Marriott was disappointed in this haggling appeal, not for his own sake, but for Gibbs's; it detracted from the romantic figure he had idealized for the man, just as Gibbs's intoxication had done. Marriott hesitated in the usual difficulty of appraising professional services, but when, presently, he rather uncertainly fixed his fee, Gibbs counted out the amount and gave it to him. Marriott took the money, with a wonder as to where it had come from, what its history was; he imagined in a flash a long train of such transactions as McDougall must be too familiar with, of such deeds as had been involved in the hearing before the commissioner, of other transactions, intricate, remote, involved, confused in morals--and he thrust the bills into his pocket."It comes out of me," Gibbs explained again. "They hadn't any fall money.""Have you heard from them?" asked Marriott, who did not know what fall money was, and wished to change the subject."No," said Gibbs, shaking his head. "I'm going out to the trial. I'll take along that newspaper guy and some witnesses for the others. I'll get 'em a mouthpiece. Maybe we can spring 'em."But, as Marriott learned several days later, Gibbs could not spring them. He went to the trial with an entourage of miserable witnesses, but he did not take Wales, for Wales's newspaper would not give him leave of absence, and there was no process to compel his attendance. But Kouka and Quinn went, and they gave Gibbs such a reputation that his testimony was impeached. He could not, of course, take Dean. Dean's business, like McDougall's, was unfortunately of such a nature that it did not stand investigation, and he did not make the best witness in the world. Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were sentenced to the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth for five years. At about the same time Archie Koerner pleaded guilty to stealing the revolver and was sentenced to prison for a year.Marriott left at last for his vacation, but he could not forget Mason taking his unjust fate so calmly and philosophically. He had great pity for him, just as he had for Archie, though one was innocent and the other guilty. He had pity for Dillon, too, and, yes, for Mandell and Squeak. He thought of it all, trying to find some solution, but there was no solution. It was but one more knot in the tangle of injustice man has made of his attempts to do justice; a tangle that Marriott could not unravel, nor any one, then or ever.XLike most of the great houses along Claybourne Avenue, the dwelling of the Wards wore an air of loneliness and desolation all that summer. With Mrs. Ward and Elizabeth in Europe, the reason for maintaining the establishment ceased to be; and the servants were given holidays. Barker was about for a while each day looking after things, and Gusta came to set the house in order. But these transient presences could not give the place its wonted life; the curtains were down, the furniture stood about in linen covers, the pictures were draped in white cloth. At evening a light showed in the library, where Ward sat alone, smoking, trying to read, and, as midnight drew on, starting now and then at the strange, unaccountable sounds that are a part of the phenomena of the stillness of an empty house. He would look up from his book, listen, wait, sigh, listen again, finally give up, go to bed, worry a while, fall asleep, be glad when morning came and he could lose himself for another day in work. Dick never came in till long after midnight, and Ward seldom saw him, save on those few mornings when the boy was up early enough to take breakfast with him at the club. Such mornings made the whole day happy for Ward.But the few hours she spent each day in the empty house were happy hours for Gusta Koerner. She was not, of course, a girl in whom feeling could become thought, or sensation find the relief of expression; she belonged to the class that because it is dumb seems not to suffer, but she had a sense of change in the atmosphere. She missed Elizabeth, she missed the others, she missed the familiar figures that once had made the place all it had been to her. But she loved it, nevertheless, and if it seemed to hold no new experiences for her, there were old experiences to be lived over again.At first the loneliness and the emptiness frightened her, but she grew accustomed; she no longer started at the mysterious creakings and tappings in the untenanted rooms, and each morning, after her work was done, she lingered, and wandered idly about, looked at herself in the mirrors, gazed out of the windows into Claybourne Avenue, sometimes peeped into the books she could so little understand.Occasionally she would have chats with Barker, but she did not often see him; he was always busy in the stables. Ward and Dick were gone before she got there. But the peace and quiet of the deserted mansion were grateful, and Gusta found there a sense of rest and escape that for a long time she had not known. She found this sense of escape all the more grateful after Archie's trouble. He had not been at home in a long time, and they had heard nothing of him; then, one evening she learned of his latest trouble in those avid chroniclers of trouble, the newspapers. Her father, who would not permit the mention of his son's name, nevertheless plainly had him on his mind, for he grew more than ever gloomy, morose and irritable. And then, to make matters worse, one Saturday evening Charlie Peltzer threw it up to Gusta, and they parted in anger. On Sunday afternoon she went to see Archie at the jail, and stayed so late that it was twilight before she got to the Wards'. She had never had the blues so badly before; her quarrel with Peltzer, her father's scolding, her mother's sighs and furtive tears, her own visit to the prison, all combined to depress her, and now, in the late and lonesome Sunday afternoon she did her work hurriedly, and was just about to let herself out of the door when it opened suddenly, and Dick Ward, bolting in, ran directly against her."Hello! Beg pardon--is that you, 'Gusta?" he said."Oh!" she exclaimed, leaning against the wall, "you scared me!"Dick laughed."Well, that's too bad; I had no idea," he said.She had raised her clasped hands to her chin, and still kept the shrinking attitude of her fright. Dick looked at her, prettier than ever in her sudden alarm, and on an impulse he seized her hands."Don't be scared," he said. "I wouldn't frighten you for the world."She was overwhelmed with weakness and confusion. She shrank against the wall and turned her head aside; her heart was beating rapidly."I--I'm late to-day," she said. "I ought to have been here this morning.""I'm glad you weren't," said Dick, looking at her with glowing eyes."I must hurry"---she tried to slip away. "I--must be going home, it's getting late; you--you must let me go."She scarcely knew what she was saying; she spoke with averted face, her cheeks hot and flaming. He gazed at her steadily a moment; then he said:"Never mind. I'll take you home in my machine. May I?"She looked at him in wonderment. What did he mean? Was he in earnest?"May I?" he pressed her hands for emphasis, and gazed into her eyes irresistibly."Yes," she said, "if you'll--let me--go now."Suddenly he kissed her on the lips; there was a rustle, a struggle, he kissed her again, then released her, left her trembling there in the hall, and bounded up the stairs."Wait a minute!" he called. "I came home to get something. You'll wait?"Gusta was dazed, her mind was in a whirl, she felt utterly powerless; but instinctively she slipped through the door and out on to the veranda. The air reassured and restored her. She felt that she should run away, and yet, there was Dick's automobile in the driveway; she had never been in an automobile, and-- She thought of Charlie Peltzer--well, it would serve him right. And then, before she could decide, Dick was beside her."Jump in," he said, glancing up and down the avenue, now dusky in the twilight. They went swiftly away in the automobile, but they did not go straight to Bolt Street--they took a long, roundabout course that ended, after all, too suddenly. The night was warm and Gusta was lifted above all her cares; she had a sensation as of flying through the soft air. Dick stopped the machine half a block from the house, and Gusta got out, excited from her swift, reckless ride. But, troubled as she was, she felt that she ought to thank Dick. He only laughed and said:"We'll go again for a longer ride. What do you say to to-morrow night?"She hesitated, tried to decide against him, and before she could decide, consented."Don't forget," he said, "to-morrow evening." He leaned over and whispered to her. He was shoving a lever forward and the automobile was starting."Don't forget," he said, and then he was gone and Gusta stood looking at the vanishing lights of the machine. Just then Charlie Peltzer stepped out of the shadows."So!" he said, looking angrily into her face. "So that's it, is it? Oh--I saw you!""Go away!" she said.He snatched at her, caught her by the wrist."Go away, is it?" he exclaimed fiercely. "I've caught you this time!""Let me alone!""Yes, I will! Oh, yes, I'll let you alone! And him, too; I'll fix him!""Let me go, I tell you!" she cried, trying to escape. "Let me go!" She succeeded presently in wrenching her wrist out of his grasp. "You hurt me!" She clasped the wrist he had almost crushed. "I hate you! I don't want anything more to do with you!"She left him standing there in the gloom. She hurried on; it was but a few steps to the door."Gusta!" he called. "Gusta! Wait!"But she hurried on."Gusta! Wait a minute!"She hesitated. There was something appealing in his voice."Oh, Gusta!" he repeated. "Won't you wait?"She felt that he was coming after her. Then something, she knew not what, got into her, she felt ugly and hateful, and hardened her heart. She cast a glance back over her shoulder and had a glimpse of Peltzer's face, a pale, troubled blur in the darkness. She ran into the house, utterly miserable and sick at heart.Gusta could not thereafter escape this misery; it was with her all the time, and her only respite was found in the joy that came to her at evening, when regularly, at the same hour, under the same tree, at the same dark spot in Congress Street, she met Dick Ward. And so it began between them.XIThe way from the station to the penitentiary was long, but Sheriff Bentley, being a man of small economies, had decided to walk, and after the long journey in the smoking-car, Archie had been glad to stretch his legs. The sun lay hot on the capital city; it was nearly noon, and workmen, tired from their morning's toil, were thinking now of dinner-buckets and pipes in the shade. They glanced at Archie and the sheriff as they passed, but with small interest. They saw such sights every day and had long ago grown used to them, as the world had; besides, they had no way of telling which was the criminal and which the custodian.Archie walked rapidly along, his head down, and a little careless smile on his face, chatting with the sheriff. On the way to the capital, Bentley had given him cigars, let him read the newspapers, and told him a number of vulgar stories. He was laughing then at one; the sheriff had leaned over to tell him the point of it, though he had difficulty in doing so, because he could not repress his own mirth. They were passing under a viaduct on which a railroad ran over the street. A switch-engine was going slowly along, and the fireman leaned out of the cab window. He wore, oddly enough, a battered old silk hat; he wore it in some humorous conceit that caricatured the grandeur and dignity the hat in its day had given some other man, whose face was not begrimed as was the comical face of this fireman, whose hands were not calloused as was the hand that slowly, almost automatically, pulled the bell-cord. That old plug hat gave the fireman unlimited amusement and consolation, as he thrust it from his cab window while he rode up and down the railroad yards. Archie looked up and caught the fireman's eye; the fireman winked drolly, confidentially, and waved his free arm with a graceful, abandoned gesture that conveyed a salutation of brotherliness and comradeship; Archie smiled and waved his free arm in recognition.And then they stepped out of the shade of the viaduct into the sun again, and Archie's smile went suddenly from his face. They were at the penitentiary. The long wall stretched away, lifting its gray old stones twelve feet above their heads. Along its coping of broad overhanging flags was an iron railing; coming to the middle of a man, and at every corner, and here and there along the wall, were the sentry-boxes, black and weather-beaten, and sinister because no sentry was anywhere in sight. Archie looked, and he did not hear the dénouement of the sheriff's story, which, after all, was just as well.Midway of the block the wall jutted in abruptly and joined itself to a long building of gray stone, with three tiers of barred windows, but an ivy vine had climbed over the stones and hidden the bars as much as it could. A second building lifted its Gothic towers above the center of the grim facade, and beyond was another building like the first, wherein the motive of iron bars was repeated; then the climbing ivy and the gray wall again, stretching away until it narrowed in the perspective. Before the central building were green lawns and flower-beds, delightful to the eyes of the warden's family, whose quarters looked on the free world outside; delightful, too, to the eyes of the legislative committees and distinguished visitors who came to preach and give advice to the men within the walls, who never saw the flowers.Archie and the sheriff turned into the portico. In the shade, several men were lounging about. They wore the gray prison garb, but their clothes had somehow the effect of uniforms; they were clean, neatly brushed, and well fitted. They glanced up as Archie and the sheriff entered, and one of them sprang to his feet. On his cap Archie saw the words, "Warden's Runner." He was young, with a bright though pale face, and he stepped forward expectantly, thinking of a tip. He was about to speak, but suddenly his face fell, and he did not say what had been on his lips. He uttered, instead, a short, mistaken,"Oh!"The sheriff laughed, and then with the knowledge and familiarity men love so much to display, he went on:"Thought we wanted to see the prison, eh? Well, I've seen it, and the boy here'll see more'n he wants."The warden's runner smiled perfunctorily and was about to turn away, when Bentley spoke again:"How long you in for?" he asked."Life," said the youth, and then went back to his bench. He did not look up again, though Archie glanced back at him over his shoulder."Trusties," Bentley explained. "They've got a snap."In the office, where many clerks were busy, they waited; presently a sallow young man came out from behind a railing. The sheriff unlocked his handcuffs and blew on the red bracelet the steel had left about his wrist."Hot day," said the sheriff, wiping his brow. The sallow clerk, on whom the official air sat heavily, ignored this and said:"Let's have your papers."He looked over the commitments with a critical legal scowl that seemed to pass finally on all that the courts had done, and signaled to a receiving guard."Good-by, Archie." Bentley held out his hand."Good-by," said Archie."Come on," said the receiving guard, tossing his long club to his shoulder in a military way. The great steel door in the guard-room swung open; the guard sitting lazily in a worn chair at the double inner gates threw back the lever, and the receiving guard and Archie entered the yard.It was a large quadrangle, surrounded by the ugly prison houses, with the chapel and the administration building in the center. Archie glanced about, and presently he discerned in the openings between the buildings companies of men, standing at ease. A whistle blew heavily, the companies came to attention, and then began to march across the yard. They marched in sets of twos, with a military scrape and shuffle, halted now and then to dress their intervals, marked time, then went on, massed together in the lock-step. As they passed, the men looked at Archie, some of them with strange smiles. But Archie knew none of them; not Delaney, with the white hair; not the Pole, who had been convicted of arson; not the Kid, nor old Deacon Sammy, who still wore his gold-rimmed glasses, nor Harry Graves. Their identity was submerged, like that of all the convicts in that prison, like that of all the forgotten prisoners in the world. The men marched by, company after company, until enough to make a regiment, two regiments, had passed them. A guard led Archie across the yard to the administration building. As they entered, a long, lean man, whose lank legs stretched from his easy chair half-way across the room, it seemed, to cock their heels on a desk, turned and looked at them. He was smoking a cigar very slowly, and he lifted his eyelids heavily. His eyes were pale blue--for some reason Archie shuddered."Here's a fresh fish, Deputy," said the guard.The deputy warden of the prison, Ball, flecked the ashes from his cigar."Back again, eh?" he said.Archie stared, and then he said:"I've never stirred before.""The hell you haven't," said the deputy. "The bull con don't go in this dump! I know you all!" The receiving guard looked Archie over, trying to recall him.The deputy warden let his heavy feet fall to the floor, leaned forward, took a cane from his desk, got up, hooked the cane into the awkward angle of his left elbow, and shambled into the rear office, his long legs unhinging with a strange suggestion of the lock-step he was so proud of being able to retain in the prison by an evasion of the law. A convict clerk heaved an enormous record on to his high desk, then in a mechanical way he dipped a pen into the ink, and stood waiting."What's your name?" asked the deputy.Archie told him."Age?""Twenty-three.""Father and mother living?""Yes.""Who shall we notify if you die while you're with us?"Archie started; and the deputy laughed."Notify them.""Ever convicted before? No? Why, Koerner, you really must not lie to me like that!"When the statistical questions were finished the deputy said:"Now, Koerner, you got a stretch in the sentence; you'll gain a month's good time if you behave yourself; don't talk; be respectful to your superiors; mind the rules; you can write one letter a month, have visitors once a month, receive all letters of proper character addressed to you. Your number is 48963. Take him and frisk him, Jimmy."The deputy warden hooked his cane over his arm and shambled out. Archie watched him, strangely fascinated. Then the guard touched him on the shoulder, tossed a bundle of old clothing over his arm, and said:"This way."They made him bathe, then the barber shaved him, and he donned his prison clothes, which were of gray like those worn by the trusties he had seen at the gate of the prison. But the clothes did not fit him; the trousers were too tight at the waist and far too long, and they took a strange and unaccountable shape on him, the shape, indeed, of the wasted figure of an old convict who had died of consumption in the hospital two days before.The guard took Archie to the dining-room, deserted now, and he sat down at one of the long tables and ate his watery soup and drank the coffee made of toasted bread--his first taste of the "boot-leg" he had heard his late companions talk about.And then the idle house, stark and gloomy, with silent convicts ranged around the wall. On an elevated chair at one end, where he might have the scant light that fell through the one high window, an old convict, who once had been a preacher, read aloud. He read as if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but few of the prisoners listened. They sat there stolidly, with heavy, hardened faces. Some dozed, others whispered, others, whom the prison had almost bereft of reason, simply stared. The idle house was still, save for the voice of the reader and the constant coughing of a convict in a corner. Archie, incapable, like most of them, of concentrated attention, sat and looked about. He was dazed, the prison stupor was already falling heavily on his mind, and he was passing into that state of mental numbness that made the blank in his life when he was in the workhouse with Mason. He thought of Mason for a while, and wondered what his fate and that of Dillon had been; he thought of Gusta, and of his mother and father, of Gibbs and Curly, wondering about them all; wondered about that strange life, already dim and incredible, he had so lately left in what to convicts is represented by the word "outside." He wished that he had been taken with Mason and Dillon. Then he thought of Kouka--thought of everything but the theft of the revolver, which bore so small a relation to his real life.The entrance of a contractor brought diversion. The contractor, McBride, a man with a red face and closely-cropped white hair, smoking a cigar the aroma of which was eagerly sniffed in by the convicts, came with the receiving guard. At the guard's command, Archie stood up, and the contractor, narrowing his eyes, inspected him through the smoke of his cigar. After a while he nodded and said:"He'll do--looks to me like he could make bolts. Ever work at a machine?" he suddenly asked.Archie shook his head."Put him on Bolt B," said the contractor; "he can learn."The day ended, somehow; the evening came, with supper in the low-ceiled, dim dining-hall, then the cells."You'll lock in G6," said the guard.Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in.At seven o'clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; "buried," the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep.The summer night fell, and the prison's gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed.XIIElizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth's dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn't enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine."Perhaps I'll become a stenographer or a trained nurse.""The idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties.""Why?" demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes.Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly."You owe it to your station," she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, "that's why."Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother."You don't know what you're talking about, Bess," he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company's office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth's discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was."I don't know what it is," she confided to Marriott the first time she saw him. "I ought to be of some use in the world, but I'm not--Oh, don't say I am," she insisted when she caught his expression; "don't make the conventional protest. It's just as I told you before I went away, I'm useless." She glanced over the drawing-room in an inclusive condemnation of the luxury represented by the heavy furniture, the costly bric-à-brac, and all that. Her face wore an expression of weariness. She knew that she had not expressed herself. What she was thinking, or, rather, what she was feeling was, perhaps, the disappointment that comes to a spirited, imaginative, capable girl, who by education and training has developed ambitions and aspirations toward a real, full, useful life, yet who can do nothing in the world because the very conditions of that existence which give her those advantages forbid it. Prepared for life, she is not permitted to live; an artificial routine called a "sphere" is all that is allowed her; she may not realize her own personality, and, in time, is reduced to utter nothingness."By what right--" she resumed, but Marriott interrupted her."Don't take that road; it will only make you unhappy.""Before I went abroad," she went on, ignoring the warning, "I told you that I would do something when I came back--something to justify myself. That's selfish, isn't it?" She ended in a laugh. "Well, anyway," she resumed, "I can look up the Koerners. You see the Koerners?""I haven't tried that case yet," Marriott said with a guilty expression."How dreadful of you!""Reproach me all you can," he said. "I must pay some penance. But, you know--I--well, I didn't try it at the spring term because Ford wanted to go to Europe, and then--well--I'm going to try it right away--soon."The next morning, as Marriott walked down town, he determined to take up the Koerner case immediately. It was one of those mild and sunny days of grace that Nature allows in the mellow autumn, dealing them out one by one with a smile that withholds promise for another, so that each comes to winter-dreading mortals as a rare surprise. The long walk in the sun filled Marriott with a fine delight of life; he was pleased with himself because at last he was to do a duty he had long neglected. He sent for Koerner, and the old man came on a pair of new yellow crutches, bringing his wife and his enormous pipe."Well, Mr. Koerner," said Marriott, "I'm glad you're about again. How are you getting along?""Vell, ve get along; I bin some goodt yet, you bet. I can vash--I sit up to dose tubs dere undt help der oldt voman."Marriott's brows knotted in a perplexity that took on the aspect of a mild horror. It required some effort for him to realize this old man sitting with a wash-tub between his knees; the thought degraded the leonine figure. He wished that Koerner had not told him, and he hastened to change the subject."Your case will come on for trial now," he said; "we must talk it over and get our evidence in shape.""Dot bin a long time alreadty, dot trial.""Yes, it has," said Marriott, "but we'll get to it now in two weeks.""Yah, dot's vat you say."He puffed at his pipe a moment, sending out the thin wreaths of smoke in sharp little puffs. The strong face lifted its noble mask, the white hair--whiter than Marriott remembered it the last time--glistening like frost."You vait anoder year and I grow out anoder leg, maybe," Koerner smoked on in silence. But presently the thin lips that pinched the amber pipe-stem began to twitch, the blue eyes twinkled under their shaggy-white brows; his own joke about his leg put him in good humor, and he forgot his displeasure. Marriott felt a supreme pity for the old man. He marveled at his patience, the patience everywhere exhibited by the voiceless poor. There was something stately in the old man, something dignified in the way in which he accepted calamity and joked it to its face.Marriott found relief in turning to the case. As he was looking for the pleadings, he said carelessly:"How's Gusta?"And instantly, by a change in the atmosphere, he felt that he had made a mistake. Koerner made no reply. Marriott heard him exchange two or three urgent sentences with his wife, in his harsh, guttural German. When Marriott turned about, Koerner was smoking in stolid silence, his face was stone. Mrs. Koerner cast a timid glance at her husband, and, turning in embarrassment from Marriott, fluttered her shawl about her arms and gazed out the windows. What did it mean? Marriott wondered."Well, let's get down to business," he said. He would ask no more questions, at any rate. But as he was going over the allegations of the petition with Koerner, finding the usual trouble in initiating the client into the mysteries of evidence, which are as often mysteries to the lawyers and the courts themselves, he was thinking more of Gusta than of the case. Poor Gusta, he thought, does the family doom lie on her, too?XIIIElizabeth kept to her purpose of doing something to justify her continuing in existence, as she put it to her mother, and there was a period of two or three weeks following a lecture by a humanitarian from Chicago, when she tortured the family by considering a residence in a social settlement. But Mrs. Ward was relieved when this purpose realized itself in a way so respectable as joining the Organized Charities. The Organized Charities was more than respectable, it was eminently respectable, and when Mrs. Russell consented to become its president, it took on a social rank of the highest authority. The work of this organization was but dimly understood; it was incorporated, and so might quite legally be said to lack a soul, which gave it the advantage of having the personal equation excluded from its dealings with the poor. Business men, by subscribing a small sum might turn all beggars over to the Organized Charities, and by giving to the hungry, who asked for bread, the stone of a blue ticket, secure immediate relief from the disturbing sense of personal responsibility. The poor who were thus referred might go to the bureau, file their applications, be enrolled and indexed by the secretary, and have their characters and careers investigated by an agent. All this was referred to as organized relief work, and it had been so far successful as to afford relief to those who were from time to time annoyed by the spectacles of poverty and disease that haunted their homes and places of business.When the Organized Charities resumed in the fall the monthly meetings that had been discontinued during the heated term, Elizabeth was on hand. Mrs. Russell was in the president's chair, and promptly at three o'clock, consulting the tiny jeweled watch that hung in the laces at her bosom, she called the meeting to order. After the recording secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting, held in the spring, and these had been approved, the corresponding secretary read a report, and a list of the new members. Then a young clergyman, with a pale, ascetic face, and a high, clerical waistcoat against which a large cross of gold was suspended by a cord, read his report as treasurer, giving the names of the new members already reported by the corresponding secretary, but adding the amount subscribed by each, the amount of money in the treasury, the amount expended in paying the salaries of the clerks, the rent of the telephone, printing, postage, and so on. Then the agents of the organization reported the number of cases they had investigated, arranging them alphabetically, and in the form of statistics. Then the clerk reported the number of meal tickets that had been distributed and the smaller number that had been gastronomically redeemed. After that there were reports from standing committees, then from special committees, and when all these had been read, received and approved, they were ordered to be placed on file. These preliminaries occupied an hour, and Elizabeth felt the effect to be somewhat deadening. During the reading of the reports, the members, of whom there were about forty, mostly women, had sat in respectful silence, decorously coughing now and then. When all the reports had been read a woman rose, and addressing Mrs. Russell as "Madame President," said that she wished again to move that the meetings of the society be opened with prayer. At this the faces of the other members clouded with an expression of weariness. The woman who made the motion spoke to it at length, and with the only zeal that Elizabeth had thus far observed in the proceedings. Elizabeth was not long in discerning that this same woman had made this proposal at former meetings; she knew this by the bored and sometimes angry expressions of the other members. The young curate seemed to feel a kind of vicarious shame for the woman. When the woman had finished, the matter was put to a vote, and all voted no, save the woman who had made the proposal, and she voted "aye" loudly, going down to defeat in the defiance of the unconvinced.Then another woman rose and said that she had a matter to bring before the meeting; this matter related to a blind woman who had called on her and complained that the Organized Charities had refused to give her assistance. Now that the winter was coming on, the blind woman was filled with fear of want. Elizabeth had a dim vision of the blind woman, even from the crude and inadequate description; she felt a pity and a desire to help her, and, at the same time, with that condemnation which needs no more than accusation, a kind of indignation with the Organized Charities. For the first time she was interested in the proceedings, and leaned forward to hear what was to be done with the blind woman. But while the description had been inadequate to Elizabeth, so that her own imagination had filled out the portrait, it was, nevertheless, sufficient for the other members; a smile went round, glances were exchanged, and the secretary, with a calm, assured and superior expression, began to turn over the cards in her elaborate system of indexed names. There was instantly a general desire to speak, several persons were on their feet at once, saying "Madame President!" and Mrs. Russell recognized one of them with a smile that propitiated and promised the others in their turn. From the experiences that were then related, it was apparent that this blind woman was known to nearly all of the charity workers in the city; all of them spoke of her in terms of disparagement, which soon became terms of impatience. One of the ladies raised a laugh by declaring the blind woman to be a "chronic case," and then one of the men present, a gray-haired man, with a white mustache stained yellow by tobacco, rose and said that he had investigated the "case" and that it was not worthy. This man was the representative of a society which cared for animals, such as stray dogs, and mistreated horses, and employed this agent to investigate such cases, but it seemed that occasionally he concerned himself with human beings. He spoke now in a professional and authoritative manner, and when he declared that the case was not worthy, the blind woman, or the blind case, as it was considered, was disposed of. Some one said that she should be sent to the poorhouse.When the blind woman had been consigned, so far as the bureau was concerned, to the poorhouse, Mrs. Russell said in her soft voice:"Is there any unfinished business?"Elizabeth, who was tired and bored, felt a sudden hope that this was the end, and she started up hopefully; but she found in Mrs. Russell's beautiful face a quick smile of sympathy and patience. And Elizabeth was ashamed; she was sorry she had let Mrs. Russell see that she was weary of all this, and she felt a new dissatisfaction with herself. She told herself that she was utterly fickle and hopeless; she had entered upon this charity work with such enthusiasm, and here she was already tiring of it at the first meeting! Elizabeth looked at Mrs. Russell, and for a moment envied her her dignity and her tact and her patience, all of which must have come from her innate gentleness and kindness. The face of this woman, who presided so gracefully over this long, wearying session, was marked with lines of character, her brow was serene and calm under the perfectly white hair massed above it. The eyes were large, and they were sad, just as the mouth was sad, but there dwelt in the eyes always that same kindness and gentleness, that patience and consideration that gave Mrs. Russell her real distinction, her real indisputable claim to superiority. Elizabeth forgot her impatience and her weariness in a sudden speculation as to the cause of the sadness that lay somewhere in Mrs. Russell's life. She had known ease and luxury always; she had been spared all contact with that world which Elizabeth was just beginning to discover beyond the confines of her own narrow and selfish world. Mrs. Russell surely never had known the physical hunger which now and then was at least officially recognized in this room where the bureau met; could there be a hunger of the soul which gave this look to the human face? Elizabeth Ward had not yet realized this hunger, she had not yet come into the full consciousness of life, and so it was that just at a moment, when she seemed very near to its recognition, she lost herself in the luxury of romanticizing some sorrow in Mrs. Russell's life, some sorrow kept hidden from the world. Elizabeth thought she saw this sorrow in the faint smile that touched Mrs. Russell's lips just then, as she gave a parliamentary recognition to another woman--a heavy, obtrusive woman who was rising to say:"Madame President."Elizabeth had hoped that there would be no unfinished business for the society to transact, but she had not learned that there was one piece of business which was always unfinished, and that was the question of raising funds. And this subject had no interest for Elizabeth; the question of money was one she could not grasp. It affected her as statistics did; it had absolutely no meaning for her; and now, when she was forced to pay attention to the heavy, obtrusive woman, because her voice was so strong and her tone so commanding, she was conscious only of the fact that she did not like this woman; somehow the woman over-powered Elizabeth by mere physical proportions. But gradually it dawned on Elizabeth that the discussion was turning on a charity ball, and she grew interested at once, for she felt herself on the brink of solving the old mystery of where charity balls originate. She had attended many of them, but it had never occurred to her that some one must have organized and promoted them; she had found them in her world as an institution, like calls, like receptions, like the church. But now a debate was on; the little woman, who had urged the society to open its sessions with prayer, was opposing the ball, and Elizabeth forgot Mrs. Russell's secret romance in her interest in the warmth with which the project of a charity ball was being discussed.
IX
It was several days before Marriott saw Gibbs again, and then he appeared at Marriott's office with a companion and leaned for an instant unsteadily against the door he had carefully closed. Marriott saw that he was changed, and that it was the change drink makes in a man. Gibbs sank helplessly into a chair, and stared at Marriott blankly. He was not the clean, well-dressed man Marriott had beheld in him before. He was unshaven, and the stubble of his beard betrayed his age by its whiteness; the pupils of his eyes were dilated, his lips stained with tobacco. His shoes were muddy, one leg of his trousers was turned up; and his lack of a collar seemed the final proof of that moral disintegration he could not now conceal. When he had been there a moment the atmosphere was saturated with the odor of alcohol.
"My friend, Mr. McDougall," said Gibbs, toppling unsteadily in his chair, as he waved one fat hand at his companion, a heavy blond fellow, six feet tall, well dressed and dignified.
"I've gone to the bad," said Gibbs. Marriott looked at him in silence. The fact needed no comment.
"The way those coppers jobbed Mason was too much for me," Gibbs went on. "Worst I ever seen. I couldn't stand for it, it put me to the bad."
"Well, you won't do him any good, at that--" McDougall began.
"Aw, to hell with you!" said Gibbs, waving McDougall aside with a sweep of his arm. The movement unsettled him in his chair, and he steadied himself by digging his heels into the rug. Then he drew a broken cigar from his coat pocket, struck a match, and held it close to his nose; it took him a long time to light his cigar; he puffed hurriedly, but could not keep the cigar in the flame; before he finished he had burned his fingers, and Marriott felt a pain as Gibbs shook the match to the floor.
"He hasn't touched a drop for five years," said McDougall indulgently. "But when they kangarooed Mason--"
McDougall looked at Gibbs, not in regret or pity, nor with disapproval, but as one might look at a woman stricken with some recent grief. To him, getting drunk seemed to be as natural a way of expressing emotion as weeping or wringing the hands. Marriott gazed on the squalid little tragedy of a long friendship, gazed a moment, then turned away, and looked out of his window. Above the hideous roofs he could see the topmasts of schooners, and presently a great white propeller going down the river. It was going north, to Mackinac, to the Soo, to Duluth, and the sight of it filled Marriott with a longing for the cold blue waters and the sparkling air of the north.
Gibbs evidently had come to talk about Mason's case, but when he began to speak his voice was lost somewhere in his throat; his head sank, he appeared to sink into sleep. McDougall glanced at him and laughed. Then he turned seriously to Marriott.
"It was an outrage," he said. "Mason has been right here in town--I saw him that day. He ought to be alibied."
"Couldn't you testify?" asked Marriott.
McDougall looked at Marriott with suspicion, and hesitated. But suddenly Gibbs, whom they had supposed to be asleep, said impatiently, without opening his eyes:
"Oh, hell!--go on and tell him. He's a right guy, I tell you. He's wise to the gun." And Gibbs slumbered again.
"Well," said McDougall with a queer expression, "my business is unfortunately of such a nature that it can't stand much investigation, and I don't make the best witness in the world."
Gibbs suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and drew an enormous roll of money from his pocket.
"How much do I owe you?" he asked, unrolling the bills. "It comes out of me," he said. Marriott was disappointed in this haggling appeal, not for his own sake, but for Gibbs's; it detracted from the romantic figure he had idealized for the man, just as Gibbs's intoxication had done. Marriott hesitated in the usual difficulty of appraising professional services, but when, presently, he rather uncertainly fixed his fee, Gibbs counted out the amount and gave it to him. Marriott took the money, with a wonder as to where it had come from, what its history was; he imagined in a flash a long train of such transactions as McDougall must be too familiar with, of such deeds as had been involved in the hearing before the commissioner, of other transactions, intricate, remote, involved, confused in morals--and he thrust the bills into his pocket.
"It comes out of me," Gibbs explained again. "They hadn't any fall money."
"Have you heard from them?" asked Marriott, who did not know what fall money was, and wished to change the subject.
"No," said Gibbs, shaking his head. "I'm going out to the trial. I'll take along that newspaper guy and some witnesses for the others. I'll get 'em a mouthpiece. Maybe we can spring 'em."
But, as Marriott learned several days later, Gibbs could not spring them. He went to the trial with an entourage of miserable witnesses, but he did not take Wales, for Wales's newspaper would not give him leave of absence, and there was no process to compel his attendance. But Kouka and Quinn went, and they gave Gibbs such a reputation that his testimony was impeached. He could not, of course, take Dean. Dean's business, like McDougall's, was unfortunately of such a nature that it did not stand investigation, and he did not make the best witness in the world. Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were sentenced to the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth for five years. At about the same time Archie Koerner pleaded guilty to stealing the revolver and was sentenced to prison for a year.
Marriott left at last for his vacation, but he could not forget Mason taking his unjust fate so calmly and philosophically. He had great pity for him, just as he had for Archie, though one was innocent and the other guilty. He had pity for Dillon, too, and, yes, for Mandell and Squeak. He thought of it all, trying to find some solution, but there was no solution. It was but one more knot in the tangle of injustice man has made of his attempts to do justice; a tangle that Marriott could not unravel, nor any one, then or ever.
X
Like most of the great houses along Claybourne Avenue, the dwelling of the Wards wore an air of loneliness and desolation all that summer. With Mrs. Ward and Elizabeth in Europe, the reason for maintaining the establishment ceased to be; and the servants were given holidays. Barker was about for a while each day looking after things, and Gusta came to set the house in order. But these transient presences could not give the place its wonted life; the curtains were down, the furniture stood about in linen covers, the pictures were draped in white cloth. At evening a light showed in the library, where Ward sat alone, smoking, trying to read, and, as midnight drew on, starting now and then at the strange, unaccountable sounds that are a part of the phenomena of the stillness of an empty house. He would look up from his book, listen, wait, sigh, listen again, finally give up, go to bed, worry a while, fall asleep, be glad when morning came and he could lose himself for another day in work. Dick never came in till long after midnight, and Ward seldom saw him, save on those few mornings when the boy was up early enough to take breakfast with him at the club. Such mornings made the whole day happy for Ward.
But the few hours she spent each day in the empty house were happy hours for Gusta Koerner. She was not, of course, a girl in whom feeling could become thought, or sensation find the relief of expression; she belonged to the class that because it is dumb seems not to suffer, but she had a sense of change in the atmosphere. She missed Elizabeth, she missed the others, she missed the familiar figures that once had made the place all it had been to her. But she loved it, nevertheless, and if it seemed to hold no new experiences for her, there were old experiences to be lived over again.
At first the loneliness and the emptiness frightened her, but she grew accustomed; she no longer started at the mysterious creakings and tappings in the untenanted rooms, and each morning, after her work was done, she lingered, and wandered idly about, looked at herself in the mirrors, gazed out of the windows into Claybourne Avenue, sometimes peeped into the books she could so little understand.
Occasionally she would have chats with Barker, but she did not often see him; he was always busy in the stables. Ward and Dick were gone before she got there. But the peace and quiet of the deserted mansion were grateful, and Gusta found there a sense of rest and escape that for a long time she had not known. She found this sense of escape all the more grateful after Archie's trouble. He had not been at home in a long time, and they had heard nothing of him; then, one evening she learned of his latest trouble in those avid chroniclers of trouble, the newspapers. Her father, who would not permit the mention of his son's name, nevertheless plainly had him on his mind, for he grew more than ever gloomy, morose and irritable. And then, to make matters worse, one Saturday evening Charlie Peltzer threw it up to Gusta, and they parted in anger. On Sunday afternoon she went to see Archie at the jail, and stayed so late that it was twilight before she got to the Wards'. She had never had the blues so badly before; her quarrel with Peltzer, her father's scolding, her mother's sighs and furtive tears, her own visit to the prison, all combined to depress her, and now, in the late and lonesome Sunday afternoon she did her work hurriedly, and was just about to let herself out of the door when it opened suddenly, and Dick Ward, bolting in, ran directly against her.
"Hello! Beg pardon--is that you, 'Gusta?" he said.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, leaning against the wall, "you scared me!"
Dick laughed.
"Well, that's too bad; I had no idea," he said.
She had raised her clasped hands to her chin, and still kept the shrinking attitude of her fright. Dick looked at her, prettier than ever in her sudden alarm, and on an impulse he seized her hands.
"Don't be scared," he said. "I wouldn't frighten you for the world."
She was overwhelmed with weakness and confusion. She shrank against the wall and turned her head aside; her heart was beating rapidly.
"I--I'm late to-day," she said. "I ought to have been here this morning."
"I'm glad you weren't," said Dick, looking at her with glowing eyes.
"I must hurry"---she tried to slip away. "I--must be going home, it's getting late; you--you must let me go."
She scarcely knew what she was saying; she spoke with averted face, her cheeks hot and flaming. He gazed at her steadily a moment; then he said:
"Never mind. I'll take you home in my machine. May I?"
She looked at him in wonderment. What did he mean? Was he in earnest?
"May I?" he pressed her hands for emphasis, and gazed into her eyes irresistibly.
"Yes," she said, "if you'll--let me--go now."
Suddenly he kissed her on the lips; there was a rustle, a struggle, he kissed her again, then released her, left her trembling there in the hall, and bounded up the stairs.
"Wait a minute!" he called. "I came home to get something. You'll wait?"
Gusta was dazed, her mind was in a whirl, she felt utterly powerless; but instinctively she slipped through the door and out on to the veranda. The air reassured and restored her. She felt that she should run away, and yet, there was Dick's automobile in the driveway; she had never been in an automobile, and-- She thought of Charlie Peltzer--well, it would serve him right. And then, before she could decide, Dick was beside her.
"Jump in," he said, glancing up and down the avenue, now dusky in the twilight. They went swiftly away in the automobile, but they did not go straight to Bolt Street--they took a long, roundabout course that ended, after all, too suddenly. The night was warm and Gusta was lifted above all her cares; she had a sensation as of flying through the soft air. Dick stopped the machine half a block from the house, and Gusta got out, excited from her swift, reckless ride. But, troubled as she was, she felt that she ought to thank Dick. He only laughed and said:
"We'll go again for a longer ride. What do you say to to-morrow night?"
She hesitated, tried to decide against him, and before she could decide, consented.
"Don't forget," he said, "to-morrow evening." He leaned over and whispered to her. He was shoving a lever forward and the automobile was starting.
"Don't forget," he said, and then he was gone and Gusta stood looking at the vanishing lights of the machine. Just then Charlie Peltzer stepped out of the shadows.
"So!" he said, looking angrily into her face. "So that's it, is it? Oh--I saw you!"
"Go away!" she said.
He snatched at her, caught her by the wrist.
"Go away, is it?" he exclaimed fiercely. "I've caught you this time!"
"Let me alone!"
"Yes, I will! Oh, yes, I'll let you alone! And him, too; I'll fix him!"
"Let me go, I tell you!" she cried, trying to escape. "Let me go!" She succeeded presently in wrenching her wrist out of his grasp. "You hurt me!" She clasped the wrist he had almost crushed. "I hate you! I don't want anything more to do with you!"
She left him standing there in the gloom. She hurried on; it was but a few steps to the door.
"Gusta!" he called. "Gusta! Wait!"
But she hurried on.
"Gusta! Wait a minute!"
She hesitated. There was something appealing in his voice.
"Oh, Gusta!" he repeated. "Won't you wait?"
She felt that he was coming after her. Then something, she knew not what, got into her, she felt ugly and hateful, and hardened her heart. She cast a glance back over her shoulder and had a glimpse of Peltzer's face, a pale, troubled blur in the darkness. She ran into the house, utterly miserable and sick at heart.
Gusta could not thereafter escape this misery; it was with her all the time, and her only respite was found in the joy that came to her at evening, when regularly, at the same hour, under the same tree, at the same dark spot in Congress Street, she met Dick Ward. And so it began between them.
XI
The way from the station to the penitentiary was long, but Sheriff Bentley, being a man of small economies, had decided to walk, and after the long journey in the smoking-car, Archie had been glad to stretch his legs. The sun lay hot on the capital city; it was nearly noon, and workmen, tired from their morning's toil, were thinking now of dinner-buckets and pipes in the shade. They glanced at Archie and the sheriff as they passed, but with small interest. They saw such sights every day and had long ago grown used to them, as the world had; besides, they had no way of telling which was the criminal and which the custodian.
Archie walked rapidly along, his head down, and a little careless smile on his face, chatting with the sheriff. On the way to the capital, Bentley had given him cigars, let him read the newspapers, and told him a number of vulgar stories. He was laughing then at one; the sheriff had leaned over to tell him the point of it, though he had difficulty in doing so, because he could not repress his own mirth. They were passing under a viaduct on which a railroad ran over the street. A switch-engine was going slowly along, and the fireman leaned out of the cab window. He wore, oddly enough, a battered old silk hat; he wore it in some humorous conceit that caricatured the grandeur and dignity the hat in its day had given some other man, whose face was not begrimed as was the comical face of this fireman, whose hands were not calloused as was the hand that slowly, almost automatically, pulled the bell-cord. That old plug hat gave the fireman unlimited amusement and consolation, as he thrust it from his cab window while he rode up and down the railroad yards. Archie looked up and caught the fireman's eye; the fireman winked drolly, confidentially, and waved his free arm with a graceful, abandoned gesture that conveyed a salutation of brotherliness and comradeship; Archie smiled and waved his free arm in recognition.
And then they stepped out of the shade of the viaduct into the sun again, and Archie's smile went suddenly from his face. They were at the penitentiary. The long wall stretched away, lifting its gray old stones twelve feet above their heads. Along its coping of broad overhanging flags was an iron railing; coming to the middle of a man, and at every corner, and here and there along the wall, were the sentry-boxes, black and weather-beaten, and sinister because no sentry was anywhere in sight. Archie looked, and he did not hear the dénouement of the sheriff's story, which, after all, was just as well.
Midway of the block the wall jutted in abruptly and joined itself to a long building of gray stone, with three tiers of barred windows, but an ivy vine had climbed over the stones and hidden the bars as much as it could. A second building lifted its Gothic towers above the center of the grim facade, and beyond was another building like the first, wherein the motive of iron bars was repeated; then the climbing ivy and the gray wall again, stretching away until it narrowed in the perspective. Before the central building were green lawns and flower-beds, delightful to the eyes of the warden's family, whose quarters looked on the free world outside; delightful, too, to the eyes of the legislative committees and distinguished visitors who came to preach and give advice to the men within the walls, who never saw the flowers.
Archie and the sheriff turned into the portico. In the shade, several men were lounging about. They wore the gray prison garb, but their clothes had somehow the effect of uniforms; they were clean, neatly brushed, and well fitted. They glanced up as Archie and the sheriff entered, and one of them sprang to his feet. On his cap Archie saw the words, "Warden's Runner." He was young, with a bright though pale face, and he stepped forward expectantly, thinking of a tip. He was about to speak, but suddenly his face fell, and he did not say what had been on his lips. He uttered, instead, a short, mistaken,
"Oh!"
The sheriff laughed, and then with the knowledge and familiarity men love so much to display, he went on:
"Thought we wanted to see the prison, eh? Well, I've seen it, and the boy here'll see more'n he wants."
The warden's runner smiled perfunctorily and was about to turn away, when Bentley spoke again:
"How long you in for?" he asked.
"Life," said the youth, and then went back to his bench. He did not look up again, though Archie glanced back at him over his shoulder.
"Trusties," Bentley explained. "They've got a snap."
In the office, where many clerks were busy, they waited; presently a sallow young man came out from behind a railing. The sheriff unlocked his handcuffs and blew on the red bracelet the steel had left about his wrist.
"Hot day," said the sheriff, wiping his brow. The sallow clerk, on whom the official air sat heavily, ignored this and said:
"Let's have your papers."
He looked over the commitments with a critical legal scowl that seemed to pass finally on all that the courts had done, and signaled to a receiving guard.
"Good-by, Archie." Bentley held out his hand.
"Good-by," said Archie.
"Come on," said the receiving guard, tossing his long club to his shoulder in a military way. The great steel door in the guard-room swung open; the guard sitting lazily in a worn chair at the double inner gates threw back the lever, and the receiving guard and Archie entered the yard.
It was a large quadrangle, surrounded by the ugly prison houses, with the chapel and the administration building in the center. Archie glanced about, and presently he discerned in the openings between the buildings companies of men, standing at ease. A whistle blew heavily, the companies came to attention, and then began to march across the yard. They marched in sets of twos, with a military scrape and shuffle, halted now and then to dress their intervals, marked time, then went on, massed together in the lock-step. As they passed, the men looked at Archie, some of them with strange smiles. But Archie knew none of them; not Delaney, with the white hair; not the Pole, who had been convicted of arson; not the Kid, nor old Deacon Sammy, who still wore his gold-rimmed glasses, nor Harry Graves. Their identity was submerged, like that of all the convicts in that prison, like that of all the forgotten prisoners in the world. The men marched by, company after company, until enough to make a regiment, two regiments, had passed them. A guard led Archie across the yard to the administration building. As they entered, a long, lean man, whose lank legs stretched from his easy chair half-way across the room, it seemed, to cock their heels on a desk, turned and looked at them. He was smoking a cigar very slowly, and he lifted his eyelids heavily. His eyes were pale blue--for some reason Archie shuddered.
"Here's a fresh fish, Deputy," said the guard.
The deputy warden of the prison, Ball, flecked the ashes from his cigar.
"Back again, eh?" he said.
Archie stared, and then he said:
"I've never stirred before."
"The hell you haven't," said the deputy. "The bull con don't go in this dump! I know you all!" The receiving guard looked Archie over, trying to recall him.
The deputy warden let his heavy feet fall to the floor, leaned forward, took a cane from his desk, got up, hooked the cane into the awkward angle of his left elbow, and shambled into the rear office, his long legs unhinging with a strange suggestion of the lock-step he was so proud of being able to retain in the prison by an evasion of the law. A convict clerk heaved an enormous record on to his high desk, then in a mechanical way he dipped a pen into the ink, and stood waiting.
"What's your name?" asked the deputy.
Archie told him.
"Age?"
"Twenty-three."
"Father and mother living?"
"Yes."
"Who shall we notify if you die while you're with us?"
Archie started; and the deputy laughed.
"Notify them."
"Ever convicted before? No? Why, Koerner, you really must not lie to me like that!"
When the statistical questions were finished the deputy said:
"Now, Koerner, you got a stretch in the sentence; you'll gain a month's good time if you behave yourself; don't talk; be respectful to your superiors; mind the rules; you can write one letter a month, have visitors once a month, receive all letters of proper character addressed to you. Your number is 48963. Take him and frisk him, Jimmy."
The deputy warden hooked his cane over his arm and shambled out. Archie watched him, strangely fascinated. Then the guard touched him on the shoulder, tossed a bundle of old clothing over his arm, and said:
"This way."
They made him bathe, then the barber shaved him, and he donned his prison clothes, which were of gray like those worn by the trusties he had seen at the gate of the prison. But the clothes did not fit him; the trousers were too tight at the waist and far too long, and they took a strange and unaccountable shape on him, the shape, indeed, of the wasted figure of an old convict who had died of consumption in the hospital two days before.
The guard took Archie to the dining-room, deserted now, and he sat down at one of the long tables and ate his watery soup and drank the coffee made of toasted bread--his first taste of the "boot-leg" he had heard his late companions talk about.
And then the idle house, stark and gloomy, with silent convicts ranged around the wall. On an elevated chair at one end, where he might have the scant light that fell through the one high window, an old convict, who once had been a preacher, read aloud. He read as if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but few of the prisoners listened. They sat there stolidly, with heavy, hardened faces. Some dozed, others whispered, others, whom the prison had almost bereft of reason, simply stared. The idle house was still, save for the voice of the reader and the constant coughing of a convict in a corner. Archie, incapable, like most of them, of concentrated attention, sat and looked about. He was dazed, the prison stupor was already falling heavily on his mind, and he was passing into that state of mental numbness that made the blank in his life when he was in the workhouse with Mason. He thought of Mason for a while, and wondered what his fate and that of Dillon had been; he thought of Gusta, and of his mother and father, of Gibbs and Curly, wondering about them all; wondered about that strange life, already dim and incredible, he had so lately left in what to convicts is represented by the word "outside." He wished that he had been taken with Mason and Dillon. Then he thought of Kouka--thought of everything but the theft of the revolver, which bore so small a relation to his real life.
The entrance of a contractor brought diversion. The contractor, McBride, a man with a red face and closely-cropped white hair, smoking a cigar the aroma of which was eagerly sniffed in by the convicts, came with the receiving guard. At the guard's command, Archie stood up, and the contractor, narrowing his eyes, inspected him through the smoke of his cigar. After a while he nodded and said:
"He'll do--looks to me like he could make bolts. Ever work at a machine?" he suddenly asked.
Archie shook his head.
"Put him on Bolt B," said the contractor; "he can learn."
The day ended, somehow; the evening came, with supper in the low-ceiled, dim dining-hall, then the cells.
"You'll lock in G6," said the guard.
Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in.
At seven o'clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; "buried," the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep.
The summer night fell, and the prison's gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed.
XII
Elizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth's dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn't enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine.
"Perhaps I'll become a stenographer or a trained nurse."
"The idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties."
"Why?" demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes.
Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly.
"You owe it to your station," she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, "that's why."
Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Bess," he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company's office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth's discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was.
"I don't know what it is," she confided to Marriott the first time she saw him. "I ought to be of some use in the world, but I'm not--Oh, don't say I am," she insisted when she caught his expression; "don't make the conventional protest. It's just as I told you before I went away, I'm useless." She glanced over the drawing-room in an inclusive condemnation of the luxury represented by the heavy furniture, the costly bric-à-brac, and all that. Her face wore an expression of weariness. She knew that she had not expressed herself. What she was thinking, or, rather, what she was feeling was, perhaps, the disappointment that comes to a spirited, imaginative, capable girl, who by education and training has developed ambitions and aspirations toward a real, full, useful life, yet who can do nothing in the world because the very conditions of that existence which give her those advantages forbid it. Prepared for life, she is not permitted to live; an artificial routine called a "sphere" is all that is allowed her; she may not realize her own personality, and, in time, is reduced to utter nothingness.
"By what right--" she resumed, but Marriott interrupted her.
"Don't take that road; it will only make you unhappy."
"Before I went abroad," she went on, ignoring the warning, "I told you that I would do something when I came back--something to justify myself. That's selfish, isn't it?" She ended in a laugh. "Well, anyway," she resumed, "I can look up the Koerners. You see the Koerners?"
"I haven't tried that case yet," Marriott said with a guilty expression.
"How dreadful of you!"
"Reproach me all you can," he said. "I must pay some penance. But, you know--I--well, I didn't try it at the spring term because Ford wanted to go to Europe, and then--well--I'm going to try it right away--soon."
The next morning, as Marriott walked down town, he determined to take up the Koerner case immediately. It was one of those mild and sunny days of grace that Nature allows in the mellow autumn, dealing them out one by one with a smile that withholds promise for another, so that each comes to winter-dreading mortals as a rare surprise. The long walk in the sun filled Marriott with a fine delight of life; he was pleased with himself because at last he was to do a duty he had long neglected. He sent for Koerner, and the old man came on a pair of new yellow crutches, bringing his wife and his enormous pipe.
"Well, Mr. Koerner," said Marriott, "I'm glad you're about again. How are you getting along?"
"Vell, ve get along; I bin some goodt yet, you bet. I can vash--I sit up to dose tubs dere undt help der oldt voman."
Marriott's brows knotted in a perplexity that took on the aspect of a mild horror. It required some effort for him to realize this old man sitting with a wash-tub between his knees; the thought degraded the leonine figure. He wished that Koerner had not told him, and he hastened to change the subject.
"Your case will come on for trial now," he said; "we must talk it over and get our evidence in shape."
"Dot bin a long time alreadty, dot trial."
"Yes, it has," said Marriott, "but we'll get to it now in two weeks."
"Yah, dot's vat you say."
He puffed at his pipe a moment, sending out the thin wreaths of smoke in sharp little puffs. The strong face lifted its noble mask, the white hair--whiter than Marriott remembered it the last time--glistening like frost.
"You vait anoder year and I grow out anoder leg, maybe," Koerner smoked on in silence. But presently the thin lips that pinched the amber pipe-stem began to twitch, the blue eyes twinkled under their shaggy-white brows; his own joke about his leg put him in good humor, and he forgot his displeasure. Marriott felt a supreme pity for the old man. He marveled at his patience, the patience everywhere exhibited by the voiceless poor. There was something stately in the old man, something dignified in the way in which he accepted calamity and joked it to its face.
Marriott found relief in turning to the case. As he was looking for the pleadings, he said carelessly:
"How's Gusta?"
And instantly, by a change in the atmosphere, he felt that he had made a mistake. Koerner made no reply. Marriott heard him exchange two or three urgent sentences with his wife, in his harsh, guttural German. When Marriott turned about, Koerner was smoking in stolid silence, his face was stone. Mrs. Koerner cast a timid glance at her husband, and, turning in embarrassment from Marriott, fluttered her shawl about her arms and gazed out the windows. What did it mean? Marriott wondered.
"Well, let's get down to business," he said. He would ask no more questions, at any rate. But as he was going over the allegations of the petition with Koerner, finding the usual trouble in initiating the client into the mysteries of evidence, which are as often mysteries to the lawyers and the courts themselves, he was thinking more of Gusta than of the case. Poor Gusta, he thought, does the family doom lie on her, too?
XIII
Elizabeth kept to her purpose of doing something to justify her continuing in existence, as she put it to her mother, and there was a period of two or three weeks following a lecture by a humanitarian from Chicago, when she tortured the family by considering a residence in a social settlement. But Mrs. Ward was relieved when this purpose realized itself in a way so respectable as joining the Organized Charities. The Organized Charities was more than respectable, it was eminently respectable, and when Mrs. Russell consented to become its president, it took on a social rank of the highest authority. The work of this organization was but dimly understood; it was incorporated, and so might quite legally be said to lack a soul, which gave it the advantage of having the personal equation excluded from its dealings with the poor. Business men, by subscribing a small sum might turn all beggars over to the Organized Charities, and by giving to the hungry, who asked for bread, the stone of a blue ticket, secure immediate relief from the disturbing sense of personal responsibility. The poor who were thus referred might go to the bureau, file their applications, be enrolled and indexed by the secretary, and have their characters and careers investigated by an agent. All this was referred to as organized relief work, and it had been so far successful as to afford relief to those who were from time to time annoyed by the spectacles of poverty and disease that haunted their homes and places of business.
When the Organized Charities resumed in the fall the monthly meetings that had been discontinued during the heated term, Elizabeth was on hand. Mrs. Russell was in the president's chair, and promptly at three o'clock, consulting the tiny jeweled watch that hung in the laces at her bosom, she called the meeting to order. After the recording secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting, held in the spring, and these had been approved, the corresponding secretary read a report, and a list of the new members. Then a young clergyman, with a pale, ascetic face, and a high, clerical waistcoat against which a large cross of gold was suspended by a cord, read his report as treasurer, giving the names of the new members already reported by the corresponding secretary, but adding the amount subscribed by each, the amount of money in the treasury, the amount expended in paying the salaries of the clerks, the rent of the telephone, printing, postage, and so on. Then the agents of the organization reported the number of cases they had investigated, arranging them alphabetically, and in the form of statistics. Then the clerk reported the number of meal tickets that had been distributed and the smaller number that had been gastronomically redeemed. After that there were reports from standing committees, then from special committees, and when all these had been read, received and approved, they were ordered to be placed on file. These preliminaries occupied an hour, and Elizabeth felt the effect to be somewhat deadening. During the reading of the reports, the members, of whom there were about forty, mostly women, had sat in respectful silence, decorously coughing now and then. When all the reports had been read a woman rose, and addressing Mrs. Russell as "Madame President," said that she wished again to move that the meetings of the society be opened with prayer. At this the faces of the other members clouded with an expression of weariness. The woman who made the motion spoke to it at length, and with the only zeal that Elizabeth had thus far observed in the proceedings. Elizabeth was not long in discerning that this same woman had made this proposal at former meetings; she knew this by the bored and sometimes angry expressions of the other members. The young curate seemed to feel a kind of vicarious shame for the woman. When the woman had finished, the matter was put to a vote, and all voted no, save the woman who had made the proposal, and she voted "aye" loudly, going down to defeat in the defiance of the unconvinced.
Then another woman rose and said that she had a matter to bring before the meeting; this matter related to a blind woman who had called on her and complained that the Organized Charities had refused to give her assistance. Now that the winter was coming on, the blind woman was filled with fear of want. Elizabeth had a dim vision of the blind woman, even from the crude and inadequate description; she felt a pity and a desire to help her, and, at the same time, with that condemnation which needs no more than accusation, a kind of indignation with the Organized Charities. For the first time she was interested in the proceedings, and leaned forward to hear what was to be done with the blind woman. But while the description had been inadequate to Elizabeth, so that her own imagination had filled out the portrait, it was, nevertheless, sufficient for the other members; a smile went round, glances were exchanged, and the secretary, with a calm, assured and superior expression, began to turn over the cards in her elaborate system of indexed names. There was instantly a general desire to speak, several persons were on their feet at once, saying "Madame President!" and Mrs. Russell recognized one of them with a smile that propitiated and promised the others in their turn. From the experiences that were then related, it was apparent that this blind woman was known to nearly all of the charity workers in the city; all of them spoke of her in terms of disparagement, which soon became terms of impatience. One of the ladies raised a laugh by declaring the blind woman to be a "chronic case," and then one of the men present, a gray-haired man, with a white mustache stained yellow by tobacco, rose and said that he had investigated the "case" and that it was not worthy. This man was the representative of a society which cared for animals, such as stray dogs, and mistreated horses, and employed this agent to investigate such cases, but it seemed that occasionally he concerned himself with human beings. He spoke now in a professional and authoritative manner, and when he declared that the case was not worthy, the blind woman, or the blind case, as it was considered, was disposed of. Some one said that she should be sent to the poorhouse.
When the blind woman had been consigned, so far as the bureau was concerned, to the poorhouse, Mrs. Russell said in her soft voice:
"Is there any unfinished business?"
Elizabeth, who was tired and bored, felt a sudden hope that this was the end, and she started up hopefully; but she found in Mrs. Russell's beautiful face a quick smile of sympathy and patience. And Elizabeth was ashamed; she was sorry she had let Mrs. Russell see that she was weary of all this, and she felt a new dissatisfaction with herself. She told herself that she was utterly fickle and hopeless; she had entered upon this charity work with such enthusiasm, and here she was already tiring of it at the first meeting! Elizabeth looked at Mrs. Russell, and for a moment envied her her dignity and her tact and her patience, all of which must have come from her innate gentleness and kindness. The face of this woman, who presided so gracefully over this long, wearying session, was marked with lines of character, her brow was serene and calm under the perfectly white hair massed above it. The eyes were large, and they were sad, just as the mouth was sad, but there dwelt in the eyes always that same kindness and gentleness, that patience and consideration that gave Mrs. Russell her real distinction, her real indisputable claim to superiority. Elizabeth forgot her impatience and her weariness in a sudden speculation as to the cause of the sadness that lay somewhere in Mrs. Russell's life. She had known ease and luxury always; she had been spared all contact with that world which Elizabeth was just beginning to discover beyond the confines of her own narrow and selfish world. Mrs. Russell surely never had known the physical hunger which now and then was at least officially recognized in this room where the bureau met; could there be a hunger of the soul which gave this look to the human face? Elizabeth Ward had not yet realized this hunger, she had not yet come into the full consciousness of life, and so it was that just at a moment, when she seemed very near to its recognition, she lost herself in the luxury of romanticizing some sorrow in Mrs. Russell's life, some sorrow kept hidden from the world. Elizabeth thought she saw this sorrow in the faint smile that touched Mrs. Russell's lips just then, as she gave a parliamentary recognition to another woman--a heavy, obtrusive woman who was rising to say:
"Madame President."
Elizabeth had hoped that there would be no unfinished business for the society to transact, but she had not learned that there was one piece of business which was always unfinished, and that was the question of raising funds. And this subject had no interest for Elizabeth; the question of money was one she could not grasp. It affected her as statistics did; it had absolutely no meaning for her; and now, when she was forced to pay attention to the heavy, obtrusive woman, because her voice was so strong and her tone so commanding, she was conscious only of the fact that she did not like this woman; somehow the woman over-powered Elizabeth by mere physical proportions. But gradually it dawned on Elizabeth that the discussion was turning on a charity ball, and she grew interested at once, for she felt herself on the brink of solving the old mystery of where charity balls originate. She had attended many of them, but it had never occurred to her that some one must have organized and promoted them; she had found them in her world as an institution, like calls, like receptions, like the church. But now a debate was on; the little woman, who had urged the society to open its sessions with prayer, was opposing the ball, and Elizabeth forgot Mrs. Russell's secret romance in her interest in the warmth with which the project of a charity ball was being discussed.