"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's one reason."
"Vat is 't?"
"Its name is Father Kelly."
"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"
"I will so."
"Und I haf to gome into your church, und—und all dem d'ings?"
"You do that."
Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they had held many a time before, and every time she would give him no answer to his suit until he should surrender in this particular. Now, however, he considered himself about to set foot upon the highroad to prosperity, and the prosperous can ill afford to skimp magnanimity.
"Allrighd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with certain mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to enter: "I'm a strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I gan stand dot too. I'll do it."
He took her by surprise.
"Promise?" she asked.
"Sure I bromise."
"No backin' out whatever happens?"
"No packin' oud."
"Well, God bless you then."
There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely, hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German had brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and she could think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he was so honestly anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and more to her from the first evening when he had seized her as she was falling from the platform of a surface-car that had started too quickly on its way, she had seen enough of the warfare with poverty in her own family to resolve that she would not marry until she could contribute her share to the wages of the resulting household, and now she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood of obtaining one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because she must not cry, she smiled.
Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.
"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.
Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:
"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."
"But Katie"—he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it—"you don' mean dot! You said—you dold me—you bromise——"
He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain silent. She faced him once more.
"It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious. "Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for—you said yourself it might end in a café o' your own—an' to get there you'll be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that."
He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down.
"Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine for a quarter if you hold your nose."
The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head.
"But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own. I don' vant a gafé: I vant you."
She smiled again.
"You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an' then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'—when she could get it—an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know it."
While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the story of Violet.
He spoke simply, which is to say forcibly, and he had an understanding, and therefore sympathetic, audience. Katie's face immediately softened.
"The poor child!" she murmured. "An' don't I know what it is? I've seen them go under, here one an' there another, hungry or overworked, every mother's daughter of them. There was Molly Ryan, as good a girl as you'd find in a day's search of the parish, left alone with no one to put clothes on her back; an' pretty Agnes Donovan—out of work for four months—her as died in the City Hospital; an' Giulia Fortuni, whose father kept a fruit-stand by the Grand Street "L" station.—What can we do for her, Hermann-boy?"
"Dot's vat I vanted to ask you, Katie," said Hoffmann. "She has to hof friends und vork first of all."
"Friends she has right here; but work she must have whether or no. I begin me old search for meself in the mornin', an' I'll keep eye an' mouth ready to get a job for her."
Cynically hopeless and city-wise in regard to her own chances, Katie's Celtic soul warmed to something of Hermann's optimism in the cause of a sister. She began planning at once, and when the train drew up outside the tunnel-shed, she had the absent Violet established as a cloak-model in the big Lennox Department-Store, and engaged to marry a floor-walker.
And then Coney—Coney the sweetly reasonable in price and the extravagantly generous in provision—crowded out of her mind, for that day, all thoughts save the thought of itself.
A great many years ago—oh, a very great many years ago!—when you were a little boy, your father took you to the county-fair. You remember it, even yet, as a purple day in the glad calendar of your childhood: the blood cattle, the show of farm implements, the prize pumpkins, the side-shows with their fat ladies and skeleton gentlemen, and the suave individual that put a bean under a cup and then, for a dollar, showed your shrewd parent that it was under another. But above all you remember the crowd. Never before had you seen so many people in one place, never realized that there were so many people in the world; and even now, out of the past, you can hear an awed voice saying:
"There are five thousand persons here."
Well, back home, the county-fair, thank heaven, continues to grow. Cattle are sleeker and pumpkins larger; the fat ladies weigh more and the thin gentlemen less; the shell-game, in one form or another, aids the progress of agriculture by making five dollars grow where only one grew before. But, in the meantime, the ugly, delightful "amusement-park" has brought the county-fair to the city-limit, and nearly three hundred thousand persons go to Coney Island every day.
Early in the season though they were, Katie and Hermann no sooner stepped upon that Surf Avenue which is at once the heart and the aorta of the Island, than they felt, as there they always felt, that they had entered upon the Land of Carnival. The broad, but crowded, way was dancing with the noise of festival, with the clangor of brass bands, the cries of venders, the smell of the circus, the tang of the sea.
Here, from mixed drinks to mixed music, went not the thugs and blacklegs, the pallid men and the painted women that would have filled such a place had it been within the borough of Manhattan. In their stead here drove the cars of generally stolid people of business and leisure, and here, above all, walked the workers of the city, the weaker sex and the stronger, seeking holiday. The full-portion hat on the half-portion girl is as familiar to Surf Avenue as to the Waldorf palm-room; care is erased from the tablets of memory. On Coney there is no To-morrow.
The laughter of the hundreds of children rang out no more freely than did that of the thousands of their elders. Mothers with babies in their arms were young again. Stately blondes and languorous brunettes, gracefully seated on the wooden steeds of the score of merry-go-rounds, rode with a dignity unsurpassed in Hyde Park or the Bois, and never a cowboy at a round-up was more adventurous than the young East-Sider mounting a hired horse upon the Pony Track.
Every nook had something to sell, and Katie had her day's work in keeping Hermann from stopping at each booth. There were miles of scenic railways on all of which he wished to ride; there were scores of panorama that tempted him with pictures of every disaster from the San Francisco fire to the Messina earthquake. There were the familiar canes waiting to be caught with the familiar ring: there were the familiar chutes to be shot, and the familiar "galleries" where the rattle of rifles recalled the battle of the Yalu. Down on the beach an army was shouting in the surf, and on every hand along the jostling, good-natured street were peanuts and popcorn, "crispettes" and "hot dogs." Upon dozens of polished floors dancers were slowly revolving with a marvelous ability to distinguish between the time of their own orchestra and that of the band in the café opposite, and everywhere were picture machines and machines that sang.
Cheap it doubtless was, but cheap also in the sense of small cost. Except in the larger cafés, the ordinary drinks sold at only five cents the glass, and the glasses were not an insult to the drinkers' capacity. Hermann and Katie had their beer at one of the smaller places. They dined for twenty-five cents apiece, without tips, at the "Home-Made-Lunch-Room"; they were twirled and buffeted in a swiftly revolving car down a series of precipitous canvas chasms, paying five cents apiece for the privilege of the shaking-up that, at home, Hermann would have resented with a blow; and they chose the last seat in the last car of a steep gravity railway, where a man must hold himself aboard with one arm and his shrieking sweetheart aboard with the other.
It was all blatant, all tawdry, all the apotheosis of the ridiculous, all essentially America-at-play; but when, at night, in the electric-train shooting through the warm darkness, the pair returned citywards, it was toward their own hard-earned and with difficulty retained places of shelter that they were going, like children after a strenuous holiday of make-believe with school to begin upon the morrow; and if, in most of the seats, as in that occupied by Katie and Hermann, girls slept with their heads resting frankly upon sleeping masculine shoulders, it was but a rest before conventional partings at home-doorways, the play-day ended for the lonely couch, and the work-day soon to begin.
In that company of the ignoble army of martyrs over which circumstances had given Rose Légère command, there were five members. Besides Mary, who now was Violet, Celeste, whom ancient conditions had temperamentally predetermined for such service, and Fritzie, who had chosen a partly moral slavery as less onerous than a wholly economic servitude, there was the highly colored Englishwoman Evelyn, who regarded her present station as one of the descending steps inevitable for everyone that set foot upon the way they all were treading, and Wanda, a dark little Russian Jewess, who, as soon as she had landed at the South Ferry from Ellis Island, had fallen into the hands of the slave-traders, and had thenceforward persistently striven upward to the place she now inhabited.
For the maintenance of her authority upon these and their patrons, Rose, unlike some of her fellows, did not have to depend upon the assistance of any man quartered in the house. To the discipline of the inmates her system of charge for clothes, food, and shelter was admirably suited; for the regulation of the visitors the generally nearby person of big Larry Riley, the policeman, amply sufficed. One other outsider seemed, however, to have a regular connection with the establishment, and this person early excited Violet's curiosity.
Dressed in the extreme of fashion, as fashion is known from Fourteenth Street southward, his gray, almost white, suits always fresh from the pressing-iron, and his flowered tie and ever evident gay silk handkerchief always glaringly new, this dapper, dark young man was unmistakably Neapolitan. His glossy black hair clustered tight over his forehead; his brown skin shone as if rubbed with oil; his eyes danced like merry, but sinister, bits of coal, and his too red lips were continuously, loosely, patterned to a smile that was more nearly contemptuous than good-humored.
For at least a part of every evening this Italian, who always entered the house from the rear and without the formality of knocking, sat in the kitchen, drinking his beer with infinite leisure and, in the intervals of her discussions in the parlor, condescended to talk, lazily, with Rose.
"Who is he?" asked Violet, on what was perhaps the fifth of his visits that she had happened to observe.
Celeste, to whom the question had been addressed, shrugged her smooth shoulders.
"He ees Angel," she answered.
"He don't look like one."
"No, not mooch, but hees name, eet ees that: Rafael Angelelli. Eef he had the moostache, he would be almost 'andsome."
"Rose acts like she thought a good deal of him as he is."
"But why not?"—Celeste raised her heavy brows. "'e ees 'er sweed'eart."
"He is?" repeated Violet, who could not yet understand the masculine lover that would batten upon his conquest. "I notice he pretty nearly lives here, an' he never pays out a cent, an' never seems to work at anything, an' he always wears good clothes."
"My child, truly! That is the reason that I have tol' you: 'e ees 'er sweed'eart."
"Well, it's queer," said Violet, remembering another caller to whom, though he was a less frequent visitor, Rose was equally attentive. "I don't think he's half as nice as that fellow who comes here in a taxi—the one that always wears a dress-suit an' sits in the back parlor. He's a swell."
But at this Celeste grew enigmatic.
"Oh," she said, "that ees deeferent"—and would say no more.
Nevertheless, it happened, not long afterward, when the black Cassie was absent on her "evening out," that Violet, descending the back stair in unshod feet to steal from the ice-chest—as was her companions' custom—a quiet bottle of the beer that she had come to like, was brought to a palpitating stop by the sound, just then, of Rose's and Angel's voices from the kitchen but a few steps below her. The pair were plainly engaged in an important conversation, the woman hurried and frightened, the man cold and obdurate.
"Naw," said the Neapolitan; "I maka naw move out o' deesa house."
"But he's coming in now, I tell you," Rose almost supplicated. "He'll be in the back-parlor in half a minute, an' I've got to go in an' talk to him."
"Olla righta; you go; I go alonga you."
"You can't do that; you know you can't. You know how things are without my tellin' you. What makes you so stubborn all of a sudden?"
"I don' lika dees Meesta Wesley Dyker."
"That's no reason why you should double-cross me."
"'E's too mucha de fina gentleman."
"I don't care what he is; you ought to know what I am. Do you want to tear up your own meal-ticket and throw down your easy money?"
"Easy mon'? You maka de joke!"
The woman's voice noticeably changed.
"Do you mean you want some more coin?" she asked.
The Italian did not answer.
"Because I won't give it to you," Rose continued, anger darting into her still cautiously lowered voice. "I know what you're doing with it. I know you had a girl from a department store out at shows twice last week, an' the second time she had a new dress on."
Somewhere in the front of the house a door closed heavily.
"'E's comin'," the Italian coolly commented. "Do you wanta that I go along in with you?"
As quickly as it had entered, all the anger fled from Rose's voice, and Violet, accustomed to it in command or at satisfied ease, was amazed now to hear it swaying between terror and genuine affection.
"I didn't mean it!" Rose pleaded. "I didn't believe it when I heard it an' I don't believe it now, I know how much it costs a fellow to live. Here's another ten-spot. I—I—you know how I hate Dyker, and Angel, you know that I love you!"
The listener heard Angelelli rise and heard even his voice soften, though probably less with affection than with gratification.
"Now you talka lika de person witha gooda sense," he said. "Don' you listen to de beega lie no more. I lika you—nobody but only you. You are de gooda girl."
There was a whispered word more, and then the kitchen door was softly shut and Violet heard Rose, going into the next room, welcome that Wesley Dyker who, Violet had, to Celeste, so favorably compared with Angel.
The woman on the stairs hesitated. She wanted to pursue her eavesdropping, and she knew that she could regain her room, should the doorbell ring, before she was likely to be missed; but she was afraid that, in the maid's absence, Rose might return to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and discover her. Accordingly she waited the few minutes that were required for the first of such errands, and, those over, crept forward to the lighted keyhole, ready to retreat at the first intimation of danger.
She gave her eye precedence over her ear, and, as it chanced that Dyker was sitting directly in the limited shaft of her vision, she was enabled to get what was her first careful view of him.
A man but little beyond thirty, Wesley Dyker's face, which might once well have been handsome, was beginning to show that flaccid whiteness which must later light to red and glow to purple. What his mouth might have told, a crisp, short, brown mustache concealed, but the regularity of his other features lost much of its effect because of eyes that, though large and steel gray, were heavy-lidded and calculating. Nevertheless, Violet's estimate of the man was not without justification. He spoke easily and well in the voice of education; his excellently made evening clothes displayed a figure that had not yet lost its admirable lines, and even the face—to one that either had known it during its gradual changes, or to one that lacked a fund of experience for purposes of comparison—was not wanting in attraction.
To the sturdy Rose, whose hand he held and who was looking at him with what she patently believed to be a tender expression, he was speaking with a certain formal politeness that was novel in the ears of the listener.
"You think you can get it?" Rose was asking.
"I think that I have something more than a fighting chance," replied Dyker.
"What does O'Malley say?"
"He is at least as liberal in his promise to me as he is in his promise to the other man."
"And the big chief doesn't yip?"
"My dear Rose, you should know, by this time, enough of New York politics to realize that the first qualification of a big boss is to hold his tongue, and that the present incumbent, whatever his other shortcomings, can always keep quiet as long as he has no pen in his hand."
Rose freed her hand to pour the wine.
"May I smoke?" asked Dyker.
"You always ask me that, and you always know you can."
He bowed and, drawing a cigarette from a plain gun-metal case, lighted it.
"Of course," he pursued, "I expect to win—I always expect to win, because failure may fight its way to a perch on any man's banner, but it's sure to lodge on the standard of the man that sits and waits for it. But I can't be sure of O'Malley."
"I guess whatever headquarters orders will go with him, all right."
"On the surface, perhaps; but, if he wants to, he can have his own candidate run on an independent ticket, and then he can quietly knife me at the polls."
"Would he have the nerve?"
"It is precisely what he did election before last. I am sure of that, and yet nobody has ever been able to prove it. That is where I look for your help."
Rose took his hand again, and pressed it reassuringly.
"I always take care of my friends," she smiled, "and you sure have been good to me. Where do I come in on this game?"
"Just yet you don't have to come in at all. It may be that everything will be honest and above-board—I trust it will—and in that case you need not disturb yourself."
"But if it ain't?"
"If it isn't,"—he looked at her kindly, but keenly, from under his heavy lids—"I shall want you to let me know just as soon as O'Malley begins to make preparations for registering voters from this house."
Rose bent forward and kissed him lightly on his flaccid cheek.
"That's easy," she laughed.
"Perhaps, but if you have to go so far at first, you will have to go farther afterward."
"An' now?"
"Just now I want you to keep your ears open for gossip. You are in a position to hear a lot: in this house men talk that are dumb outside."
"Who are you thinkin' of?"
"Several people, friends of O'Malley's. There's one cheap little camp-follower who, I am told, gets around here rather frequently. I don't suppose that he's of enough importance to know much, but he would be worth watching."
"What's his name?"
Dyker filled Rose's glass, and poured more wine for himself.
"Angelelli," he answered.
From the darkened kitchen, Violet, her eye now fast to the keyhole, drew a short breath, and watched Rose as the sophisticated spectator watches an emotional actress when she approaches her "big scene." But Rose, still the primitive Teuton of the brewery-calendar, never quavered.
"Rafael Angelelli?" she inquired.
"I think so. He is a little Italian loafer with no work and plenty of money. You know him, of course?"
"Sure I know him. He's in an' out of here all the time. We call him 'Angel'."
"Hum. Well, there are angels and angels, so that name may fit him as well as any other. There may be nothing to it, but he does hang about O'Malley a good deal, and it might be worth your while to find out what, if anything, he knows."
"That's easy," purred Rose. "Here's success."
The pair clinked their glasses, and drained them.
"And—Rose?" began Dyker.
"Yes?"
"Neither this little fellow nor any of his crowd knows about—us?"
Rose's placid smile was eminently convincing.
"I guess I know my business," she said.
"I dare say you do. Only don't let him know that you know mine."
"Trust me for that, Wes' dear."
"Because, if O'Malley could get hold of it, he would have a rather formidable weapon."
"He doesn't know I ever set my lamps on you."
"Good," said Dyker; "and he mustn't know it for a good many months to come. Now, then, let's have just one pint more between us—only a pint—my dear—and——"
But the woman at the keyhole waited to hear no more.
When that injudicious grasping of the third-rail had snuffed out the low, but stubborn, flame that a foreman had known as "Number 12," and a few score of human beings had called Michael Flanagan, his wife, Bridget, had looked up from her washtub long enough to refuse the offer of a hundred dollars, made by the company's claim-adjuster as full payment for whatever inconvenience she might have been occasioned by her husband's demise. One of those very modern young lawyers, whose livelihood depends upon their study of the newspapers, and the speed of their feet, had arrived at the Flanagan tenement ahead of the adjuster. He had accepted a contingent fee of ten dollars, and thereafter, being defeated by the company's expert attorneys in a lower court, refused, as usual, to appeal unless the widow handed him a further amount of money that was wholly beyond her reach. So Irish-eyed Katie was put to work, as she should in any case have been put, and Mrs. Flanagan went on with her washing.
The girl's first position was in a second-hand clothing shop on Sixth Avenue, where she went to work at eight in the morning and quit at half-past ten at night. The stock-in-trade of this place was largely revived ball-gowns and opera cloaks, bought, for the most part, from women of so much means as to pretend, at least, that they never wore the same gown twice, and yet of too much thrift to give their discarded clothes to charity. Its patrons were persons that the original wearers of the gowns would have blushed to meet. And its proprietress was a little lynx-eyed, hook-nosed person whose sole object in life was to induce the former class to sell for less than they had intended and to persuade the latter class to buy for more than they could afford.
The virtue of this method she impressed, by precept and example, upon her six girl-clerks, and she raised their profits as they raised their prices of sale. She told, with a fine pride, how she had once so conducted a negotiation that a Riverside Drive husband had paid her nearly as much for a dress that he was buying for a Forty-seventh Street acquaintance as he had first paid for the same dress when it was made for his wife.
But, commissions to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Katie nor her companions could earn anything beyond a bare living wage. The lure of clothes was always before them; their work was the handling and the praising of beautiful fabrics beautifully arranged. They were told that they might themselves buy of these at what the proprietress called a mere nothing above the cost price, but what was really a considerable increase over it; they wanted to look their best among their friends, and their employer insisted that they look their best to her patrons; there was not one of the half-dozen clerks that was not continually from fifteen to a hundred dollars in her mistress's debt.
That Katie, like many another making the same fight, escaped further contamination, that the contrast between the oppression of the hook-nosed owner on the one hand and the apparent ease and luxury of her customers on the other, did not tempt her,—for opportunities were plenty,—from the station of clerk to purchaser, was due in part to her own sturdy character and to the accident of her own Celtic temper. Other girls there were who were not so destined, but Mrs. Flanagan's weary feet one day refused to support their possessor, and Katie, knowing well the need of ready money for the doctor and the druggist, neglected to purchase, even on credit, an expensive black walking-suit that was repeatedly called to her attention.
"Say, you'd look just grand in this," said the psittacidic proprietress, Mrs. Binks.
She held the dress extended, putting its best points to the light. And all the other clerks echoed:
"You'd look just grand in it, Miss Flanagan!"
"I would that," replied Katie, who was as taciturn to her employer as she was loquacious to everybody else.
"Why don't you take it?" asked Mrs. Binks.
"I don't just like it," lied Katie.
Mrs. Binks blinked her bead-like eyes. That the girl's reply could be true was inconceivable.
"Try it on," she suggested.
"Where's the use? I don't want it."
"Oh, try it on anyway."
"I'll be too busy, Mrs. Binks. The customers 're startin' to pour in this very minute."
"Then try it on at your lunch time. I'll leave it handy here, over this chair."
She did leave it there all day long. Katie, whose one dress was now, in spite of endless feminine make-shifts, beginning to show wear, had to go through her task with the baited hook constantly dangling before her. Nevertheless, when the long-delayed closing hour arrived, the suit was just where Mrs. Binks had left it. Katie carefully abstained from touching it; she would not even put it away.
"What's this?" asked the mildly surprised owner, as she stumbled over the garment. "I declare it's that handsome walking-suit I wanted you to have, Miss Flanagan."
Katie turned and regarded the neglected garment precisely as Mrs. Binks was regarding it.
"Well, well," she said, "and is it, now?"
Her mistress looked at her, again blinking suspiciously.
"Did you try it on?" she demanded.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't think I want it."
"It's a fine suit."
"It's grand."
"But you don't want it?"
"I don't think I do."
"I told you that you could have it for a third off."
"I know you did that, Mrs. Binks, and it's thank you I do for your kindness."
"Hum—hum. I'll take off a dollar more—for you."
"Thank you, no, Mrs. Binks. Good-night, Mrs. Binks."
This sort of thing went on, with variations, for three days, at the end of which time Mrs. Binks, as she would have phrased the occurrence, "came right out with it"; and for this ceremony she chose that morning hour when the other girls in the shop had the greatest amount of leisure to observe what happened.
"Miss Flanagan," said she, marching up to the thoroughly prepared Katie, and peering hard into the serene Irish eyes of her selected victim, "I like my clerks to look well."
"So I've been noticin'," said Katie.
"An' I don't like to speak about it when they don't," continued Mrs. Binks.
"You're just that tender-hearted!"
"But if you girls don't wear good clothes, my customers'll think I don't treat you right."
"How could they now, Mrs. Binks?"
"And," concluded Mrs. Binks, overlooking these interruptions in view of the crushing climax she was approaching, "as you've made up your mind not to take the hints I've been givin' you, or the fine offers I've made you, I've got to say it plainly that you're looking too shabby to work any more for me."
Katie smiled her warmest smile.
"Mrs. Binks," she replied, resorting again to prevarication, and presenting the greedily seized money that she still owed her employer, "I'd begun to be afraid that maybe them was your feelin's, an' so yesterd'y at lunch time I bought me the exact duplicate of that walking-suit you've been tryin' to thrust upon me—only I got it next door an' for half your price."
Saying this she had walked to the shallow closet in the fitting-room, taken down her hat and coat, put them on, sung "Good-by" to her consternated fellow-workers, and strolled away forever from that place of employment. She went smiling, but, instead of the curt word that she generally employed, she administered a hand-slap with her open palm to a stranger that accosted her on her journey homeward.
She got work, after some searching, in a candy shop on Eighth Street, but this she had to relinquish when her mother's speedy illness developed into a brief and fatal disease. It was not until the last nursing, relieved by Hermann's assistance, and the funeral were over, that she could again think of labor, and then it was only to get, in a Fourth Street necktie factory, a small position that she lost because she had the effrontery to resent the rather frank overtures of the foreman.
Now, although she had told her cheerful lover nothing about it, she had come to the last ditch. She had been deceived by advertisements, cheated by employment agencies, denied work by the superintendents of scores of shops and manufactories. She was not a skilled laborer, and she had, at first, nothing in the matter of recommendation; she belonged to no trade union; the rent for her little room was dangerously overdue; so, also, were the bills of the baker and the milk dealer upon whom alone she was depending for food; all that she could pledge was in pawn, and, with the soles of her shoes worn through almost to her feet, the elaborate mourning costume that she had been unable to resist was her only badge of material prosperity.
Two avenues of escape were open, were even persistently presented, yet she would regard neither. To take what Hermann pleaded with her to accept, though her hungry heart and her underfed body cried out for it, would have been, she felt well assured, unfairly to handicap her best friend, and, as for turning into that other way—a way into which the streets on every hand seemed so easily to open, she was too wise to consider.
"No thanks," she answered in her soul, as she walked by the leering satyrs, with her black head erect and her lips compressed—"not yet, if you please: not yet, nor never, I think, for starvin' seems some easier and a deal quicker, too."
She had to repeat the words pretty often, for they had come to be a sort of incantation, almost a pious ejaculation, against the enemy, and, as her poverty grew and her chances decreased in inverse ratio, the enemy, like vultures flocking to the fatally wounded, seemed startlingly to increase in force. At first it was a well-dressed corps strayed from Broadway or the Avenue; then it was the bank-clerk hurrying to work and the master mechanic hurrying from it; but finally, so plain are the signs of distress shown upon our faces by the selves that are besieged, it had become the professionally employing, professedly unemployed.
Yet at every dawn she renewed her quest, with a glass of blue milk and a bite of bread for breakfast. Every day and all day she tramped the long, aching streets. And every night, despairing but resolute, she came home for her supper of bread and milk and for the sleep of the hungry and distressed.
It was now a Thursday morning. The milkman had pounded at her door and, receiving no answer, had left no milk. Still gnawing her crust, Katie slunk out of the tenement, and, at the step, was waylaid by the rent-collector, a little man with a sharp, white face that told plainly of his own struggle. He blocked the exit.
"Good-day to you, Miss Flanagan," he said, touching his dirty cap.
"Good-mornin', Mr. Woods," she answered, aware that the hour for the last engagement was approaching.
The man was one whose business forced him to mince nothing.
"I was comin' up to git yer rent," he continued. "It's three weeks overdue."
"I'm afraid I'll have to be askin' you to let it run a bit longer," said Katie, and her voice, in spite of all resolution, trembled.
"But I've been an' done that twice fer you, Miss Flanagan. The boss is after me as hard as I'm after you—an' harder."
"I know it. I—you can't stand him off another week, Mr. Woods?"
"Nix on the stand-off, miss."
"You see, I'm—I'm out of a job."
"I know that, but then you've been out o' one fer a good while now."
"Yes, only I rather expect—indeed, I've been promised one beginnin' to-morrow."
The little man coughed behind a dirty hand.
"That's Friday?" he asked.
"It is that."
"Well, ain't you got your dates mixed? You told me last week you had a job promised for that Friday."
Katie surprised even herself: she laughed.
"So I did!" she said. "An' of course I was lyin' an' of course you knowed it. Oh, well, Woods, man, hold 'em off for forty-eight hours, an' if I don't get work then, I'll—well, I won't bother you no more."
In the shadowy hallway, she felt his eyes studying her less with evil than with wonder.
"There ain't many girls with your looks, Miss Flanagan, as'd be out of a job as long as you've been."
Katie shrugged her shoulders: she was beyond resentment.
"The more pity to 'em," she said.
"Not many," repeated Mr. Woods.
There was an awkward silence. The collector paused because he wanted her fully to weigh an implication that he honestly considered to contain sound advice, and Katie refrained from further comment for the excellent reason that she had nothing to say. It was Woods that at last took up the broken thread.
"I'll tell you what I'll do, Miss Flanagan," he not unkindly concluded; "I'll hold 'em off till to-morrow evenin', an' if by then you can pay me a chunk on account, it'll be all right; if you can't——"
He stood aside, and Katie clapped him warmly on the shoulder.
"You're doin' your best, Woods," she said, "an' I thank you for it. I'll get the job someways, but not the way you think, an'—an' I thank you."
Only half-way to the corner she met the girl that lived across the hall from her, Carrie Berkowicz, a homely, round-cheeked, brown-haired Lithuanian Jewess, who worked in a shirtwaist factory on Tenth Street.
"Say, Katie"—Carrie prided herself on her colloquial English, as she learned it in the night-classes in the Rand School—"were you still looking for a job?"
Katie nodded.
"Well, say, I just this minute passed Emma Schrem, an' she says Cora Costigan is quitting her job at the Lennox store to-day to be married to-morrow. Why don't you pull up there and try for it?"
Try for it? Katie could scarcely stop to thank her rescuer before she had turned northward. There was no longer left her even the five cents necessary for carfare, and, though she was faint with hunger and shaking with fear lest her tardiness should lose her this slim opportunity, she was forced to walk. Facing a fine rain blown in from the Sound, she walked up Second Avenue, and finally, turning westward to the shopping quarter now crowded with salesgirls on their hurried way to work, she entered, by the dark employés' door, the large department-store of Joshua N. Lennox, merchant and philanthropist.
A dozen quick inquiries rushed her, wet and weary, but flushed by her walk and radiant with the excitement of the race, into the presence of the frock-coated, pale-faced, suave-mouthed Mr. Porter, the tall, thin man, with the precision of a surgeon and the gravity of a Sunday-school superintendent, to whose attention, it appeared, such pleas as hers must be brought. Mr. Porter, who had gray side-whiskers, which he stroked with white hands, listened in judicial calm to what she had to say.
"Just fill out this application-blank," he remarked as, breathless, Katie ended her little speech.
They were in a dim, bare office under the street, the man at a roll-top desk lighted by a green-shaded incandescent lamp, the girl standing beside him. Mr. Porter indicated a writing-shelf along the opposite wall, where Katie found a pile of the blanks, and pen and ink. While she struggled with the task assigned her, Mr. Porter verified, by brief, sharp inquiries through a telephone, her statement of the approaching marriage of Miss Cora Costigan.
Katie, meanwhile, was giving her age, her parentage, her birthplace, the name of the firm that had last employed her—she mentioned the candy-shop for that,—was cheerfully agreeing to join the "Employés' Mutual Benefit Association," and was putting a "Yes," which she intended promptly to forget, to the question that asked her to become a spy on her co-workers: "If you saw a fellow-employé doing anything detrimental to the interests of the firm, would you consider it your duty to report the same?" It was only at one of the last questions that she hesitated.
"Please what does that mean?" she asked.
Mr. Porter deigned to walk across the room and, close to her shoulder, examined the question. It was the simple one: "Do you live with your parents?"
"That," said Mr. Porter, "is inserted because the firm wishes to have only nice girls here, and those with good home influences are considered—most trustworthy."
Mr. Porter had the type of emotionless eyes that can say one sort of thing far better than the eyes of more temperamental people, and he now met Katie's steady gaze with a stare of considerable significance.
Katie was rather sure that she understood.
"So that," she said, "if I didn't live with my people, I couldn't have the job?"
"So that," Mr. Porter corrected, "if a girl does get a position and lives with her family, she will be better cared for, and we will know that she is safe at home evenings."
Katie hesitated no longer. She took the pen and, opposite the query, wrote a quick "Yes." To be sure she was, on that account, obliged to invent the kind of work done by her father and the amount of the family wage; but she so needed the position that her active wit at once supplied the answers. More or less truthfully, she put a word in reply to the remaining questions, signed her name, and wrote her address.
Mr. Porter took the paper in his white fingers, read it slowly, folded it, indorsed it with several hieroglyphics, and placed it in a pigeon-hole.
"I am filing this with our other applications," he said. "As soon as your name is reached, I will see that you are notified."
Katie's jaw dropped.
"But I thought," she began, "I thought I was to get the job now. I—isn't Cora leavin', thin, after all?"
"Miss Costigan is leaving us, I understand," said Mr. Porter, stroking his whiskers; "but there are others—nearly a hundred—on the list ahead of you."
Katie was hungry, and hunger finds it hard to think of justice. She had borne all that she could bear. The waiting, the walking, the hope and the hopelessness had gnawed the string of her courage. Something snapped inside of her, and she began to sob with Irish unrestraint.
Mr. Porter was embarrassed. He frequently had to deal harshly with other employés of his philanthropic employer—it was, in fact, upon the performance of such duties that his living almost depended—but he did not like to have tears shed in his office: it did not look well for the reputation of the establishment.
"My dear Miss—Miss Flanagan," said he, first consulting the application-blank for the forgotten name, and putting one of his white hands toward the face now hidden in a crumpled handkerchief.
"You mustn't—really, you must not!"
"But everything depends on me gettin' this job!" sobbed Katie in an Irish wail. "The rent's due; me family's all sick; the milkman won't leave no more milk, an' I've eaten nothin' for Heaven knows how long!"
In a rush of words her story, including that of her resurrected father, leaped from her. What effect it would have had upon Mr. Porter had it been calmly told is beyond guessing; but it was told by no means calmly, and Katie's voice rose to a pitch that forced him to surrender out of mere fear of a prolonged scene. Grudgingly, but unconditionally, he laid down his arms. He took the telephone and called again Miss Isaacs, the buyer of the women's hosiery department, which Miss Costigan was to leave on the following day, told as much of Katie's story as he thought necessary, and obtained consent to a trial of the girl. He informed Katie that she might take, on the next morning, the place to be vacated by Miss Costigan, but he took care to impress upon her mind the fact that he was doing her an exceptional favor, which she was not to mention to her friends, who might try to profit by her unusual experience.
Katie was on the point of calling all the saints to bless him when she bethought her of a practical inquiry theretofore, in her eagerness to secure any sort of work, neglected.
"An' what's the pay?" she inquired.
"You will receive," replied Mr. Porter in the tones in which his employer announced the gift of a small fortune to a large college, "four dollars and fifty cents a week."
Katie forgot the saints.
"Four—" she began. "But, Mr. Porter," she concluded, "will you be tellin' me how I'm to be livin' on all that?"
Mr. Porter's calm eyes came again into significant play.
"You have said in your application, you may recall," he dryly remarked, as he reached for that document, "you have said that you lived with your father."
For a moment her glance probed his.
"But for all that," she said, "I have to support meself entirely."
Mr. Porter was still looking at her with his emotionless, appraising gaze. He saw a girl with pretty, piquant features, with glossy black hair, with cheeks that bloomed even in privation and blue eyes that were beautiful even in tears.
"Miss Flanagan," said he, "most of the girls that start at these wages in department-stores are partly supported by their family or have some friend to help them out."
Katie flushed, but she kept her outward calm.
"An' what if they haven't got a friend?" she inquired.
Porter's cold eye never wavered.
"They find one," he said; "and I may add, Miss Flanagan, that you should experience no difficulty in that direction."
Poverty will do much for most of us. For Katie it succeeded in curbing a temper that, in better times, was never docile. Beggars, she reflected, cannot afford to look too closely into the source or significance of the alms they have asked. She swallowed her wrath.
"Will you advance one week's salary now?" she asked.
Mr. Porter was distinctly surprised.
"I—why, certainly I won't!" he stammered.
"Why not?"
"But, my dear Miss Flanagan, I have nothing to do with the payment of the salaries. Besides, this firm doesn't know you; it does not even know that you will come to-morrow; it does not know that, if you do come, you will remain."
Katie smiled insidiously, and Katie smiling through her tear-curled lashes was insidious indeed.
"Och, now, Mr. Porter," she protested. "That's all well enough for the green girls; but you an' I know that you're the boss in matters of this sort. Lend me two an' a quarter."
Mr. Porter, pleased in spite of himself by her flattery, protested, but Katie remained unconvinced. She declared that she knew he was the real authority and that she could not bear to hear him underestimate himself. And the upshot of the discussion was that, though Mr. Porter could, in his official capacity, do nothing so unbusinesslike as to make her an advance, he would, personally, be glad to oblige her with a dollar and a half, and oblige her, adding a fatherly pat to her pink cheek, he ultimately did.
"Thanks," Katie responded as she took the money, and turned to go. "I'll report to-morrow, then, at a quarter of eight, Mr. Porter."
"At quarter to eight," repeated Mr. Porter, slowly closing the door behind her.
But, out in the wet street, Katie was saying what she had refrained from saying in the darkened office.
"An' as for the pay," she concluded, "I can't buy no automobiles with me loose change; but I think you'll find, you limb of Satan, that I can keep body an' soul together without a friend in the wor'rld!"
That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.
There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment, a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide, broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.
"Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir," said the servant. "May I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?"
Wesley shook his well-shaped head.
"No, thank you, Charles," he answered, and then, nodding to a decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner table: "Irish?" he asked.
Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.
"That is all, Charles," said Dyker, and the servant silently left him alone.
Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be diplomatic.
Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the seneschal's gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original and of every syllable of the English translation.
It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class, the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:
"Good-evening, Mr. Dyker."
Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.
The man before him was the perfection of that noble work of Heaven, a Prominent Citizen. Joshua Lennox endowed Bowery chapels with organs and meat-supplies; he contributed heavily to missions among the benighted Japanese; he assisted in arbitrating strikes wherein his fellow-employers were concerned; he always served on memorial committees; and he regularly subscribed to the campaign funds of all movements toward municipal political reform.
If his climbing wife insisted upon having liquor in the house, Mr. Lennox never touched it. If she served tobacco, he did not smoke. If she took in a Sunday paper, written and printed on Saturday, he would read no news until the appearance of the Monday journal merely written and printed on Sunday. And if his mercantile establishment sold poker-chips under the pseudonym of "counters," he was aware only that it did not sell playing-cards. The business he considered as his creation had grown beyond the limits of his power, and though, a good man and sincere, he might have done something by keeping a closer eye upon his work, he was in reality as much the creature of conditions as his worst-paid cash-boy. The great Frederick complained that a monarch could not know all the evil done in his kingdom: Joshua Lennox was so busy benefiting mankind that he had no leisure to observe in his own shop the state of affairs that made his philanthropy financially possible.
"I hope you are going with us to the opera, Mr. Lennox," said Dyker.
The old man shook his silvered head.
"No," said he in the slow, deliberate utterance that he had acquired with his first million of dollars; "I am on my way farther down town than that."
"But you had better come," urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was certain. "This is the last performance of the season."
"On the contrary," the merchant chuckled kindly, "I think you had better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am going to the first performance of a new season."
"Where's that?"
"To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union."
That made it Dyker's turn to smile.
"Oh, but I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm on the other side, you know."
"Against good government?" The elder man manifestly enjoyed this mild thrust.
"Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us from the street."
The merchant's cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker's lowered lids betrayed nothing.
"Yes," replied Lennox, dryly; "I heard that when Tammany Hall first came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take an older man's advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time."
Wesley's reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter it, Marian Lennox came into the room.
Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what she was certain were opinions of her own.
She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.
She caught her father's concluding words.
"While there is yet time," she paraphrased, "Mr. Dyker will withdraw from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire."
She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker's entrance into her waiting limousine with almost no delay whatever.
"There," she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their drive; "I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon."
Dyker laughed shortly.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I esteem your father so much that I should like him to like me."
"But you think that he doesn't like you?"
"I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest men."
"And may they?" bantered Marian.
"Well," he lightly accepted the challenge, "I shall take the specific case. There is no doubting your father's sincerity; there is no doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him, to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks at last."
"And on the other hand," said the girl, "I suppose I must generously refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?"
"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed."
"Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon."
"Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to another human being—and you should know that I am not to be suspected."
There was a ring in his voice that touched her.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime."
"I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles."
"He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors."
"But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?"
"He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing—something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long—and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it."
Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued.
"If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a very terrible thing."
"Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work."
Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.
"Of course you're joking," he said.
"I am in cold earnest," she assured him.
"But that's absurd. You've—why you don't know what settlement-work means!"
"I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters."
"And you really mean——"
"I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is music to listen to."
Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.
Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.
He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in theentr'actes, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was "Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored.
His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.
One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week's work to his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that contractor learned of Wesley's service. At the ensuing trial the client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his patron's district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.
For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father's fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to marry her with as little delay as possible.
Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he meant to play his first lead.
He did play it—played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to the mood best suited to his own.
"May I talk now?" he asked ruefully.
She smiled.
"You mean to ask if you may argue," she answered. "No, you may not argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a man of your sort should want to."
"I don't intend to argue," he protested, leaning the merest trifle toward her. "I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite fixed."
She bowed her splendid head.
"Quite fixed," she said.
"So that argument would not shake it?"
"So that no argument could shake it."
"Nor any persuasion?"
His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the change.
"Nor any persuasion," she replied.
"Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but a condition?"
"But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me. You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty."
A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously sweet.
"What I understand," responded Dyker, "is that there is one situation in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that crowds all others from the board."
His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.
"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it—none even for the poor and suffering."
In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.
"Marian"—his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash—"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to answer me!"
He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.
But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.