A living foam gushed from the neck as the self-appointed butler poured into the two glasses a pale gold fluid, which creamed angrily to their edges, and then subsided until first one addition and then another set them boiling again.
Mrs. Légère took a glass in each hand and pressed the foremost into the passive palm of the girl.
"Well," said she, in a phrase new to Mary, "here we are."
Mary hesitated, the glass to her lips. She could hear the liquid whispering to her, and particles seemed to jump from it and sting her eyes.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Vine," said Max.
"But what kind of wine?" she weakly delayed.
"My dear," her entertainer informed her, "there is only one kind of wine in New York."
"It's tchampagne," hissed Max, as if the name were something too sacred to be spoken in the tone of ordinary conversation. "Un' this kind costs eighd dollars a bottle."
The words and the connotation had their lure. Champagne—she had heard of it as the beverage of the rich; and eight dollars for one bottle—the price of two winter dresses!
"Come on," smiled Mrs. Légère.
The girl still hesitated.
"Here's to the wedding!" prompted the hostess, and drank the entire contents of her glass.
Mary took a mouthful and swallowed it. At first she nearly choked. Then the fiery liquid brought fresh tears to her blue eyes, still smarting from the gas that had, a moment before, assailed them. But finally, there began to spread through her weary body a grateful glow, and, half in apology for what she feared had been a clownish exhibition, she looked up with red lips pleasantly parted.
"Now, wasn't I right?" inquired Mrs. Légère. "Don't you feel better already?"
"I—I believe I do, thank you," Mary admitted. "Anyhow, it is pretty good, I guess—when you get used to it."
She took, bravely and with an ease now gained by experience, a second drink, and, as she held the glass before her, Max gallantly replenished it.
A bell rang and the glum, ebony maid passed through the room, closing both doors behind her.
Mary, alarmed at this nocturnal interruption, started a little, but neither of her companions seemed to regard the incident as unusual.
"You look much better," Mrs. Légère asseverated. "Finish that glass, dearie, and you'll be all to the good again."
"Do you think I'd better take so much?"
Both Max and Mrs. Légère laughed unaffectedly.
"Vhy, there ain't enough here to hurt a baby," declared the former.
Mary accepted the assurance. She did not like the taste of the champagne, but she knew now that she had been very tired, and the wine sent fresh life and energy through her sleepy limbs. She emptied the glass and felt, joyfully, all her fears and regrets slipping for her. Doubt and difficulty were resolved into a shimmering mist, were overcome, were forgotten.
The black maid thrust her head in at the hall-doorway.
Mrs. Légère rose.
"Excuse me," she said, leaving the room. "I'll be right back."
Max, the instant she was gone, rose in his turn.
"I'm going to fool her," he said. "I'm going to graft her drink!"
He took the glass that his hostess had placed upon the table, poured more of the wine into it, replenished the glass of his now unresisting companion and sat down by her side, his arm stretched behind her.
Mary, with refreshed courage, broke the silence. She was feeling like a naughty child triumphantly successful in her naughtiness.
"Do you know, Max," she said, "I gave a jump when that bell rang? I thought for a minute they might be after us."
"Nix on that," chuckled Max. "They couldn't catch us if they tried. Here's to the runavays!"
They clinked glasses and drank.
"I guess," the young man pursued, "it was chust von of Rosie's boarders."
"Her boarders? Does she run a boarding-house?" There was a note of dignified scorn in Mary's climbing voice.
"Sure she keeps boarders."
"But I——" Mary hesitated. She was tasting wine for the first time in her life, she had been tired and nerve-wracked, and now, though thoughts danced through her mind with unfamiliar rapidity, utterance seemed to her suddenly, and somewhat amusingly, to have become too clumsy to keep pace with them. "I thought," she elaborately persisted, "that—you—said—she—was rich."
"She is," said Max; "only she's got a big house she can't all use herself. Lots of people fill their houses that vay in N'York."
Mary started to formulate a reply that came glistening along the dim horizon of her mind; but just then there was a light tap at the door.
"Come in!" called Max, and Mrs. Légère re-entered.
The precaution of her hostess forced a smile from Mary.
"Why did you knock?" she asked.
But Mrs. Légère shook her corn-colored locks wisely.
"I don't ever disturb lovers," she said.
She sat down opposite the pair she was addressing and, without noticing that Max had appropriated her glass, discovered a fresh one on the mantelpiece, poured herself a mouthful of the wine and then decanted the rest for Mary.
She had just put down the empty bottle when the bell rang a second time.
"Good Lord," she sighed, "there it goes again! These people will be the death of me, losing their keys and coming in at all hours. Never mind, Cassie," she called through the rear door, "I'll go myself!" And then, to Mary, she concluded: "I'll attend to this and then I'll come right back and send Max home and show you to your room."
She left them seated on the sofa, Max's dark hand encircling the soft, young fingers of the girl as gently as if he had been a rustic wooer.
"Shall I go graft another bottle from thekitchen?" he asked, grinning impishly.
Mary shook her russet head.
"Not for me," she said; "I guess I've had enough."
Max again refrained from insistence. Instead, he remained beside her, and fell once more into the story that she had learned best to like,—the beautiful pictures of the wonderful city, of the work-free life that she should lead there, and of their marriage on the fast approaching morning.
Gradually, as his voice ran smoothly on, the words he was then saying became confused in her brain with other words that he had said earlier in the evening. Her eyelids grew heavy. The mood of exhilaration passed, and a weariness far more compelling than that from which she had previously suffered stole upon her. Mrs. Légère was absent for an unconscionable time. The girl yawned.
"I wonder when she's comin' back," said Mary, "I'm—I'm awful tired."
Max's hand slipped to her unresisting head and pressed it down upon his shoulder. He had not yet so much as kissed her, and he did not kiss her now.
"Don't vorry about her," he said softly. "You're tired out. Chust close your eyes for a minute, Mary, un' I'll vake you vhen she comes."
His shoulder was very comfortable. She closed her blue eyes.
"You will wake me?" she murmured.
"Sure I vill," said Max. "I'll have you clean avake before she's through knockin'."
But he must have forgotten that promise, for when Mrs. Légère at last returned, he was still sitting there among the pillows, Mary's hair fallen over his green coat, her cheeks pinker than ever, and her girlish breast rising and falling rhythmically in sleep.
Clinging to a gigantic pendulum, Mary was swept through a mighty curve of roaring darkness, up from the black chasm of insensibility, and tossed, swaying over that frightful cliff, to the precipitous crag of consciousness. For what seemed many minutes, she tottered on the verge, dizzy, afraid. Then white knives, swift and sharp, slashed at her eyes and forced up the lids.
Defying closed blinds and drawn chintz curtains, the sunlight of noonday beat upon her face. She pulled something between her cheek and the leaping rays. Her hand trembled.
At first she could neither think nor recollect. The blows of an ax, regular, tremendous, were splitting her head. Her throat was hot and dry and choking. Her stomach crawled and leaped with nausea. From head to foot she was shaking with recurrent nervous chills that wracked a body of which every muscle was strained and sore.
Realization of the present came slowly, but it preceded all memory of the past. She found that the thing with which she had instinctively shaded her eyes was a sheet, and, as she lowered it, she saw, in a glance where the employment of sight was a separate pain, that she was lying among large pillows in a big brass bed, heavily mattressed. Beyond the foot of the bed her survey could not extend, because the foot was high and hung with a pink and green down quilt; but between two windows against the wall to her right, she saw a bureau, bearing a few scant toilet articles, and opposite, on the left, there was a washstand with a basin on the floor before it and, on its top, a pitcher, a soap-tray, a small brown bottle, and a little blue box bursting with white cotton.
This was not the room in which she had first fallen asleep.
With that isolated fact flashing like a message of disaster through her brain, she sat suddenly upright in the bed; but the room pitched before her like a boat in the trough of a storm on the river at home. A wave of sickness hissed over her, and she sank back among pillows repellantly scented.
Vaguely she realized that she must be in a room somewhere above the ground floor. Dimly she began to wonder how she had got up the stairs. What would the kindly Mrs. Légère think of her condition? And that which had happened—had it lasted for an hour or a night?
That which had happened—there memory, in a blinding blast, reasserted itself. What had been but half-wittingly accepted was now wholly known. Hot irons were branding upon her brain the full history of all that had occurred: the deeds for which she had at last learned the name, and the deeds that, even in her own frightened soul, were nameless. There was nothing—nothing of her, hand and foot, and mouth and eye and soul—that was not defiled.
For herself, for Max, but most of all for the hideous facts of life, she shook in physical disgust. Before the face of such things, what must birth and marriage mean? She opened her eyes, but she could not look at her silent witnesses; she shut her lids, but she saw, behind them, the hairy arms of a gorilla closing on her, to break her and bear her away. For one moment, all that she had loved she hated, and for the next, seizing his smiling reassurance as the one vow that could legalize what nothing could refine, all that she had come to hate she tried to force herself to love.
She understood now so much that she had never understood before: the whispered words of town gossip, the stray glimpses of lovers in the summer lanes, the cautions and the commands that had once so galled her in her home.
At the word, her mind swung back to far-away yesterday. She was sorry that she had been the cause—for she had been the cause—of the spilling of the stew. She was sorry that she had been so sharp with Sallie. She wished that she had washed the dishes less unwillingly. She still feared—she more than ever feared—the swaying bulk of masculinity that had been her father, but she began to see in him the logical result of forces that were themselves, as yet, beyond her ken; and she looked with a new and pitying vision upon the picture of her little, work-worn and care-marked mother stooping over the polished kitchen-stove.
Her breast tossed and her throat throbbed; but she was beyond tears. Painfully, slowly, yet with resolution, she struggled back to her sitting-posture in the bed.
In this position she found herself facing a long mirror hung against the opposite wall, and in the mirror she saw what was herself. With a low cry, she pulled loose the sheet and covered her nakedness.
That done, she looked again at the strange face that fronted her: a face the more strange because it was the intimate become alien, a ruin, an accusation. Framed in a tangle of dank hair, the cheeks, once pink, were chalky now, and splotched with red, the mouth that she had known only as full and firm, was loose and twisted; the eyes that had been blue, now circled with black, burned in blood-shot fields like coals of angry fire.
One impulse alone directed her: to find her clothes; to put them on; to return, as far as the mask of appearances would take her, to the self that she had been. In spite of aching head and quivering hands, she wrapped the sheet about her and, with infinite care, got from the bed. The floor seemed to sweep up to meet her, but she steadied herself against the wall and, each timid stride a separate agony, began to stumble about the room.
She looked for a clothes-closet or wardrobe, but there was neither. The only door was the door of exit, and the nearest chair was empty. In a corner she saw a pile of linen: laboriously she stooped and picked it up, unrolled a portion, and then, gasping in horror, tossed it away. On the other chair there lay a long kimona of crimson. She lifted it and found, neatly arranged below, a sheer cambric garment edged with coarse lace, two black silk stockings slashed with red, and a pair of slippers, high-heeled, with buckles of brass—for no reason that she could have formulated, the sight sickened her. She went to the bureau and tugged at its drawers, but all that she found was a single brown bottle, like that she had first observed on the washstand, filled with white tablets and labeled "Poison." Obviously, her clothes had been taken from the room.
In a panic of shame, she groped blindly for the door: she must call for Mrs. Légère. She grasped the knob and turned it—the door was locked.
Fear, mad and unreasoning, drove its spurs into her sides. Forgetting her nausea, heedless of her pain, she ran first to one window and then to the other, but the bowed shutters, though they admitted the light, would open for nothing beside: they were fastened with riveted loops of brass, and, looking through the small space between them, she could catch only a glimpse of the street far below. She tried to argue that the key might have fallen from the lock within the room, but she could not find it, and, the sheet dropping from her shoulders, she began to rattle at the knob, and then to pound upon the panels, her voice rising swiftly from a low call to a high, hysterical, frantic cry for help.
"Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère! Mrs. Légère!" she cried, and then as suddenly ceased, tilted against the door, and collapsed into a naked heap upon the floor.
All power of movement seemed to have slipped from her, but when there came a heavy footfall on the stair, a swish of skirts outside and the loud rasping of a key inserted in the lock, Mary leaped galvanically to her feet, gathered the sheet about her body, and flung herself upon the bed.
The door opened and closed behind Rose Légère, who promptly relocked it and slipped the key into the swelling bosom but half concealed by her dragon-spotted, baby-blue negligé.
"What in hell's the matter withyou?" she demanded.
A little more rotund of figure, a little looser in the cheeks, and more patently crayoned and powdered about the eyes, a little more obviously painted and a little older, she was still the woman of the brewery's advertisement. But her forehead was knotted in deep, angry wrinkles; her under jaw was thrust so far forward that the roll of fat beneath it was invisible, and her eyes snapped with malice.
Mary shrank back among the pillows.
"Weren't you yellin'?" persisted Rose. "Did you lose your voice doin' it? What in the hell's the matter with you, I say?"
With a sweep of her stout arm, she seized the girl's bare shoulder and shook it till Mary's teeth clicked like castanets.
"I'm not goin' to have any such racket in my house!" the woman asseverated, as she plied her punishment. "You've got to learn first-off to keep your mouth to yourself, and be dead sure if you don't I'll give you a real beatin'."
She tossed Mary from her, as if her victim had been a bundle of straw, and stood up again, arms akimbo, breathing scarcely beyond her normal speed.
Mary was half mad and wholly sick with dread. She wanted to cry out for rescue and dared not. She wanted to rise and try to force the door or break open the shutters, but she could not move. She could only lie there panting for breath, with her mouth gasping and her heart hammering at her breast. She had closed her eyes. She opened them just in time to see Rose, whose slippered foot had touched something on the floor, stoop, pick up, and place beside the key in her bosom, a crumpled purple-bordered handkerchief.
"Now then," said the woman in a tone that, if still hard, was at least less intense than its predecessor, "try to tell me what's the trouble, like somebody this side of Matteawan."
With a supreme lunge at courage, Mary got her voice.
"I want my clothes," she said dully. "And where's Max?"
"Your clothes ain't fit to wear," said Rose; "an' I don't know where Max is. What you need is breakfast."
"I want my clothes," monotonously repeated Mary. "I couldn't eat to save my life. Hasn't Max come back?"
But Rose did not seem to hear the question.
"Nonsense, honey," she said, her anger seeming now entirely passed. "Of course you must eat. I got up on purpose for it, and I've set that nigger cooking a perfect peach of a breakfast."
"I want my clothes."
Rose leaned over the bed and put a soothing hand upon her questioner's fevered forehead.
"Now don't lose your nerve, dearie," she advised. "I'm your friend—honest, I am. You rest awhile and eat a little, and then maybe we'll talk things over."
"He hasn't come yet?"
"No, he hasn't. But why are you lettin' that jar you? Perhaps he's sick, too. Perhaps he's had some kind of a scrap with his old man. How do I know what's hit him? He'll show up all right in the end and, till he does show up, you just make yourself at home here and don't bother. I'll take care of you."
Something in the woman's solicitude—or it may have been the quick and unexplained change from violence to tenderness—frightened Mary even more than the initial outburst had frightened her.
"I want to go home," she quavered.
"Sure you want to go home," Rose acquiesced, without moving a muscle. "But how can you go? Max told me you'd sent your people a note saying you'd hiked out with him to be married, and how can you go home until he gets back here and you can take him along and show the goods?"
Her tone was lightly argumentative, but it was also stolidly merciless, and it hurled true to its mark the shaft of conviction. Out of the yesterday, Mary heard the voice of her father that was the voice of a society rigidly shaped by the conditions of its own fashioning:
"Bay 'un thirty year old an' noot another sin ag'in 'un, I would beat 'un within a bare inch o' 'er deeth, an' turn 'un oot to live the life 'un had picked fur herself!"
She understood that statement now.
"I can go to Max's," she hazarded.
"To—where?"
"To Max's father's."
"Maybe you can; but it's a long trip to Hungary."
Mary answered nothing. Rose had only confirmed what the girl had for an hour feared.
"You see how it is," pursued Rose, reading Mary's silence with a practiced mind. "Better let me take care of you."
Mary's face was hidden. Again she felt New York as a malevolent consciousness, a living prison implacably raising around her its insurmountable walls. There was, she thought, nothing left her but the diminishing hope of Max's return.
"Now you will eat, won't you?" Rose was continuing.
Mary shook her head.
Rose patted quietly one of the clenched hands that lay close to her.
"Better do it, dearie," she said. "I'm your friend; remember that. You can have whatever you want."
Mary mastered what strength remained to her. She raised herself on her elbow.
"Then let me go!" she pleaded, extending an open palm like a beggar asking for a crust. "I don't care if my clothes is mussed. I don't care what'll happen afterward. Just let me go!"
"You're a fool," Rose made cool rejoinder. "Where'd you go?"
"I don't know?"
"What'd become of you?"
"I don't care."
"Well, you would care, all right, all right. You can't go home, and you've no clothes and no money and no references. You couldn't get work anywhere in New York, and you couldn't get away from New York."
"I——" Mary groped through the darkness of her soul. "I can do housework."
"Not without a reference you can't."
"I could go to some office——"
"If you went to any charity-joint, they'd throw you out because of what's happened to you."
"I could beg on the street if I had to."
"Do you think the men in this town give money for nothing to a good-looking girl? You could go on the street, that's what you could do."
The phrase was new to its hearer, but the tone explained it.
"Then," she stumbled forward, "I could go to the police. They'd help me. I could——"
But at that word Rose flew into a torrent of anger and abuse that dwarfed the former tempest.
"You could, could you?" she cried. "That's your game, is it, you sneaking little innocent? I'll bet you're a damn sight wiser than you let on. But you don't know this town: you can take that much from me. Go to the police! Go to 'em! The cops on this beat are my friends: if you don't believe it, I'll bring 'em in and introduce you. They're my friends, and so's the whole precinct my friends. Go to 'em! Go to 'em, and I'll have you pinched and locked up for bein' what you are!"
Mary had drawn away from the blast, but Rose's powerful fist caught her under the chin and sent her crashing down on the bed.
"You don't come that on me!" the jailer continued. "You've got your choice: you can stay here and live easy, or walk out and go to jail, and that's all you can do. Max ain't comin' back, and you always knew he wouldn't come back. You know what this house is as well as I do, and you've got to stay here and earn your keep. If you give one yip I'll have the cops in! You don't want to eat, hey? Well then, you shan't eat! You can lay there and starve, or you can knock on the door and get the best breakfast you ever had, all ready for you. Do what you please; but if you let out one yip I'll hammer the life out of you!"
She turned and left the room. She banged the door behind her, and Mary, in a swirling dream, heard herself again locked in her cell.
Through all the days that immediately followed—the days that were nights, and the nights that were red noondays—a thousand horrors, from subtle word to recurring experience, conjoined to assure to Mary the reality of her servitude. All of that first day, after Rose had left her with the dark blood oozing from her cut chin upon the scented pillows, she lay, like a wounded dog, now in a faint and then in a stupor, on the disordered bed. As the sunlight shifted and the shadows lengthened in the room, torpor gave way to reawakened fear, and she crawled into a corner and tried to hide herself, trembling, with chattering teeth, at every sound of laughter that rose from the lower floors, at every footstep upon the stair.
Thrice Rose returned. Each time she bore a steaming dish that, as the girl's physical pain grew less, assailed the nostrils with increasing poignancy. Each time Mary shook her stubborn russet head. And each time the visit ended in a beating.
Escape by door or window was out of the question; to attempt to raise an alarm was to invite fresh violence; and gradually grew the certainty that the situation was genuinely as the jailer had described it: that the street was worse than the house, and that Mary was her own prisoner. She found the bottle labeled "Poison," and bit one of the tablets, but she was young and afraid, and she spat the burning crumbs from her mouth. She did not dare to die, and when Rose came again to the room, her captive was too weak to refuse the broth that was fed her, as if she were a sick child, from a spoon.
"You're a dear girl, after all," said the mistress, as she administered the grateful food. "You do as I say and you won't never be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I'm your friend."
Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer.
"And now," Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink."
And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.
The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured.
It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary's cell and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key.
They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant frame—a younger Rose—the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary's would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak.
"'Ello!" she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like pomegranate seeds. "We have come to make the call."
Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself.
Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word.
But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke curling toward the ceiling.
"My name," she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, "eet ees Celeste, an' my good frien' here," she continued with an easy gesture of the cigarette, "she ees Fritzie—chust a bar-bar-ous German."
Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless.
"An' you' name?" pursued Celeste, "eet ees—what?"
Fritzie supplied the answer, speaking in a ponderous contralto.
"Her name is Mary," said she.
"Bien—a pretty name," Celeste rattled on, precisely as if her unwilling entertainer had made the response. "I like eet well; but"—and she studied with unobtrusive care the russet-framed, indignant face before her—"eet ees not so good as ees yourself. I t'ink—let me see—yaas: I t'ink I shall call you 'Violet.'—Violet, why you don't eat more een dees 'ouse?"
"I'm hardly ever hungry," said Mary.
"Not hongry?—Oh-h, but you mohst be hongry! Anyone so young mohst want to eat, and anyone so beautiful mohst eat so as not to loose the beauty.—Ees eet not so, Fritzie?"
The German girl smiled gently and nodded her blonde head.
"Ach, yes," she rumbled. "The liebchen!"
"No," insisted Mary. "I don't care about nothing. I have a headache all the time. I have one now."
Celeste jumped lightly to the floor: it was as if to uncoil her feet and to reach the door required but a single movement.
"Un moment!" she laughed. "I shall feex themal de têteimmediate!"
There was no time for remonstrance; the door closed upon her concluding word, and Mary was left there gazing into the stolid, sphinxlike face of the placidly smiling German. It was not a bad face, and soon Mary realized that it was a contented one.
Fritzie was returning her look with an equal curiosity.
"Are you vorried?" she finally inquired.
"No," lied Mary proudly.
"I dought you looked like vorried," the German continued. "Bud you should be nod. Dis iss a goot place. Dere are loads vorse blaces in New York dan dis: I know 'em."
She paused, but Mary's lips remained closed, her eyes fixed.
"You bed I know 'um!" Fritzie repeated. "Bud dis blace—vhy, ve haf de best meals, so goot nobody gould besser haf! I like dis blace."
A faint question shot into Mary's face. At once Fritzie answered it.
"Dat's righd. Listen: I gome over here two year ago in de steerage. Some of de vomen, men meet dem—oh, most all de nod-family vons—un' took dem to dese here intelligence office dat are only fakes, un' sold dem, vidout dere knowin' nussin' of it, fur ten un' fifteen dollar' each. Bud I vas careful. I get a real tshob.—Ach, himmel!"
She waved a broad palm in disgust.
"Id vas bad enough in de steerage mit all de sailor-mens kissin' you to-day un' kickin' you to-morrow; bud dat tshob of mine, dat vas de real limit! I gome over here because I vouldn't vork in de fields back home, bud in dat boarding-house vhere I get dat tshob, I get up at dree o'clock every mornin', because some of de mens vork in Jefferson Market, un' I haf to scrub, un' make de beds, un' help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes, un' sweep de whole house oud. Un' den till late at nighd I haf to help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes some more still. Vhenever I am sick, or late, or break von dish, or a boarder don' pay, I gets docked. Un' almost every veek I'm sick or late or break a dish or a boarder don' pay. My vages is d'ree dollar a veek, un' I never gets more as two-fifty—sometime, two—un' dat vill nod pay my clothes ad first, un' don' pay my doctor bills aftervard."
The story was told monotonously, without much show of emotion, but it was enough of itself to wring a word from the woman to whom it was addressed.
"You got sick?" asked Mary.
"Who vouldn't?" said Fritzie. "You bed I get sick, un' vhen I gome oud of de hospital, de young doctor—he'd been makin' grand lofe to me—he tell me I vas too nice a girl to vork my hands off fur nussin' a veek, un' he gif me his visitin' card vith a writin' on it to a voman he knowed, un' I quit un' vent dere."
She paused, but Mary was silent, and the German resumed:
"It vas a goot place, bud nod so goot as dis von. I stay a mont' till she move to Philadelphia. Den I vent to anozzer house, not so goot as dat first, fur two mont's till the voman die. Un' den, after some more, I gome here, pretty soon, to Miss Rose's. No"—she waved her thick hand toward the door through which Celeste had lately passed—"I'm nod like dat Frenchie. She's vhat Phil Beekman calls a 'gongenital,' vatever dat iss; I vork hard enough now, und I vanted to vork righd den; bud I tell you I could not stand it, dough I vas so strong. No, I'm glad I gome here."
She leaned back upon her elbow.
"Now, dis Celeste——" she began, but the French girl, just then entering, came with an air that was a sufficient explanation of her never complex temperament.
"Voilà!" she smiled, holding aloft a long glass filled by a dull green liquid. "Let the leetle girl tak some of thees wheech I meex for her."
Before she had well realized what she was doing, Mary had accepted the glass.
"What is it?" she asked weakly.
"Absinthe," replied Celeste.
"It smells like licorice," said Mary.
"Ah, but no; eet ees not that. You try thees, an' then you can eat."
"But I don't think I want to eat."
"Poof! That ees folly! See, now, I meex thees myself—I myself havefrappéeet. Ees eet what you call polite that you say 'no' to me? Say, now: ees eet?"
Involuntarily Mary smiled. It was a rueful little smile, but it was a smile of exhausted consent.
"It won't hurt me?"
"Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache, of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve."
For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her they turned no key upon their exit.
So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of visitors—clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters, thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone filthy of mind—the green government note was their certificate of qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken? She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that—and she must not care.
And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims' brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was no more than supine acquiescence.
Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board andlingeriedemanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.
With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope of Max's return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic destiny.
Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.
And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release. Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source from which she could conceive of their coming.
The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of her own age.
"Listen," she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, "I want you to do me a favor."
"Anything you say, Violet," he chuckled.
"Don't talk so loud, then. I—I want you to take me out of here."
The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered bewilderment.
"Like me as much as that, do you?" he sparred.
"You don't understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was——"
He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek.
"It's not me that don't tumble to the facts," he said; "it's you. I told you I was a family man. I couldn't put you anywhere."
"I don't mean that. I mean——"
But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.
"You girls!" he laughed, in palpable deception. "You all think I've got a lot of money. Why, there ain't no use thinkin' you can bleed me. I'm a business man, an' I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn't rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street."
Violet's answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should be so grossly misinterpreted—these things sent a red rage rushing to her now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs.
"Get away from me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Get away! I wouldn't have you for a gift!"
The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm. He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already becoming accustomed.
"You come down here," he courageously shouted, "and I'll give you the worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I'll have it pinched—you see if I don't! You can't make an easy thing out o' me! You've robbed me, anyhow. You'll get what's comin' to you!"—And he ended with the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed.
Rose ran out from the parlor.
"Shut up, you!" she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that nevertheless compelled obedience. "What's the trouble, Violet?"
Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she was also afraid.
"You heard him," she gasped.
"Yes," snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former timbre, "and you heard me, too!"
The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave.
"Well," said Rose, "tell me what she done."
Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue.
"He says he's been robbed!" she called down the stairs. And then she ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered but could not conceal. "Search me!" she commanded. "If you think I took a cent of yours, search me!"
She was a vision that brought conviction with it.
Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had, perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man's hat from the hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently propelled him through it.
"You're drunk," she said, "an' you'd better get out before I call the cop. There ain't no badger business in this house, an' don't you forget it!"
She shut the door, and turned calmly to Violet.
"How much did you get?" she asked.
"Why, Miss Rose, you know——"
"I mean what did you touch him for? You mustn't play that sort of game here: it gives the house a bad name. But just this once we'll divide up an' not say anything more about it."
Violet's eyes opened wide.
"I didn't steal a penny," she declared.
Rose regarded her with a softening countenance.
"Word of honor?" she asked.
"Word of honor," vowed Violet.
"All right, but even if you do touch them, you mustn't ever let themthinkyou do. A man'll forgive you for hurtin' him anywhere but in his pocket-book.—You're all worked up, dearie. Come on out to the kitchen an' have a bottle of beer."
As they were pouring the drinks, a heavy foot sounded in the outside passageway and a careful four knocks followed upon the rear door.
"That's Larry," said Rose, and drew the bolt.
A policeman's hat was poked through the doorway, followed by a flushed, genial Irish face, and a tall, hulking body in regulation uniform.
"I'm terrible dry," grinned Larry.
"Then you've come to the right shop," was Rose's greeting. "We're just havin' a little drop ourselves. Larry, this is my new friend, Violet."
The policeman grinned again, and sat carefully upon the edge of a kitchen-chair, in evident fear that his bulk might prove too great for it.
"Glad to know you," he said.
"Larry's on this beat nights," Rose explained to Violet, "an' him an' the lieutenant look after us—don't you, Riley?"
"Well, what use is a frind if he don't take care of yez, Miss Rose? We do the bist we can."
"I know that.—What'll it be, Larry? We're takin' beer, but there's wine on the ice if you want it."
"I'll just have a small drap of liquor, ma'am, please," said Riley.
Rose poured and handed to him a glass of whiskey.
"When you came by," she inquired, "did you see a fat man throwin' fits in our gutter?"
"Why, I did not. Have ye been afther havin' a rumpus the night?"
"Oh, no—only that fat little fellow that keeps the jewelry-store around the corner. He was drunk, an' I threw him out. If he tries to get gay, let me know, will you?"
"Of course I'll let ye know—an' here's to your very good health, ma'am an' miss.—But you may rist aisy; that there won't be no throuble."
"I know that: he's too scared of his wife.—Have another, won't you?"
The officer rose.
"No, thank ye kindly," he said. "I wanted but the drap, ma'am."
"And how are Mrs. Riley and the children?"
Larry's face became a web of smiling wrinkles.
"Grand," he said; "the auld woman's grand—you ought to see her in the new silk dress I bought 'er the day—all grane wid fancy trimmin's from Six' Avenoo. An' the kiddies is thrivin'. Cecilia'll soon be havin' to go to work an' help the family funds, she's that sthrong and hearty, an' young Van Wyck is such a divil that the teacher throwed him out of school. He's licked all the b'ys in his class, an' I think he'll end as a champeen pug."
He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed, there came into the younger woman's eyes the question that she would not have dared to ask.
"Yep," nodded Rose, "that's my week's pay for what they call protection."
"Isn't he afraid to take it?" Violet, thus encouraged, inquired.
"The man above him isn't afraid to take two-thirds of it," said Rose, "an' the best of it goes past him to the district boss—it's the regular system with the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain't afraid; an' if you ever tried to live on a copper's pay, you'd soon be afraid not to take it."
Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to be had from the law.
Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true.
"It's all right enough to want to get out of here," said her sagest adviser, who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; "but how are you going to live after you get out? You can't go home; you haven't got any trade; you can't cook; without a recommendation you can't get even a job at general housework or in a factory."
He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose's and, in his own little world, a position of some influence.
"You get me out," said Violet, "an' I'll do the rest."
But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry—she saw that; but what could he do?
It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.
Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle—the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.
"After all," he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through it of his long, nervous fingers—"after all, you see, you and I are in the same boat. You can't get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I daren't get out because I can't swim."
Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.
"But anyway," he insisted, "you can do one thing that I can't."
She clutched at the straw.
"What's that?" she asked.
"You can get help from shore."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean that if you'll write a letter home, I'll mail it."
She shook her head: the straw crumpled in her fingers.
"There's no use of that," she said.
"Of course there is. After all, your father's your father, you see, and I don't know a father that wouldn't help his daughter out of the sort of mess you've got into."
"I know one," said Violet, grimly.
"Not till you try him, you don't."
"Yes, I do. If you was in my place would your father——"
"Which father?" laughed Beekman. "My one won't have anything to do with me because I live with the other, and the other won't have anything to do with me because I'm the son of his predecessor.—You take my advice and write home."
"I'd never get an answer."
She spoke in an even tone, but there was no mistaking the tragedy that underlay it.
Beekman looked at her and blinked queerly. He brought his fist down smartly among the jangling glasses.
"It's a rotten shame!" he said. "A dirty, rotten shame! Why, don't you know that that yid who got you into this makes a business of such things? Don't you know there's a whole army of them that do? I wish to the Lord I could do something, but there isn't a policeman or a magistrate in the city who'd listen to me—they know too well where they get the jam for their bread and butter—and I can't get a job for even myself, let alone you!"
She had not, however, heard his last sentence. Her blue eyes wide, she was hanging on his reference to Max.
"A business?" she repeated. "Do you mean that men make money—that way?"
"Of course I do." The film passed suddenly from Beekman's eyes, leaving them alert with purpose. "Look here," he said, "there is one thing I can do, and I don't know anything that I'd enjoy more: you give me that little kyke's name, and I'll push his face out of the back of his head!"
Then there happened a strange thing. She had long guessed and now she knew, but guessing or knowing, she would not believe. As much for her own sanity as for Max's safety, she lied.
"The name he gave me," she said, "wasn't his right one. It wasn't even one he mostly used. And I never knew no other."
Beekman raised his hands in more than mock despair, and got up to go.
"Well," he declared, "I don't know what I can do for you. If I got into any scandal, it would punch the last hole in my meal-ticket."
Violet, who was becoming accustomed to such replies, smiled kindly.
"I don't want you to get into no trouble for me," she said.
"I know you don't, and I couldn't be any use if I did. But I'll promise you this: I'll keep my eyes open, and if anything does turn up, I'll be Johnny-on-the-spot, all right."
"Thank you," said Violet.
"And look here," pursued Beekman, "I know that it's all rot to expect you to walk out of here without friends or a job; I know that, unless you've got one or the other, you're just simply in jail here; but if I can't get you anything, there must be those who can. Why don't you talk to the coal-men, or the gas-inspectors, or—I tell you, I've seen that tow-headed Dutchman who leaves the beer here. He looks straight, and he stops at the door. Why don't you talk to him? He's the sort that would know of a job for—for——"
Beekman hesitated, blushing like a schoolboy.
"For my sort?" asked Violet. "Maybe he is. Thank you. Anyhow I'll see."
And she did see. When Beekman left her, pressing into her hand the last piece of money that he would have for a week, he gave her at the same time so much of hope. Those who seemed rich could not help her; she would appeal to those who were poor.
She was up early and in the kitchen the next morning at the hour when she knew the brewery-wagon would stop outside, and she sent the ebon Cassie on an errand to the corner pharmacy. The maid had scarcely closed the door before Violet was summoned to open it to the German of whom Beekman had spoken.
Philip had observed well. The brewery's driver, who stood whistling in the areaway, was a short, stocky man with the neck and arms of a gladiator and the round, smiling face of a child. His blue overalls and dark cloth cap accentuated the fairness of his hair, and his round inquiring eyes were alive with continual good-humor. He had just piled a half-dozen cases of beer beside the doorway.
Violet, in her crimson kimona, took from the table the money that had been left for him.
"Good-morning," she said as she handed him the bills.
He accepted the money with his left hand and, with his right, raised his cap from his clustering curls. His lips ceased whistling, half regretfully.
"Goot-mornin'," he replied, smiling.
"Won't you come in and have a drink?" asked Violet, adopting Rose's form of salutation.
"No, t'ank you," the German shook his head. "I neffer trinks nussing bud beer."
"Well," said Violet, "we have lots of that now."
"Und I neffer trink dot till tinner."
There was an awkward pause. The German, not knowing how to leave without seeming rudeness, was shifting his weight from one heavily shod foot to the other. The woman, uncertain how to say the words she wanted to say, remained with her hand upon the knob.
"You don't?" she awkwardly repeated.
"No, und so I t'ink—I t'ink I besser be goin'," he hurriedly concluded, and began to turn on his heel.
The necessity for quick action roused her.
"Wait," she said. And then, as he faced her again in mute wonder, she pressed another bill into his hand. "I want you to help me," she continued. "I want to get a job somewhere, and I don't want Miss Rose to know nothing about it."
He looked from the bill to her, still wondering.
"So-o?" he responded.
"Yes, I want work—some other kind of work—and I thought perhaps you might"—her voice faltered—"might know of some kind."
The German's mobile face underwent a quick change. First astonishment and then something not far removed from tears came into his childlike eyes. He crushed the bill in his big red fist.
"So-o?" he repeated.
"Yes, I—you understand that I must have friends or a job if I am to get away from here, and I thought you might know of something."
The German bobbed his curls.
"I know dot right vell," he said; "bud I don' know no tshob chust now."
Violet's face darkened.
"All right," she answered, "I only hoped maybe——"
"Look here, miss," the driver cut in with a note of ready feeling in his voice. "You mean all dot?"
"All what?"
"About geddin' ozzer—aboud a real tshob."
"If I had the clothes and a place I'd go this minute."
"Vell, den, listen. I've chust god a new blace; I'm goin' to be bar-tender ofer on Segond Avenue, bud I gan send back here if I hear anysing.—Your name?"
"Violet—just Miss Violet."
"All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis dan you maybe t'ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex' Sunday I dake my girl to Coney, und den ve'll dalk sings ofer und ve'll see vhat Katie says."
In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet's face kindled.
"You're good," she said simply, "and I'll trust you."
"Oh, I make nussing," replied the German, smiling once more, "bud chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing."
Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the topmost beercase.
That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming Second Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been a workday morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.
To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman in mortal agony or mortal fear.
Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs.
That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."
Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."
Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs—the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type—the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention; perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light gash in his upper lip.
He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror, cracking the glass across one corner.
"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!"
And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him through the darkened hallway.
To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets of carnations—one pink and the other white—and boarded a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead.
In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:
Here In PeaceLies The Body OfWlLHELMINA HOFFMANN,Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann,Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia,Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907.———"Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also."
The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language of Luther, as she had taught it him.
"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay She said it."
And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.
Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps from the subway at Park Place—the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.
"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"
"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue.
The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.
"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train vas lade from the cem't'ry in."
She understood and smiled.
"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.
"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe——"
"Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann—and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!"
They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning crowd.
"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin ad my new tshob."
"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think——"
There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train.
In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.
Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself with the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched her in frank admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her head, in that pose which, of all others, is the most becoming to her sex.
"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling, sidelong, blue glance at him.
But before her the strong man was a timid child.
"Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.
Katie laughed again.
"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a Castle Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to ask me now, I wonder."
Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.
"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking of brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my new tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good reason, gan dere?"