"Kiss me," she said.
He smiled and leaned condescendingly toward her.
"What's your hurry?" she murmured.
He looked at her, and the weak light and the strong liquor stood her in good stead.
"I ain't in no hurry," he smiled.
She met him smile for smile—and then, in a sudden sense of triumph, she flung back her head and laughed.
It was not until three hours later that he finally left her, but he left hurriedly, for the remorseless gray light of morning was coming in at the window, and it fell upon her as she wrapped a soiled pink kimona around her shivering figure and slipped her feet into a pair of rundown Turkish slippers.
"Good-by," he said, looking away from her.
"Wait a minute," said Mary. "I'll go with you to the door."
She did go. She followed him down the dark stairway, creaking noisily under their shamed feet, and she stood for a moment in the black hall, holding the brass knob of the door, as he passed to the step outside. Mary slipped the dead-latch, ready to bolt the door.
"Max," she said.
He turned quickly, nearly knocking over, as he did so, the milk-bottles that were lined, in a white row, upon the step.
"Yes?" he returned, and grinned sheepishly.
She thrust out her towsled head and looked up and down the gray morning street. The block was empty. She drew her head clear of the door. She was still trembling, but from neither cold nor fear.
"You ain't goin' without kissin' me?" she asked.
But a reaction of disgust had seized him.
"Yes, I am," he said.
Mary's one hand tightened on the knob; the other flattened itself against the nearest panel of the door, ready to push hard.
"All right," she replied, with a sudden change in her voice that, still low, became tense and metallic. "You think I'm—I'm done for, Max. Well—you're done for, too!"
The man's jaw dropped. His olive face was ashen. His eyes stared.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
Mary's mouth was wreathed in a smile.
"You know," she answered.
Max retreated so suddenly that he nearly fell down the stone steps.
"You've—you've——" he gasped.
"Yes," said Mary.
"It's a lie! You're tryin' to scare me!" His jaw worked spasmodically. "It's a damned lie!" he repeated.
"You don't believe me?" the girl inquired.
If she had looked for heroics, if she had feared melodrama, she was as yet disappointed. The knees of Max shook under him; he was in abject terror.
"It's a lie," he muttered over and over. "It's a damn' lie!"
"Think what you please," said Mary. She was still smiling, still serene. "You believed I'd forgot, didn't you? Well, I didn't forget, Max Grossman, an' now you'll remember. If you don't yet think I'm givin' you a straight story, all you have to do is just one thing:wait."
Max uttered an inarticulate cry and threw himself at her, but he only bashed his head against the closed door.
Mary had shut it, and in time. Behind it, in the dark hallway, she lay half fainting.
"It's the last of you, Max," she laughed.
And it was.
Mary was too ill to go to work that night, and on the night following she was no better. The shock, the spasm of success, the recoil, not moral but physical, after the satisfaction of a supreme desire—these things were, of themselves, enough to leave her prostrate. But, in addition to these, she had, while standing at that open door, contracted one of those heavy colds to which she was now rendered especially susceptible. Through long hours of the day and the darkness she tossed among the hot sheets of her bed, sometimes with her teeth clicking in a chill, again with her body burning in a fever, but always revolving in her seething brain the details of the vengeance that she had wrought.
Her physical sufferings mattered little to her. There were hours when she was wholly incapable of feeling them. When the inertia of the state of reaction began at last to wear away, it left her with a glow of recollection so great that there seemed no place for lesser sensation. She had accomplished her great work, she had achieved her mission. What she had done had been done solely for her own heart's sake; there had been no delusion of a celestial command, no distorted thought of a social duty; yet, the impulse, however utilitarian, had been supreme, and its end filled her with a sense of triumph that, for want of the proper title, she was sure was happiness.
A wiser head and an unwounded heart would have known enough of life to see that even Max Grossman was not entirely to blame. A better brain could have looked back into the past. It could have seen Max as the type of all his kind, the symbol of every one of the great company of slavers, the inevitable result of a system blind both to its own interests and to the interests of the race. It could have seen the child, one of half a dozen born to a woman that could not, properly, have cared for three. It could have seen that child neglected, dirty, forgotten, locked, by day, in the bedroom where the whole family tried vainly to sleep by night, learning the highest facts of life from the worst of teachers: the cramped childish brain—and going out, at last, upon the street, with passions prematurely developed and perverted. It could have seen the social order shape that child into society's enemy: the starved boy-pickpocket sent to the monstrously misnamed "reformatory"; the same child branded as a criminal, with none to shelter or to trust him, and with a knowledge, gained in the state's own institution, which fitted him to be only a crafty gorilla to harass the state. It could have seen the fatal line of least resistance as clearly in the resultant man as it is seen in the life of him that does no more than wreck a bank or steal a corporation, and, hideous as its course is in the one instance, it would have seen that the line was the same in all.
But Mary never doubted her justice, and never regretted it. One only thought troubled her: she was afraid that, by telling Max, she might have given him a warning sufficiently early to defeat her own ultimate purpose. It was a large part of her plan that he should know whose hand had struck him, and, for a man in his business, the only way in which she could make that knowledge certain was the way that she had followed. Yet what if he were in time to profit by her information? What if, even were he too late, he should guard and doctor himself with proper caution? She turned the questions over and over in her mind, but she had always to end in the faith that the worst had happened.
Sometimes, in the moments of exhaustion from the mad round of these inquiries, she reverted for relief to matters that touched her less nearly, and endeavored to occupy herself with the affairs of others. She thought of Dyker, and without resentment. She knew that he would use her written retraction to regain Marian's confidence, and she hoped that he would be successful. Again she fell to speculating upon the fate of Carrie Berkowicz and to wondering what had become of Katie. But upon her own past and present she did not permit herself to dwell, and always, with the certainty of a machine, her brain recurred to Max and her vengeance on him.
On the third evening, however, her landlady, entering with supper, reminded her, without mincing matters, that the rent was due, and Mary recalled that her little stock of money was exhausted.
"Can you wait till to-morrow morning, Mrs. Foote?" she asked.
Mrs. Foote was an ample woman, with round cheeks and robust frame, whose only dissipations were an over-indulgence in ritualism, babies, and the hospital. She had a high-church cleric to whom she confessed the sins of her neighbors; a wraithlike husband whose sole occupation appeared to be that indispensable to the regular increase of her family—and whom she would otherwise have failed altogether to tolerate—and such a passion for being ill that she could never quite believe in the illnesses of others.
"I can wait just that long, Miss Morton," she said; "but I'm sufferin' so from rheumatism in my fingers that I just know my old gastric trouble is comin' on ag'in, an' that'll mean another of them hospital-bills."
Mary raised her aching head.
"You won't have to wait any longer," she answered.
"I'm glad of it, Miss Morton," responded Mrs. Foote, "for there was a young lady lookin' at this room to-day an' she offered me a dollar more a week for it, an' I wouldn't like to lose you."
"You won't lose me," said Mary, to whom even sustained conversation was physical pain. "I'm goin' out to-night, an' I'll have plenty for you by the mornin'."
"You're sure?" asked the landlady.
"Of course I am. It'd be a pity if I couldn't earn that much."
Mrs. Foote looked at Mary's face and seemed to doubt the foundation for her assurance.
"Well," she sighed, "I certainly hope you can."
For some minutes after the door closed, Mary lay still. She had again been brought face to face with the most poignant of tragedies, the tragedy of living.
An hour earlier, had she questioned herself, she would have said that she was careless of life, that neither this earth nor the quitting of it interested her, that continued existence was a matter of indifference. Then she was in that state of exultation above things mundane which is produced only by great sorrow, great joy, or the great revenges that are both grief and triumph. But now the words of the landlady had brought her back from the indulgence of contemplation to the necessity of action. Mary's insidious, implacable disease had completed what her business had begun, and what her business alone would have completed far more slowly. The few emotions that she was now capable of feeling were the more intense because of their rarity, but their intensity was equaled by their brevity and, when the moment had gone, it left her even more of a moral weakling than it had found her.
She knew Mrs. Foote and her tribe too well to deceive herself as to what must happen should the morning dawn upon an empty stocking. Life held nothing for which Mary greatly cared, but the instant of death contained all of which she was afraid. She did not greatly want to harm others by plying her trade in her present condition, but she could not think of others. Each step would be a separate wound to her tortured body and her throbbing head, but she understood that the landlady had to wring out the rents by the means that conditions had forced upon her; and so the worst of fears, the fear of poverty, which is the fear of death, took this sick woman from her bed, dressed her in her best frock, and sent her out into the street.
Along Sixth Avenue, where fortune had often, theretofore, been kind to her, she met no significant glances. A passing girl or two, having missed her for the last few evenings, proffered a casual sympathy; but that was all. Through the open doors of the Haymarket, she turned in, but there even the women at first disregarded her. Several men that she recognized in the boxes of the gallery around the little hall nodded, but immediately looked away. The one man that she happened to know better than any of the others did not appear at all to remember her, and his neighbor, who had frequently accompanied her, signaled elsewhere.
She was lonely. She approached two women who were circling the floor, arm in arm. She addressed them with the familiarity of the craft.
"Hello," she said.
The one woman smiled, but her companion, a formidable, tailor-made personage, swelled with dignity.
"You better beat it," she declared.
Mary flushed.
"What's eatin' you?" she demanded.
"You don't belong here," the woman answered. She made a lofty survey of Mary's finery, and then added: "Goin'?"
Mary's heart sickened, but she stood her ground.
"No," she said, "I ain't."
The floor-manager was passing. The social arbiter turned to him.
"Will," she asked, and her shrill voice seemed to carry over all the room; "what's this place comin' to? Throw that Fourteenth Street woman out o' here!"
This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard. She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in a great ulster.
"Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?"
The man looked at her and swore.
"You must think I'm blind," he ended.
She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money. She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced; and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal. It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next dark figure that she stopped—she did not look at his face or care what sort of face it was—answered her with sharp laughter.
"A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old girl!"
"A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously.
"I got just a half—an' you ain't worth a cent more."
She took it—what would she not have taken?—and she worked on into the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond the sum due for rent.
During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end, there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but the craven passion for life.
Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest.
Mary twisted her helpless hands.
"How can I afford to take it?" she asked.
"Save your money," said he, patting her thin shoulders, and chuckling prosperously. "You girls never put aside a cent."
"We don't earn enough."
"Poof! That's what you all say. I know—I know. We men aren't such fools as you take us for."
But Mary, as each evening she made up before her little mirror, noted the gradual depreciation of her wares; each week she found it harder to pay rent and retain enough money for food. Mrs. Foote seemed to come every day, instead of every seventh, and yet each night business grew more difficult. Whenever Mary missed a few evenings, or whenever she changed her hunting-grounds, the police needed fresh payments. She surrendered one uptown cross-street after another. At last she deserted Broadway and patrolled only that Fourteenth Street which the woman at the Haymarket had so scornfully referred to and which had so wonderfully burst upon Mary's sight when she first stepped from the Hudson Tunnel upon the surface of Manhattan.
Spring, summer, and autumn passed, and a lean winter followed them. Mary caught another cold and was ill for a week. She went to work too soon and had to go back to bed for several days and remain idle for several nights. At last, with the ancient fear of the white race—the fear of that poverty which is death—gnawing at her vitals, she struggled to her feet and tramped once more along Fourteenth Street from Sixth Avenue to Third.
But now the sword descended. Even the Fourteenth Street saloon best known for her purposes gave no fish to her net, and Eighth Street was little better. She was too tired to go farther; she had, the next morning, to offer Mrs. Foote only a third of what was due.
The landlady, whose bulk seemed to crowd the hall-bedroom, leaned heavily against its frail door. Mary thought the woman's slow, brown eyes more than commonly suspicious and her round face implacably hard. The tenant, with all explanation frozen upon her lips, handed over the clinking bits of money. They fell into the big, extended palm as a few drops of water might fall into a basin. Mrs. Foote began slowly to count the coins.
Mary watched, in fascinated silence, the counting of those few pieces of silver, each one of which seemed stained with her blood. She saw the landlady's expression change to one of incredulity. She saw the counting repeated.
Mrs. Foote again thrust out her grimy fingers.
"What's this?" she demanded.
"It's——" Mary looked at the floor. "It's the rent," she concluded, in a whisper.
"What'sthe rent?"
"That's all I have—just now. I thought—I thought, considerin' how long I've been here, you might wait a day for the rest, Mrs. Foote."
The landlady opened her hand, and Mary's little store of coin dropped to the bed.
"I can't take this," she said.
"You mean," asked Mary, with a quick gasp of hope, "that you'll let me keep it till I get the rest?"
"No, I don't mean nothin' of the sort," said Mrs. Foote. "I mean I've got to have the whole bill—right now."
Mary's heart sank.
"That's all I have," she said.
She had sunk to a seat on the tumbled bed, beside her scattered coins. Her thin hands were locked across her knees; the dirty pink kimona slipped lower from her shoulders at every frequent cough, and her eyes sought those of Mrs. Foote in dumb appeal. Her russet hair fell dully disordered about her hollow cheeks, and the rouge on her lips was purple.
"I'm sorry," pursued Mrs. Foote, who was too used to such incidents greatly to concern herself; "but I've got to make my living like anybody else does."
"I was expectin' some money this evenin'," said Mary.
"Hump!" sniffed the landlady.
"You don't believe that?"
"I don't care, Miss Morton; I can't care."
"But I"—Mary's fingers knotted tighter about her knees—"I was promised it," she lied, "an' I'm dead sure to get it then."
"I've heard that so many times," said Mrs. Foote, "that I knowed it by heart three year' ago."
"I could pawn somethin'," suggested Mary.
The landlady swept the bare room with a critical glance.
"What?" she asked.
There was no adequate answer to be made. Mary had tried to pledge her coat a few days before, and had been offered only an inadequate twenty-five cents for it.
"Then you won't—you can't wait?"
"No, I can't. I'm a sick woman myself; my rent's due, Miss Mary, an' the honest truth is that there's such a lot of women wantin' rooms that I'd only be doin' a injustice to my children not to take in a lady that could pay prompt—for a while."
Mary said nothing more. She packed her few belongings into her trunk, left it in the hall to be called for, and, as the chill evening fell, went away from the house with no idea where she was to find a lodging for the night. For an hour, though she was still weak, and the time was as yet so early, she walked up Broadway and, in the Forties, turned eastward for a few blocks, and so south again. Not far from the Grand Central Station she saw a little crowd gathered at a corner, and she stopped, rather for the luxury of standing still than from any curiosity.
The place was a church. Colored lights streamed from its rich stained-glass windows. Through its swinging doors there stole the scent of flowers and the sound of delicate music. A long row of carriages, the coachmen walking up and down to keep warm, stretched far around the corner.
Mary, shivering, worked her way quietly through the group of men and women on the sidewalk. In order to avoid a particularly entangled portion of the press, she started to walk along the steps by the tower-entrance, and then, seeing a side-door open, she listlessly turned toward it and looked in.
Far away up the vaulted nave the altar stood, white with damask and yellow with candles. The chancel was a garden, the whole building heavy with scent. Acolytes in scarlet were grouped about the robed priests. The choir had risen and, preceded by a lad that bore aloft a great brass cross, were forming into a singing procession, which slowly filed down the center aisle.
With a subdued scuffle and swish, the congregation also rose as the double line of choristers moved between them. Women craned their necks and men, pretending to look stolidly ahead of them, looked really out of the corners of their eyes. The choir, at the main door, divided and stood still. High overhead a deep-toned organ was playing the wedding-march from Lohengrin, and through the respectful line of white-clad boys there moved a man of regular features with lowered lids that hid his eyes, and a crisp brown mustache, which concealed his lips, and, on his arm, in the costume of a bride, a tall, graceful, pure woman, whose face was like a Greek cameo and in whose hand was a huge bunch of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley.
The fingers of a policeman touched Mary's arm.
"You'll have to get back," he said. "The people'll be comin' out in a minute."
But Mary did not wish to move.
"I've got a right here," she answered.
"You?" The policeman looked at her, and then laughed. "What right?" he asked.
"Isn't that Miss Lennox?"
"It was."
"And Judge Dyker?"
"Sure."
"Well, I gave him his marriage-license."
The policeman's good-nature was amused, but he forced her back to the street.
"No use," he said.
"An' I guess," said Mary bitterly—"I guess I paid for the bride's bouquet."
He did not reply, nor would she have heard him had he spoken, for in the stream of lesser guests now flowing from the rear of the church, which had been assigned to them, she was met by Katie Flanagan.
Not the piquant Katie of that photograph which used to adorn the bureau in the shabby tenement of bachelor Hermann Hoffmann, or the saucy girl of the second-hand clothing-store, or yet the frightened clerk that had at first evaded and at last defied the whiskered Mr. Porter. Those days were patently passed; Katie, like many another strong soul, had faced temptation and conquered it; and in the stead of the old days had come new days that brought a maturity and a dignity with which Katie was consciously satisfied. Her blue eyes were as glad as Mary remembered them, but their happiness was calm; her black hair was gathered in a formal knot, and her gown, though a better gown than that she used to wear, was of a simplicity almost severe.
Nevertheless, when she saw Mary, who sought evasion, Katie came frankly forward with outstretched hand. She recognized with regret, the change in her former acquaintance, but, knowing, as she must have known, its cause, she decided to ask no questions concerning it, and, if she offered no assistance, she at least proffered no advice.
"I just come to see the last o' Miss Marian," she explained. "Near the half of old Rivington Street's been tucked in here among th' swells to give the good word to her—Jews an' Irish—an' if the rabbis won't mind for the sheenies to come to such a heathen church, I thought Father Kelly might manage to forgive me."
Mary's brain was just then too dull to make any but a commonplace answer.
"You're lookin' well," she said.
"I ought to be, though there's a youngster expected. I tell Hermann—we was married a few weeks after last election—I don't know how we'll keep a family; but he just whistles an' says we'll make out some way, an' I guess we will."
"I'm glad," said Mary, "that you're married."
"Well, so am I—most of the time. Of course, the man has some queer ideas, but I'm doin' me best, with Father Kelly's help, to get 'em out of the head of him, an' nowadays, when he goes to one of them Socialist meetin's by night, I make him make up by goin' with me to early mass next mornin'."
She paused and surveyed again the pale woman before her. Essentially Katie had not changed. She had still, and would always have, the big, kind heart and the ready hand of her earlier days. But her condition had altered, and Mary's had evidently again fallen; she looked through an alien atmosphere, and her gaze was distant: the responsibilities and adjustment of young married life shackled her, and must continue to shackle her until they were no longer new. She did not know how to suggest any assistance, did not even believe that it was desired; but, though she still felt that she must refrain from intimate inquiry, one effort she tried to make.
"An' you," she asked—"how're you gettin' on, Mary?"
Mary bit her lip.
"Fine," she answered, huskily.
"Are you——? There ain't——?" Katie floundered in a maze that she would, a few months previously or a few months in the future, have cut her way through with a strong directness. "There ain't nothin' I could——?"
Mary's head shook, almost mechanically. It was not entirely that she felt unable to accept assistance from her former protector; it was rather that she felt only that she must run away.
"Oh, no," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm doin' grand."
The gala crowd was sweeping about them. It jostled both girls and threatened momentarily to separate them. After all, there was nothing more to be said.
"I—I got to go," murmured Mary. "I got an appointment——"
"But you'll come to see us sometime, won't you Mary?" asked Katie, and she gave her address. "We'll have a fine party at the christening an' I'll want you to see the baby."
"Oh, yes," said Mary; "yes, of course."
But Katie was hesitant.
"You're sure I can't do nothin'?" she asked.
"No, no. I——" Mary caught and pressed with what warmth there was left in her fingers, the Irish girl's hand. "Good-by," she concluded, and then, in order to keep up the farce of an appointment, she got upon a passing car.
Even if panic had not possessed her, she could not have accepted anything that Katie might offer. The most that could have been given her would have been but temporary, and what she must have was a means of earning a living.
She rode well downtown, and then walked farther southward. She slipped along the broad, yellow-lighted Bowery, gathering one or two quarters on her way, and wandered into the narrow, serpentine, fevered alleys of Chinatown. When an ugly rain began to fall, the open door of a mission attracted her, and she went in to rest.
It was the typical mission-room, very different from the uptown church where she had seen the wedding. This new place was mean; it had a low ceiling and was none too clean. The lights were flaring and the dull walls were enlivened by boldly lettered Bible texts. The air was close; on the platform, at the front of the place, a well-fed man was pleading, in sweat and tears, the cause of his religion; nearby, his double was making ready the reed-organ. Crowded into the unsteady benches were pimpled boys with lolling mouths and preternaturally knowing eyes; youths already old in disease and drink and crime; full-grown men, frog-eyed or blear-eyed, who needed only the faculty of firmness and the chance to cultivate it; old men, who had lost their hold upon work in a country still too barbarous to pension its aged; and, though there were no young girls, here and there Mary saw a few women, bedraggled, sodden, hideous, because men had at some time thought themchic, dainty, beautiful.
One of the "workers" attached to the place—a bland, prosperous man, with a pleasant smile—approached Mary and shook her hand as if he were an old acquaintance. He had fat red cheeks, firm teeth, and kindly eyes.
"I'm glad to see you, sister," he said. "Are you saved?"
Mary's childhood had heard some of the phraseology of evangelicalism. She understood, but she had come to receive worldly, not spiritual, warmth.
"No," she said, "I ain't."
The "worker," however, was accustomed to that reply. He patted her shoulder.
"Don't you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked.
"Well," said Mary, "I never thought much about Him."
She looked at the floor. She was cold and hungry and afraid.
"Then," responded the man, with genuine earnestness, "you ought to begin to think. No man knoweth the hour of His comin'. He is ready with the Free Gift. Don't you want to come to Him?"
Mary's life had been one in which there had been small time for the cultivation of religious emotion, and no time at all for the cultivation of religious thought. At her home she had learned as much by rote as she had had to learn, but what she got she held only as so many tasks performed. The words were lessons to be mastered; if they had any relation to facts, those facts were things not to be faced until an age of discretion, and, pending the arrival of that age, the lessons had been stored away with a bland, childish practicality. What followed later had driven out all that preceded it. The shock of her capture; the wild, new order of existence; the endeavor to escape; the battle of service among new conditions; and, at last, the dulling of all the finer sensibilities and the final fight for a mere chance to continue alive—these were circumstances neither propitious to theology nor favorable to faith.
She glanced at the mission-worker, and then glanced away.
"I dunno," she said. "I guess I ain't the kind of woman religion can do much for."
"Don't say that," protested the man. His eyes shone with zeal and his voice was tender. "His grace is free for all who come. His mercy is from everlastin' to everlastin'. I've been a sinner myself"—the speaker's voice swelled with a real pride—"a terrible sinner, an' I know what I say, praise the Lord. The meaner an' viler we are, the more Jesus needs us. Just open your heart. Just accept Him, an' you'll never know no more trouble in this world nor the next."
"Would I get a job?" asked Mary.
The man shook his head, sadly.
"That ain't no way to think about salvation," he declared. "What's freely given ought to be freely received. Now is the appointed time."
"But I gotta make a livin'."
"I know it, I know it. We've all got to do that, but ain't it better to make one an' be saved than to make one an' be sent to hell-fire?"
She assented. "Only," she added, "I don't want to starve, even if I am saved."
It was his old difficulty.
"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about religion."
She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over a saloon—a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up occasional blasts of heat from the basement.
The rapidity with which one may descend from bad to worse is to be believed only by those who have been penniless and friendless in the larger cities. During the nights that followed, when Mary's clothes grew speedily ragged, dirty, and odorous, and when she earned just enough money to postpone starvation, she became a familiar of Chinatown, learned something of its blind paths and the tangled passages of its fetid tenements. The almond-eyed Orientals tolerantly received her. She came to know the heavy odors of the opium, to chat with clay-white American girls, morphine-eaters, and cocaine and chloral victims, whose Chinese lovers were kind to them, and who never wanted to breathe the open air. She was borne with, but the market was over-supplied there, and she found no regular keeper. She came to envy the drug-enslaved women who had first sought the Mott Street district as missionaries, even the little Mongolian girls over whose slavery, so much lighter than her own, the city, from time to time, grew ludicrously excited. Her illness progressed, but, thanks to her hardy birth and the exercise of what care was at all possible, it progressed with a step so tardy as to give no indication of reaching its tragic end, other things being equal, for two years or more. She did not again go to see the doctor; she did not have to. The only things that he could have advised were the things that she was in no position to do. Beyond a certain limited amount of routine care, she was helpless.
One night, wet and exhausted, she met a sailor in Chatham Square, and drank long with him.
"Where you goin' to sleep to-night?" he asked, as they were about to part.
He was a short, black-browed man, who walked with a bow-legged roll. The short sleeves of his jacket displayed sinewy, bronze wrists with anchors tattooed upon them. His neck rose out of his low-cut mariner's shirt like the neck of a brown, fighting bull, and his black eyes, set deep under bushy, frowning brows, were red, like those of a bull that is dangerous. He had been taken with a drunken passion for her, and though, when he kissed her, his upper lip scraped her face like a file, though his incessant grip of her hands hurt her, and though his heavy foot, seeking hers beneath the saloon-table, nearly crushed her own, she had to answer him with the professional smile.
"I dunno where I'll sleep," she said. "I guess Lee Hung's Letty'll put me up."
The sailor chucked her pointed chin so roughly that she thought her neck would crack.
"Why don't you come along o' me?" he inquired.
"Where's that?"
"To one o' our places. I know a beauty, an' I'll take good care o' you, an' afterward you can stay on."
"One of your places? What's those?"
"Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a daisy—Big Lou's keepin' it—an' they needs a new gal there, for I stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday."
Mary shuddered.
"Is it all right?" she asked.
"All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"—his black eyes leaped into a sudden threat—"I'm takin' you to-night. No philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal."
She looked away.
"Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an' the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a steady job there."
She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver. After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure of food to eat and a roof to cover her—and so she came to Summerton's.
It is a winding and tortuous way across Greenwich Village to Summerton's. The mazed course runs through streets that squirm like worms between a fisherman's fingers; it skirts cobbled courts that are in twilight at midday and damp in the longest drought; it turns and doubles up passages that seem blind, dodges through the very bones of tumble-down warehouses, storehouses, houses so ramshackle that the imagination can conjure no possible use for them, and it comes out at last into a foul thoroughfare that appears to be no better than a stinking alley, so close to the water's edge that the masts of the river's cluttered craft look as if they grew upon the dirty, sagging roofs opposite, and so near to the wharves that the green walls of the buildings are wet and odorous as if from a continuous application of bilge-water.
By day, when its residents are asleep, this street is loud with straining Norman horses, and clattering vans, and whip-cracking carters from the docks; but by night—and the nights are very dark down there—it becomes the haunt of sailors and longshoremen, drunk and shouting, or still and drugged. Then the blue electric lamps snap hysterically at distant corners; the uneven pavement mounts steeply upward, or dashes precipitately downward, with no warning; laughter and curses and the crash of breaking glass or spluttering oaths issue now and again from the blackness at one's elbow, where, hidden among the warehouses, stand the houses for the storing of another sort of wares: the slave-houses maintained for mariners. Grotesque men, could you see them, stagger into dim entrances; terrible caricatures of women, if the light would show them, steal out and dart upon gutter-couched drunkards to paw their pockets. The night is alive with shadows, and the whole street a hungry, quivering quicksand.
Only by urging her eyes to their utmost could Mary make out anything of the house before which she and her unsteady companion came to pause. Even then all of which she could be sure was that, cowering under the shadow of some huge brick building, and skulking beneath its own rotting eaves, it was a half-sunken, old, narrow house, long since abandoned as unfit for legitimate purposes, and leaning rakishly to one side, like an ancient libertine that knows his evil and grins at it.
The sailor knocked lightly at an almost unseen door. A panel of it slid open and threw a ray of light on his face.
"Who's there?" asked a voice that was like the rasping of a file.
"It's Billy," said the sailor.
"Billy who?"
"Billy Stevens. Le'me in, Lou."
A pair of swollen eyes came to the open panel and looked, down the shaft of light, into the sinister face of Bill.
"Who's that with you?" croaked the voice.
"A gal I got for you."
"Is she all right?"
"O' course she is, Lou; else what in hell'd she be doin' with me? Come on; le'me in."
The swollen eyes disappeared, and the panel was shut. There was a sound of the withdrawal of several bolts. Then the door swung open, was closed and relocked behind the newcomers, and Mary found herself in an unfurnished hall, not more than fifteen feet square, lighted by a dim lamp standing on the lowest step of a steep flight of stairs, and guarded by the owner of the swollen eyes.
At least in height, "Big Lou" was gigantic. She was fully six feet tall; she stooped a little and was extremely thin, with a hollow chest and narrow flanks, partially hidden by an old red cotton dressing-gown; but the long arms were like flails, and Lou had a temper that did not hesitate to use them as such. Her dirty brown hair was already touched with gray; she had almost no chin; her nose was a smudge in her sodden face and her cheeks were heavy with years of drunkenness. Her mouth hung loose and quarrelsome, and, as she bent over to look hard at Mary, her breath was foul.
She addressed herself, however, entirely to the black-browed Stevens.
"Where'd you git her?" she asked, as if Mary were one of the animals not gifted with articulate speech.
Stevens told of their meeting.
"Where's she from?"
The sailor gave a rapid and wholly fictitious biography.
"How old?"
"Twenty," said Bill.
"I ain't!" protested Mary.
But the sailor shot her an ugly look.
"Close your trap," he told her, and then, to Big Lou, he repeated: "Twenty."
Big Lou picked up the lamp and, holding it in one blackened claw, passed the other over Mary, with dexterous appraisement, from shoulders to knees.
"I'll give you a five-spot for her," she croaked.
"You'll go to the devil," retorted Bill.
"Six?"
"Ten."
"You're a damned thief, Stevens, that's what you are," growled the old woman. "I'll give you seven, an' not another God damned cent."
Mary leaned against the moist wall. She was now past caring, and she hardly heard.
"Make it seven-seventy-five," said Bill, with sudden ingratiation.
Big Lou raised the lamp again and again regarded the animal, her swollen eyes sharpening.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," she said, once more facing the sailor. "Are you goin' to stop here to-night?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'll come up in the mornin' and take a closer look. If she passes that, I'll give you seven-fifty."
Bill's brown face worked in thought, but the thirst for liquor was upon him, and he compromised.
"All right," he said—"if you'll give me five down on account."
The giantess flung aside her red dressing-gown and, from a black cotton stocking that hung loose upon a shriveled shank, drew a few greasy bills. From these she reluctantly counted five, handed them to Stevens, and returned the rest to their original place of safety.
"G'on up," she said. "I stay here till work's done, an' take tolls."
From somewhere in the shadows she produced a black flask and, as Mary, with the sailor's tattooed hand tightly under her arm, began the steep ascent, Big Lou settled herself at her post of gatekeeper upon the lowest step.
Those stairs seemed almost perpendicular. They rose out of the darkness of the hallway at an alarming angle; each step was close upon a foot high; they were not a yard wide, their upper half was boxed between two walls, and they opened directly into the room that evidently served as the parlor of Big Lou Summerton's establishment.
The room was small and badly lighted by a kerosene hand-lamp, which stood upon a circular center-table and sent up a thin column of smoke to the sooty ceiling. A spotted lounge with dilapidated springs stood in one corner; the faded paper was peeling from the plaster, and a broken stove, which glowed an angry red, heated the place to a degree that was well-nigh unbearable. The air was stale and rancid, both from the company that was present and from a long entertainment of similar companies, in days gone by.
There were only two persons in the room. Both were seated at the table, both were drinking whiskey poured into ragged-edged glasses from a bottle that stood between them, and both were, or had been, women. Of these one coughed so sharply and constantly between her toothless gums, and was so shrunken under her blue calico mother-hubbard, that it was plain she would soon be nothing; while the other was a creature with face red and bloated, features stunted and coarse, eyes that glowed dully, and the voice of a crow.
Stevens presented Mary to them, and wasted no formalities.
"This here's a new one," he said, and, motioning his charge to a third chair, himself pulled up a fourth.
The two inmates received her with a loud duet that was almost a choral jeer. Two more glasses were produced from a shadowy cupboard, and the drinking recommenced.
Mary took one long drink and, wasted by privation, passed at once for some time into a daze in which, though she saw all, she reckoned little. She heard Stevens drop into the babbling stage of drunkenness; she noted that, though the women kept pace with his potations, they poured water into their own whiskey and gin into the sailor's; she saw him loll in his chair and sway over the table; she felt his heavy head drop at last on her thin shoulder, and she did not move while, as he lay there, his companions—now hers—went through his clothes and tiptoed out of a rear door.
It was then that, with a quick start, she regained control of herself at the sound of speech below and the tread of feet on the stairs. A rough voice had assured Big Lou that "it was all right," and another voice was supplementing:
"Rest easy, my dear lady: we are paying as we go. Michael, here, is, as you know, a deck-hand on the admirable yacht of my admirable friend Marsden Payne, with whom I have been on a winter excursion; and he has kindly consented to show me his own section of little old New York."
Mary knew that voice, although she could not at once identify it; but, though she sprang up so quickly that she wakened the tumbling Stevens, who slipped to the floor, she could not escape before she found herself directly regarding the flushed face, glowing gray eyes, and disordered hair of Philip Beekman.
Still young and slim in his yachting clothes, he looked at her, swaying a little in the doorway, his back to those perilous stairs, and with no clear recognition.
"Hello!" he said. "I think I've had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before."
Mary's mouth tightened. She had herself now well in hand. She shook her russet head.
"I guess not," she said.
But her voice betrayed her.
"Good Lord!" said Beekman. The flush deepened on his face. With one hand he snatched his yachting-cap from his black hair; the other he suddenly held out to her, trembling. "Good Lord!" he repeated, this time with something that was nearly awe in his tone. "I—I—it'sViolet! Will you——? Won't youpleaseshake hands?"
Scarcely less amazed by his manner than was he by her appearance, she took his hand.
Beekman turned to someone on the stairs behind him.
"Get out, Mike!" he said. "I've found a friend."
There was a plucking at his sleeve and the murmur of a concerned voice from the rear.
"No," said Philip; "get out. I tell you that I have found a friend. Go down to the tall lady and hand her your money and then make tracks for the yacht. You may tell Mr. Payne that I shall return in an hour."
Again a muffled protest from the dangerous stairway.
"Pardon me a moment," said Beekman, and turned full around. "Now, then," he continued to his guide, "you get out. I am perfectly well able to take care of myself, and I want a private talk. Do you expect me to kick you downstairs? No? I should probably break your back if I did.—Then, good-night."
He stood there while the deckhand's heavy feet clattered downward; waited until he had heard Big Lou grumblingly give Mike the means of exit, and then he turned again to Mary.
"What," he rapidly began, and his handsome face grew once more earnest, "what in the name of heaven are you doing in this den?—No," he continued, raising a quick hand; "don't tell me; I remember how I sent you out of my mother's house and, upon my word, I'm afraid to hear. I couldn't do anything else—but I don't know. Anyhow, there's one thing sure: you need money. Well, I made a little in the game to-night—not much for Payne, but a good slice for me—and it's yours—it's yours—the Lord knows it ought to go to you!"
She had tried to stop him until he spoke of money; but when he mentioned that, she let him run on, let him search his pockets, and at last let him thrust something into her open hand.
"Here," he said; "take it; take it as a favor to me; take it, and remember what I said to you in Rose's. Watch your chance; get out of here; and for God's sake go back to your own home."
Her fingers closed upon the bills and transferred them to her stocking; and as she did this a movement on the floor made them both turn.
Bill Stevens, whom Mary had forgotten and whom Beekman had not seen, gathered himself together, and at last stood more or less upright upon his unsteady bowed legs. His heavy body rocked uneasily, but his dark face, with its bushy brows and sinister eyes, was thrust forward glowering. One sinewy tattooed hand gripped the back of a chair; the other, knotted into a hard fist, he raised slowly toward Beekman.
"It's your turn to go," he said, with a lingering oath. "This here's my gal; she b'longs to me—an' so does any money she gits."
Instantly Philip was his old, assured self. That quality which was most characteristic of him, that curious mixture of much that was bitter and a little that was sweet, lighted his eyes and rang in his voice.
"Where doyoucome from?" he asked, smiling. "You look as if you got out of a trap-door, like the fairy in the play."
"None o' your business where I come from," said Bill. "The point is where I'll send you, if you ain't careful."
Mary, who did not like the looks of things, tried to interpose. She put the palms of her hands against the sailor's rough cheeks.
"Listen, Bill," she said, "this is an old friend of mine——"
"Likely!" grunted Bill.
"He is, though; ain't you?" Mary appealed, with a sidelong glance at Beekman.
"Certainly I am," said Philip.
Stevens lowered his fist, but his red eyes remained full of hate.
"I don't care who you are," he rumbled; "this here's my woman."
"All right," said Beekman; "that's to your credit, I'm sure: a man is known by the woman he keeps, and you can't have a better. Only, you see, my friend——"
"I ain't yer friend."
Once more Mary interposed.
"Just sit down, Bill," she urged. "Sit down an' have a drink with us. You can hear all we got to say."
Stevens sank into a chair, but when Beekman, with Mary between them, pushed the bottle toward Bill, the sailor would have none of it.
"I'll stop a bit," he said, "but I ain't goin' to drink with you, an' you needn't think it."
Philip was still undisturbed.
"Have it your own way," he said. "I know how it is: when a man falls in love, he swears off liquor; when he falls out of love he takes to liquor again—one sort of drunkenness is as much as he can stand at a time. I'll take a drink."
Mary, who now began to fear acute trouble, slipped a hand to Stevens, but he drew away.
"I think I'll smoke—if I may," continued the undisturbed Beekman. "A pipe is domestic, a cigar is philosophic, and a cigarette is a cynic: I shall have a cigarette. William?"—And he offered his silver case to the sailor.
"No," said Stevens, shortly.
Beekman tossed his head. Mary saw his gray eyes snap.
"William," he said, "you have got to learn that the best girl is never so good as the next. And you have got to learn manners. If you won't behave yourself properly, I think you had better leave."
Stevens's fingers opened and closed slowly.
"You go to hell," he said.
Beekman rose quietly. His cigarette was in one hand, and with the other, instead of threatening, he pointed to the stairway.
"Run along," he said.
Stevens jumped to his feet and crouched, like a panther ready to spring. Mary, overturning her chair, flung her arms about him and pinioned him in an embrace.
"Don't, Bill!" she whispered, and, over her shoulder: "Don't, Mr. Beekman! Can't you two be friends? Can't you see it's all right, Bill? Can't you let him alone, Mr. Beekman? Bill, you know how much I think of you."
She put her lips to his rough face. She whispered rapid, unthought lies into his ear. She caressed and cajoled him, and at last, when Philip had been persuaded into a half-scornful apology, she managed to get Stevens out of the room and started him down the stairway to seek sympathy of Big Lou while she herself had her talk with Beekman.
They sat down again at the round table and took a drink. Philip wanted to upbraid himself for his conduct to her in his mother's house, and yet, because he felt that he could have followed no course save that which he had taken, he did not know how to begin: all that he was sure of was that there was a wrong somewhere, and that he must somehow make confession of it. Mary, on the other hand, was divided between panic from the trouble so lately avoided and a desire to hear from Philip nothing approaching condolence.
She sought escape in the commonplace.
"You mustn't mind him," she said, with a nod toward the stairs down which the glowering Bill had departed.
"Not a bit," answered Beekman. "I only wanted to get rid of him in order to tell you hew sorry I am for—for—oh, you know."
"Don't talk about that, Mr. Beekman—please."
"But I must talk about it."
"Not now; not yet. Tell me how you are."
"Oh, I'm as near right as I ever am, or ever will be. But, Violet——"
"You're looking rich."
His eyes followed hers to his gilt-buttoned yachting jacket.
"You can never judge a man by his clothes," he said. "Necessity is the mother of pretension."
"Are you married yet?"
"Hardly. There are only two things that a man can't honestly promise: to love, and to cease to love. I'm still too poor to afford those lies."
Mary only half understood his mood, but she was wholly intent on keeping him free of dreaded topics.
"Do you hear anything of the people we used to know?" she asked.
"Well," said Philip, "Rose was let off, you know, and is back at the old address and the old business." He looked at his watch and started. "By Jove," he continued; "I must have been pretty tight. I had no idea it was so late. I've got to be getting back to the yacht soon."
He stood up, his cap in one hand. Mary followed him to the stair door, and there he turned.
"Violet," he said, "I am going to tell you how sorry I am. I am going to tell you, whether you like to hear it or not."
The flush had gone from his face and eyes, leaving them simple and sincere.
Mary's voice faltered. She understood some things that she had never before understood.
"It didn't matter none," she replied. "You couldn't help it."
"I daresay I couldn't. I don't know. These things are too much for me. But I do know that I am sorry—sorry from the bottom of my heart. And if I can ever do anything—anything——"
He put out his hand, and, as she took it, he raised her hand to his lips.
At that instant there was a yell of rage from behind him. Mary, springing back, saw him half turn and reel. She saw a brown, tattooed hand close about his throat, choking his cry of alarm. She saw Bill Stevens's distorted face and red eyes appear above Beekman's shoulder. She saw a knife flash and bury itself deep in the young man's side. And then, with a tremendous smash, both men disappeared down those murderous, black stairs.
It seemed to Mary that she lost not a moment in running down to them; yet, when she reached the hall, the little drama was finished. The sailor was lying stunned in a corner, and Big Lou, with the rescued lamp beside her, was kneeling above Philip's body and running her quick claws through his pockets.
"Damn your soul, get upstairs!" she cried to Mary.
But Mary hesitated. Overhead she heard the skurry of skirts and hurried feet. Before her lay the man that had once so harmed her. His coat had been torn open and a great red smear grew larger and larger upon his white silk shirt. His mouth was twisted, but still. His gray eyes stared at the begrimed ceiling: Philip Beekman was dead.
She leaped across the body, tore back the bolts, flung open the door, and nearly fell into the pitch-black street.
As she ran around the nearest corner, she heard the cry of Mike, the deckhand, who must have been waiting nearby, and then the sharp alarm-call of a policeman's night-stick.
Her way must have led her first to the river and then well northward: she did not know. She did not even know whether she ran or walked. All that she did know was that, at least for hours to come, she must put as many miles as she could between her own tossing thoughts and that still face with the staring eyes which lay at the foot of the steep, dark stairs in Summerton's. The clocks, had she looked at them, would have told her that the night was gone, but the winter darkness still enveloped the city when she found herself at last standing before an illuminated ticket-window and addressing a sleepy clerk at a ferry.
"I want a ticket," she said, and laid down one of the bills that Philip Beekman had given her.
"Where to?" yawned the clerk.
How did it happen that the name which rose to her lips was the name of her native town—a word that she had not uttered since the morning of her awakening in the house of Rose Légère? Perhaps it was because the dead man had, with almost his last words, pleaded with her to go home; perhaps it was because that name, of which she had for so long tried never to think, was, in reality, the one always nearest to her heart; perhaps it was only because no other town was familiar to her. In any event, the name was spoken without consideration of the consequences, and, before she had time to pause or to repent, the clerk had handed her the change, and with it the bit of pasteboard that would bear her home.
"There's a boat in ten minutes," he said: "but you'll have to wait an hour in Jersey City. The first train doesn't go till six-five."
Of what immediately followed she had, thereafter, no clear recollection. She remembered only buying a cold sandwich and a half-pint of whiskey in a deserted café; crossing a bitterly cold, sullen stretch of water from a twinkling cañon to a shadowy shore; walking, for warmth, weary though she was, up and down, and up and down, along a damp, echoing train-shed, and then, at last, passing a clanging iron gate, climbing into a coach, and falling, nearly stupefied, into an uncomfortable, red-plush covered seat. She had but the faintest mental picture of changing cars, and none at all of any subsequent incident, until, in a black dawn, there flashed upon her, from between the frost-figures on the window, a bit of landscape that warned her she was approaching home.
The track came suddenly to the river-side. Beneath a gray sky, which, though the morning was well advanced, the sun seemed afraid to climb, there raced the mile-and-a-half wide strip of gray water. It crashed across a ruined dam; it swept above a submerged "chute" through which, years before, the big pine-rafts from the upper Alleghanies used to be hurled on their way to the Chesapeake. There had been a thaw: only here and there could Mary see the ominous crests of the rocks that threatened the mid-channel; the islands, with trees bare of foliage, were under water, and far away, from the cloudy York County shore, the high hills rose above the mist, dun and cheerless, forbidding and cold. With a quick catch in her throat, she saw the river-road that she had so often tramped on holidays, now axle-deep in mud. Over there were the leafless woods where, when the boughs were green, the children used to picnic, and here, nearer the town, where patches of soiled snow hid under the stunted pines, was the path where one time came, for pink laurel branches, a girl that she had been. The engine whistled sharply and stopped.
Mary mechanically readjusted the hat that she had not touched since she had put it on for the work of the evening previous—the evening so long ago. She stepped to the platform.
The station was just as it had always been. It looked smaller and dirtier, but she knew that it had not changed; and a sharp pain shot through her heart at the realization that, in this town, everything had gone on its placid way while so much had been happening to one of its children. There were the same grinning gamins waiting for the New York newspapers; the same negro porters from the two hotels; the same station-master "calling the train," just as he used to call it in the days when she had watched the outgoing coaches with envious longings for a sight of the strange lands toward which they were bound.
Then, as her aching feet touched the cinder of the thoroughfare, she realized her danger. She had no plan, no scheme of accounting for herself; some unreasoned impulse, partly, doubtless, the primal instinct that drives the wounded beast to its den, had overcome her fears and turned her face in the direction of the home whither she had, for so long, dreaded to return. But now she was seized with a terror of recognition by the townspeople, and so she lowered her head and walked, with the swiftness of panic, among the little knot of loafers about the station-door.
Now that she was here, what was she to say, what to do, where to turn? She moved, unable to evolve any order from the chaos of her thoughts. She could only go over and over the memory of that last day in school; the early violets, purple and fragrant, peeping through the lush grass on the lawns of Second Street; the flaming oriole in the Southwark yard; the lazy sunlight flowing through the open windows of Miss England's sleepy classroom. Mary's blue eyes were bright then, her mouth was red, her cheeks pink; lithe, strong-limbed, and firm of body, her walk had owned the easy, languid grace of a wild animal. And now, the lawns were bare; only a few persistent sparrows hopped in the gutters and along the ground; the sky was empty of sunlight, and she——
She came to a supreme pause. Habit had led her aimless feet. She was standing, in the full morning, before the two-story brick house that was her father's home.
She knew that the door remained unlocked from dawn to night; but she did not at once enter. She was afraid to go in, afraid to stand still, afraid to go away.
Then, from the next house, came decision. It was Etta's, her married sister's place, and she heard someone within it rattle at its door. Anything was better than a meeting with Etta: Mary quietly opened the door to her father's house and slipped inside.
She went down the brief, darkened hallway, past the drawn curtains of the parlor, through the twilight of the dining-room, and stopped at the open entrance to the small, crowded kitchen, where, among neatly arranged and brightly polished pots and pans, her mother was bending over the glowing stove.
Mrs. Denbigh looked up with a start. Still stooped, still hatchet-faced, but grayer and more shrunken, she stood there, her sleeves rolled from her thin forearms, her forehead wet by present labor, her mouth set hard by labors gone.
"Get out o' here!" she said.
"Mom!"
Mary raised and spread her arms in quick petitioning, and then, in that stranger, Mrs. Denbigh recognized her child.
"You?" she cried.
She dashed her damp hands to her checkered apron; she stepped toward her daughter with her own arms wide. She bent to kiss her—and she drew as suddenly away.
"There's liquor on your breath!" she gasped.
"I know," said Mary, her voice low and trembling. "I—I ain't been well, mom."
The kiss was given, but less abandonedly than it had promised, and, as the mother drew away, her keen eyes searched the girl from face to feet. Over the multitude of maternal questions there rose the three for which Mary was least prepared.
"Mary—what is it? Where is he? Didn't he treat you right?"
They caught the girl at her weakest point.
"Who?" she asked.
"Who?"—Mrs. Denbigh's eyes grew stern again.—"Who? You needn't say no more than that still! I ought to have knowed when I seen you. Nobody could look at you yet and not know. Why, you're—you'reold! Your things are worn out. You——" her tone increased to loud accusations. "Where did you get them clothes?"
Mary's lips faltered.
"I bought 'em," she said.
"Did anybody see you come in here?"
"I don't know.—No, nobody did."
"Thank God for that!" Mrs. Denbigh pointed a long, gnarled finger at her daughter. She pointed it at the bedraggled hat, still bearing traces of a finery too pronounced for that small town. She pointed to the waist and to the skirt. "It's true, then!" she cried. "It's true, then! You've been a bad woman!"
In the doorway Mary swayed. She leaned heavily against the wall. She was too tired to lie.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Yes," her mother echoed; "yes—an' you own up to it! The whole town said it; your pop said it; they all told me yet—an' I stood up fer you; I showed 'em your letter; I says you was married; I kep' on believin' you'd write; I stuck to it—an' now you come here to shame me. You come here when you're worn out—when no one else'll have you—you come here, brazen, not carin' still, a bad woman—a bad woman—an' I guess you think I'll take you in!"