"I did not take the money!" David cried desperately. "It's a lie!"
Helen moved to David's side, and gazed straight into Mr. Haddon's accusing face. Indignation was replacing her astoundment; her cheeks were tingeing with red.
"What, would you condemn a man upon mere guess-work!" she cried. "Merely because the money is not there, is that proof that Mr. Aldrich took it? Do you call this justice, Mr. Haddon?"
Mr. Haddon's look did not alter, and he did not reply. The opinion of womankind he had ever considered negligible.
Helen turned to David and gave him her hand. "I believe you."
He thanked her with a look.
"It must have been Mr. Morton," she said.
Her words first thrilled him. Then suddenly they rang out as a knell. If he threw off the guilt, it must fall on Morton; if Morton were publicly guilty, then the hundreds of the Mission—
Mr. Haddon's hard voice broke in, changeless belief in its tone: "Mr. Aldrich took it."
David looked at Mr. Haddon, looked whitely at Helen. And then the great Thought was conceived, struggled dizzily, painfully, into birth. He stood shivering, awed, before it....
He slowly turned and walked to a window and gazed down into the street, filled with children hurrying home from school. The Thought spoke to him in vivid flashes. He had no relatives, almost no friends. He loved Helen Chambers; but he was nobody and a beggar. He had not done anything—perhaps could never do anything—and even if he did, his work would probably be of little worth. He had wanted his life to be of service; had wanted to sell it, as it were, for the largest good he could perform. Well, here were the people of St. Christopher's toppling over the edge of destruction. Here was his Great Bargain—the chance to sell his life for the highest price.
As to what he had done with the five thousand, which of course he'd be asked—well, an evening of gambling would be a sufficient explanation.
He turned about.
"Well?" said Mr. Haddon.
David avoided Helen's look. He felt himself borne upward to the apex of life.
"Yes ... I took it," he said.
The history of the next four years of David's life is contained in the daily programme of Croton Prison. At six o'clock the rising gong sounded; David rolled out of his iron cot, washed himself at the faucet in his cell, and got into his striped trousers and striped jacket. At six-thirty he lock-stepped, with a long line of fellows, to a breakfast of hash, bread and coffee. At seven he marched to shoe factory or foundry, where he laboured till twelve, when the programme called him to dinner. At one he marched back to work; at half-past five he marched to his cell, where his supper of bread and coffee was thrust in to him through a wicket. He read or paced up and down till nine, when the going out of his light sent him into his iron cot. Multiply this by fifteen hundred and the product is David's prison life.
It would be untruth to say that a sense of the good he was doing sustained a passionate happiness in David through all these years. Moments of exaltation were rare; they were the sun-blooming peaks in an expanse of life that was otherwise low and gloom-hung. David had always understood that prisons in their object were not only punitive—they were reformative. But all his intelligence could not see any strong influence that tended to rouse and strengthen the inmates' better part. Occasional and perfunctory words from chaplains could not do it. Monotonous work, to which they were lock-stepped, from which they were lock-stepped, and which was directed and performed in the lock-step's deadening spirit, this could not do it. Constant silence, while eating, marching, working, could not do it. The removal for a week of a man's light because he had spoken to a neighbour, this could not do it. Nor could a day's or two days' confinement, on the charge of "shamming" when too ill to work, in an utterly black dungeon on a bit of bread and a few swallows of water.
Rather this routine, these rules, enforced unthinkingly, without sympathy, had an opposite energy. David felt himself being made unintelligent—being made hard, bitter, vindictive—felt himself being dehumanised. One day as he sat at dinner with a couple of hundred mates, silent, signalling for food with upraised fingers, a man and woman who were being escorted about the prison by the warden, came into the room. The woman studied for several minutes these first prisoners she had ever seen—then the dumb rows heard her exclaim: "Why look,—they're human!" To David the discovery was hardly less astonishing. He had been forgetting the fact.
Yes, moments of exaltation were rare. More frequent were the dark times when the callousness and stupidity of some of the regulations enraged him, when the weight of all the walls seemed to lie upon his chest—when he frantically felt he must have light and air, or die;—and he cursed his own foolishness, and would have traded the truth to the people of St. Christopher's for his freedom. Prometheus must often have repented his gift of fire. But the momentum of David's resolve carried him through these black stretches; and during his normal prison mood, which was the restless gloom of all caged animals, his mind was in control and held him to his bargain.
But always there was with him a great fear. Was Morton's memory retaining its potency over the people of St. Christopher's? Were they striving to hold to their old ideals, or were they gradually loosening their grip and slipping back into the old easy ways of improvidence and dissipation? Perhaps, even now, they were entirely back, and his four years had paid for nothing. The long day carrying the liquid iron to the moulds would have been easier, the long night in the black cell would have been calmer, had he had assurance that his sacrifice was fulfilling its aim. But never a word came from St. Christopher's through those heavy walls.
And always he thought of Helen Chambers. He could never forget the stare of her white face when he had acknowledged his guilt, how she had first tried to speak, then turned slowly and walked away. The four walls of his mind were hung with that picture; wherever he turned, he saw it. He had wanted to spring after her and whisper his innocence, but there had flashed up a realisation that his plan was feasible only with a perfect secrecy, and to admit one person to his confidence might be to admit the world. Besides, she might not believe him. So, silent, he had let her walk from the room with his guilt.
He often wondered if she ever thought of him. If she did, it was doubtless only to despise him. More likely, he had passed from her mind. Perhaps she was married. That thought wrung him. He tried to still the heavy pain by looking at the impassable gulf that lay between them, and by telling himself it was natural and fitting that she should have married. He wondered what her husband was like, and if she were happy. But the walls were mute.
Long before his release he had decided he should settle in New York. Life would be easiest, he knew, if he were to lose himself in a new part of the world. But St. Christopher's, where four prison years and the balance of his dishonoured life were invested, was in New York; Helen Chambers was in New York. The rest of the world had no like attractions; it could hide him—that was all. But save at first while he was gaining a foothold—and could he not then lose himself among New York's millions?—he did not desire to hide himself.
He did not care to hide himself because the prison had given him a message, and this message he intended speaking publicly. He had pondered long over society's treatment of the man who breaks its law. That treatment seemed to him absurd, illogical. It would have been laughably grotesque in its deforming incompetence had it not been directed at human beings. It was a treatment bounded on one side by negligence, on the other by severity. It maimed souls, killed souls; it was criminal. David's sense of justice and humanity demanded that he should protest against this great criminal—our prison system. He knew it as prison reformers did not—from the inside. He could speak from his heart. And as soon as he had gained a foothold, he would begin.
At length came the day of his liberation, and he found himself back in New York, twenty dollars, his prison savings, in his pocket, the exhaustion of prison life in his flesh, and in his heart a determination to conquer the world. He knew but one part of New York—the neighbourhood of St. Christopher's Mission—and that part drew him because of his interest in it, and also because he must live cheaply and there life was on a cheap scale. He hesitated to settle in the immediate neighbourhood; but he could settle just without its edge, where he could look on, and perhaps pass unnoticed. He at length found a room on the fifth floor of a dingy tenement, seven or eight blocks from the Mission. The room had a chair, a bed, a promise of weekly change of sheets, and a backyard view composed of clothes-lines, bannered with the block's underwear, and the rear of a solid row of dreary tenements. Five years before the room would have been unbearable; now it was luxury, for it was Freedom.
After paying the first month's rent of five dollars and buying a few dishes, a little gas stove and a small supply of groceries, he had nine dollars left with which to face the world and make it give him place. If he spent twenty cents a day for food, and spent not a cent for other purposes, he could eat for six weeks. But before then rent would again be due. Four weeks he could stand out, no longer; by then he must have won a foothold.
Well, he would do it.
By the time he had made a cupboard out of the soap-box the grocer had given him and had set his room in order, dusk was falling into the gulch-like backyard and the opposite wall was springing into light at a hundred windows. He ate a dinner from his slender store, using his bed as a chair and his chair as a table, and after its signs were cleared away he sat down and gazed across the court into the privacy of five strata of homes. He saw, framed by the windows, collarless men and bare-armed women sitting with their children at table; the odours of a hundred different dinners, entangled into one odour, filled his nostrils; family talk, and the rumble and clatter of the always-crowded streets, came to his ears as a composite murmuring that was an inarticulate summary of life.
But none of these impressions reached his mind; that had slipped away to Helen Chambers. The question that had asked itself ten thousand times repeated itself again: was she married? He tried to tell himself quietly that it was none of his affair, could make no difference to him—but the suspense of four years was not to be strangled by self-restraint. The desire to know the truth, to see her if he could, mounted to an impulse there was no withstanding.
And another oft-asked question also came to him. Was the Mission still a power for good? And this also roused an uncontrollable desire to know the truth. He left his room and set out for St. Christopher's, wondering if he would be recognised. But, though often Morton's guest, he had mixed but little in the affairs of the Mission, and not many from the hard-working neighbourhood had been able to attend his brief trial; so he was known by sight to few, and no one now gave him a second look.
As he came into the old streets, with here and there a little shop that had been owned by one of Morton's followers, and here and there among the passers-by a face that was vaguely familiar, his suspense grew and grew—till, when St. Christopher's loomed before him, it seemed his suspense would almost choke him. He paused across the street in the shadow of a tenement entrance, and stared over at the club-house and at the chapel with its spire rising into the rain-presaging night. Light streamed from the open door of the chapel; on the club-house window-sills were the indistinct shapes of flower-boxes; boys and girls, young men and women, parents, were entering the club-house. Everything seemed just the same. But were the people the same? Had his four years been squandered—or spent to glorious purpose?
He slipped across the street and looked cautiously into the chapel. There were the three rows of pews, the plain pulpit bearing an open Bible, behind which Morton used to preach, the organ at which a stooped girl, a shirt-waist maker, used to play the hymns and lead the congregation's singing—all just as in other days.
The chapel was empty, save the corner of a rear pew in which sat a troubled, poorly-dressed woman, and a gray-haired man whose clerical coat made David guess him to be Morton's successor. The voice of his advice was gentle and persuasive, and when the woman's rising to go revealed his shaven face, David saw that it had strength and kindness, spirit and humility—saw that the man's vigour remained despite his obvious sixty years.
David entered the chapel and approached the director of the Mission. The old man held out his hand. "I'm glad to see you," he said. "Is there anything in which I can serve you?"
David strove for a casual manner, but prison had made him too worn, too nervous, to act a part requiring so much control. "I was just—going by," he stammered, taking the hand. "I used to know the Mission—years ago—when Mr. Morton was here. So I came in."
"Ah, then you knew Mr. Morton!" said the director warmly.
"A—a little."
"Even to know him a little was a great privilege," he said with conviction, admiration. "He was a wonderful man!"
David braced himself for one of the two great questions of his last four years. "Does the neighbourhood still remember him?"
"Just as though he were still here," the director answered, with the enthusiasm an unjealous older brother may feel for the family genius.
"He has left an influence that amounts to a living, inspiring presence. That influence, more than anything I have done, has kept the people just as earnest for truer manhood and womanhood as when he left them. I feel that I am only the assistant. He is still the real head."
David got away as quickly as he could, a mighty, quivering warmth within him. On the other side of the street, he gave a parting glance over his shoulder at the chapel. He stopped short, and stared. While they had talked, the director of the Mission had turned on additional lights, among which had been an arc-light before the great stained-glass window at the street end of the chapel. The window was now a splendid glow of red and blue and purple, and printed upon its colours was this legend:
David stared at the window, weak, dizzy. There was a momentary pang of bitterness that Morton should be so honoured, and he be what he was. Then the glow that had possessed him in the chapel flowed back upon him in even greater warmth. The window seemed to David, in his then mood, to be the perpetuation in glowing colour of Morton's influence. It seemed to throw forth into the street, upon the chance passer-by, the inspiration of Morton's life.
Yes,—his four years had counted!
Half an hour later he took his stand against the shadowed stoop of an empty mansion in Madison Avenue, and gazed across at a great square three-story stone house, with a bulging conservatory running along its left side—the only residence in the block that had re-opened for the autumn. All thought of Morton and the Mission was gone from him. His mind was filled only with the other great fear of his last four years. If she came out of the door he watched, if he glimpsed her beneath a window shade, then probably she still belonged in her father's house—was still unmarried.
A cold drizzle had begun to fall. He drew his head down into his upturned collar, and though his weakened body shivered, he noticed neither the rain nor the protest of his flesh. His whole being was directed at the house across the way. Slow minute followed slow minute. The door did not open, and he saw no one inside the windows. His heart beat as though it would shake his body apart. The sum of four years suspense so weakened him that he could hardly stand. Yet he stood and waited, waited; and he realised more keenly than ever how dear she was to him—though to possess her was beyond his wildest dreams, and perhaps he might not even speak to her again.
At length a nearby steeple called the hour of ten. Presently a carriage began to turn in towards the opposite sidewalk. David, all a-tremble, his great suspense now at its climax, stepped forth from his shadow. The carriage stopped before the Chambers home. He hurried across the street, and a dozen paces away from the carriage he stooped and made pretense of tying his shoe-lace; but all the while his eyes were on the carriage door, which the footman had thrown open. First a man stepped forth, back to David, and raised an umbrella. Who? The next instant David caught the profile. It was Mr. Chambers. After him came an ample, middle-aged woman, brilliantly attired—Mrs. Bosworth, Mr. Chambers's widowed sister, who had been living with him since his wife's death.
A moment later Mr. Chambers was helping a second woman from the carriage. The umbrella cut her face from David's gaze, but there was no mistaking her. So she still lived in the house of her father!
She paused an instant to speak to the footman. For a second a new fear lived in David: might she not come with her father to her father's house, and still be married? But at the second's end the fear was destroyed by the conventional three-word response of the footman. David watched her go up the steps, her face hidden by the umbrella, watched her enter and the door close behind her. Then, collapsed by the vast relief which followed upon his vast suspense, he sank down upon the stoop, and the three words of the footman maintained a thrilling iteration in his ears.
The three words were: "Thank you,Miss."
The next morning David was awakened by the ringing of a gong. He tumbled out of bed in order to be ready for the march to breakfast at half past six; and he had begun to dress before it dawned upon him that he was a free man, and that the ringing was a prank a four-year habit had played upon him—a prank that, by the way, was to be repeated every morning for many a week to come.
He slipped back into bed, and lay there considering what he should first do. He had to find work quickly, but he felt his four walled years had earned him a holiday—one day in which to re-acquaint himself with freedom. So, after he had eaten, he felt his way down the dark, heavy-aired stairways, stepped through the doorway, and then paused in wonderment.
All was as fresh, as marvellous, as yesterday. The narrow street was a bustle of freedom—pounding carts, school-going boys and girls, playing children, marketing wives—no stripes, no lock-steps, no guards. And the yellow sun! He held his bleached face up to it, as though he would press against its sympathetic warmth; and he sucked deeply of the September air. And the colours!—the reds and whites and browns of the children, the occasional green of a plant on a window sill, the clear blue of the strip of sky at the street's top. He had almost forgotten there were colours other than stripes, the gray of stone walls, the black of steel bars.
And how calmly the streetful of people took these marvels!
At first he expected the people he threaded among to look into his face, see his prison record there, draw away from him, perhaps taunt him with "thief." But no one even noticed him, and gradually this fear began to fade from him. As he was crossing the Bowery, a car clanged at his back. He frantically leaped, with a cry, to the sidewalk, and leaned against a column of the elevated railroad—panting, exhausted, heart pounding. He had not before known how weak, nerveless, prison had made him.
He found, as he continued his way, that the sidewalk undulated like a ship's deck beneath his giddy legs; he found himself afraid of traffic-crowded corners that women and children unhesitatingly crossed; he found himself stopping and staring with intensest interest at the common-places of street life—at hurrying men, at darting newsboys, at rushing street cars and clattering trucks, at whatever moved where it willed. Old-timers had told him of the dazedness, the fear, the interest, of the first free days, but he was unprepared for the palpitant acuteness of his every sensation.
After a time, in Broadway, he chanced to look into a mirror-backed show-window where luminous satins were displayed. Between two smirking waxen women in sheeny drapery he saw that which brought him to a pause and set him gazing. It was his full-length self, which he had not seen these four years. The figure was gaunt, a mere framework for his shoddy, prison-made suit; the skin of his face snugly fitted itself to the bones; his eyes were sunken, large; his hair, which he uncovered, had here and there a line of gray. He was startled. But he had courage for the future; and after a few moments he said to himself aloud, a habit prison had given him: "A few weeks, and you won't know yourself."
As he walked on, the consciousness of freedom swelled within him. If he desired, he could speak to the man ahead of him, could laugh, could stand still, could walk where he wished, and no guard to report on him and no warden to subtract from his "good time." More than once, under cover of the rattle of an elevated train, he shouted at his voice's top in pure extravagance of feeling; and once in Fifth Avenue, forgetting himself, he flung his arms wide and laughed joyously—to be suddenly restored to convention by the hurried approach of a policeman.
All day he watched this strange new life—much of the time sitting in parks, for the unaccustomed walking wearied him. When he came to his tenement's door—flanked on one side by a saloon, and on the other side by a little grocery store before which sat a basket of shrunken potatoes and a few withered cabbages and beans, and in which supplies could be bought by the pennyworth—a hand fell upon his arm and a voice called out with wheezy cordiality: "Good evenin', friend."
David glanced about. Beside him was a loose bundle of old humanity, wrapped up in and held together by a very seedy coat and stained, baggy trousers frayed at the bottom. The face was covered with gray bristle and gullied with wrinkles. Over one eye hung a greasy green flap; the other eye was watery and red.
"Good evening," returned David.
"Excuse me for stoppin' you," said the old man with an ingratiating smile that unlipped half a dozen brown teeth. "But we're neighbours, and I thought we ought to get acquainted. Me an' my girl lives just across the hall from you. Morgan's my name—Old Jimmie Morgan."
"Aldrich is mine. I suppose I'll see you again. Good evening." And David, eager to get away from the nodding old man, started through the door.
His neighbour stepped quickly before him, and put a stubby hand against his chest. "Wait a minute, Mr. Aldrich. I'm in a little trouble. I've got to get some groceries, and my daughter—she carries our money—she ain't in. I wonder if you couldn't loan me fifty cents till mornin'?"
David knew that fifty cents loaned to him was fifty cents lost. He shook his head.
"Mebbe I could get along on twenty-five then. Say a quarter."
"I really can't spare it," said David, and tried to press by.
"Well, then make it a dime," wheedled the old man, stopping him again. "You'll never miss a dime, friend. Come, what's a dime to a young man like you. And it'll get me a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee. That'll help an old man like me a lot, for Katie won't be home till mornin'."
Merely to free himself David drew out one of his precious dimes.
"Thank you, thank you!" The dirty, wrinkled hand closed tightly upon the coin. "You've saved an old man from goin' hungry to bed."
David again turned to enter. He almost ran against a slight, neatly-dressed girl, apparently about twenty, who was just coming out of the doorway. Her black eyes were gleaming, and there were red spots in her cheeks. At sight of her the old man started to hurry away.
"Jim Morgan! You come here!" she commanded in a ringing voice.
The old man stopped, and came slowly toward her with a hang-dog look.
"You've been borrowing money of that man!" she declared.
"No I ain't. We were talkin'—talkin' politics. Honest, Katie. We were just talkin' politics."
"You were begging money!" She turned her sharp eyes upon David. "Wasn't he?"
The old man winked frantically for help with his red eye, and started to slip the dime into his pocket. The girl, without waiting for David's answer, wheeled about so quickly that she caught both the signal for help and the move of the hand pocketward. She pointed at the hand. "Stop that! Now open it up!"
"Nothin' in it, Katie," whined her father.
"Open that hand!"
It slowly opened, and in the centre of the grimy palm lay the dime.
"Give it back to him," the girl ordered.
Old Jimmie handed David the coin.
The girl's eyes blazed. Her wrath burst forth. "Now, sir, you will borrow money, will you!" her sharp voice rang out. "You will lie to me about it, will you!"
David hurried inside and heard no more. He made a pot of coffee and warmed half a can of baked beans over his little gas stove. Of this crude meal his stomach would accept little. His condition should have had the delicate and nourishing food that is served an invalid. His appetite longingly remembered meals of other days: the fruit, the eggs on crisp toast, the golden-brown coffee, at breakfast; the soup, the roast, the vegetables, the dessert, at dinner—linen, china, service, food, all dainty. He turned from the meals his imagination saw to the meal upon his chair-table. He smiled whimsically. "Sir," he said reprovingly to his appetite, "you're too ambitious."
He had placed his can of condensed milk and bit of butter out on the fire-escape, which he, adopting the East Side's custom, used as an ice-chest, and had put his washed dishes into the soap-box cupboard, when he was startled by a knock. Wondering who could be calling on him, he threw open the door.
Kate Morgan stood before him. "I want to see you a minute. May I come in?"
"Certainly."
David bowed and motioned her in. Her quick eyes noted the bow and the gesture. He drew his one chair into the open space beside the bed.
"Won't you please be seated?"
She sat down, rested one arm on the corner of his battered wash-stand and crossed her knees.
David seated himself on the edge of the bed. He had a better view of her than when he had seen her in the doorway, and he could hardly believe she was the daughter of the old man who had stopped him. She wore a yellow dress of some cheap goods, with bands of bright red about the bottom of the skirt, bands of red about the short loose sleeves that left the arms bare from the elbows, a red girdle, and about the shoulders a red fulness. The dress was almost barbaric in its colouring, yet it suited her dark face, with its brilliant black eyes.
There was neither embarrassment nor over-boldness in the face; rather the composure of the woman who is acting naturally. There was a touch of hardness about the mouth and eyes, and a touch of cynicism; in ten years, David guessed, those qualities would have sculptured themselves deep into her features. But it was an alert, clear, almost pretty face—would have been decidedly pretty, in a sharp way, had the hair not been combed into a tower of a pompadour that exaggerated her face's thinness.
She did not lose an instant in speaking her errand. "I want you to promise not to lend my father a cent," she began in a concise voice. "I have to ask that of every new person that moves in the house. He's an old soak. I don't dare give him a cent. But he borrows whenever he can, and if he gets enough it's delirium tremens."
"He told me he wanted a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee," David said in excuse of himself.
"Soup and coffee! Huh! Whiskey. That's all he thinks of—whiskey. His idea of God is a bartender that keeps setting out the drinks and never strikes you for the price. If I give him a decent suit of clothes, it's pawned and he's drunk. He used to pawn the things from the house—but he don't do that any more! He mustn't have a cent. That's why I've come to ask you to turn him down the next time he tries to touch you for one of his 'loans.'"
"That's an easy promise," David answered with a smile.
"Thanks."
Her business was done, but she did not rise. Her swift eyes ran over the furnishings of the room—the bed, the crippled wash-stand, with its chipped bowl and broken-lipped pitcher, the dishes in the soap-box cupboard, the gas stove under the bed, the bare, splintered floor, the walls from which the blue kalsomine was flaking—ran over David's shapeless clothes. Then they stopped on his face.
"You're a queer bird," she said abruptly.
He started. "Queer?"
She gave a little jerk of a nod. "You didn't always live in a room like this, nor wear them kind of clothes. And you didn't learn your manners over on the Bowery neither. What's the matter? Up against it?"
David stared at her. "Don't you think there may be another queer bird in the room?" he suggested.
She was not rebuffed, but for a second she studied his face with an even sharper glance, in which there was the least glint of suspicion. "You mean me," she said. "I live across the hall with my father. When I'm at work I'm a maid in swell families—sometimes a nurse girl. Nothing queer about that."
"No—o," he said hesitatingly.
She returned to the attack. "What do you do?"
"I'm looking for work."
"What have you worked at?"
The directness with which she moved at what interested her might have amused David had that directness not been searching for what he desired for the present to conceal. "I only came to New York yesterday," he said evasively.
"But you've been in New York before?"
"Not for several years."
She was getting too close. "I'm a very stupid subject for talk," he said quickly. "Now you—you must have had some very interesting experiences in the homes of the rich. You saw the rich from the inside. Tell me about them."
She was not swerved an instant from her point. "You're very interesting. The first minute I saw you I spotted you for a queer one to be living in a place like this. What've you been doing since you were in New York before?"
David could not hold back a flush; no evasive reply was waiting at his lips. Several seconds passed. "Pardon me, but don't you think you're a little too curious?" he said with an effort.
Her penetrating eyes had not left him. Now understanding flashed into her face. She emitted a low whistle.
"So that's it, is it!" she exclaimed, her voice softer than it had been. "So you've been sent away, and just got out. And you're starting in to try the honesty game."
There was no foiling her quick penetration. He nodded his head.
He had wondered how the world would receive him. She was the first member of the free world he had met who had learned his prison record, and he waited, chokingly, her action. He expected her face to harden accusingly—expected her to rise, speak despisingly and march coldly out.
"Well, you are up against it good and hard," she said slowly. There was sympathy in her voice.
The sympathy startled him; he warmed to her. But straightway it entered his mind that she would hasten to spread her discovery, and to live in the house might then be to live amid insult.
"You have committed burglary on my mind—you have stolen my secret," he said sharply.
"Oh, but I'll never tell," she quickly returned. And David, looking at her clear face, found himself believing her.
She tried with quick questions to break into his past, but he blocked her with silence. After a time she glanced at a watch upon her breast, rose and reached for the door-knob. But David sprang quickly forward. "Allow me," he said, and opened the door for her.
The courtesy did not go unnoticed. "You must have been a real 'gun,' a regular high-flyer, in your good days," she whispered.
"Why?"
"Oh, your kind of manners don't grow on cheap crooks."
She held out her hand. "Well, I wish you luck. Come over and see me sometime. Good night."
When he had closed the door David sat down and fell to musing over his visitor. She was dressed rather too showily, but she was not coarse. She was bold, but not brazen; hers seemed the boldness, the directness, of a child or a savage. Perhaps, in this quality, she was not grown up, or not yet civilised. He wondered how a maid or a nurse girl could support a father on her earnings, as he inferred she did. He wondered how she had so quickly divined that he was fresh from prison. He remembered a yellow stain near the ends of the first two fingers of her left hand; cigarettes; and the stain made him wonder, too. And he wondered at her manner—sharp, no whit of coquetry, a touch of frank good fellow-ship at the last.
Presently a hand which had been casually fumbling in the inside pocket of his coat drew out a folded paper. It was the bulletin of the work at St. Christopher's, and he now remembered that the director of the Mission (Dr. Joseph Franklin, the bulletin gave his name) had handed it to him the night before and that he had mechanically thrust it into his pocket and forgotten it. He began to look it through with pride; in a sense it was the record ofhiswork. He read the schedule of religious services, classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Toward the middle of the latter list this item stopped him short:
Whittier Club—Members aged 17 to 20. Meets Wednesday evenings. Leader, Miss Helen Chambers.
Whittier Club—Members aged 17 to 20. Meets Wednesday evenings. Leader, Miss Helen Chambers.
This was Wednesday evening. David put on his hat, and ten minutes later, his coat collar turned up, his slouch hat pulled down, he was standing in the dark doorway of a tenement, his eyes fastened on the club-house entrance twenty yards down the street.
After what seemed an endless time, she appeared. Dr. Franklin was with her, evidently to escort her to her car. David gazed at her, as they came toward his doorway, with all the intensity of his great love. She was tall, almost as tall as Dr. Franklin; and she had that grace of carriage, that firm poise of bearing, which express a noble, healthy womanhood under perfect self-control. David had not seen her face last night; and he now kept his eyes upon it, waiting till it should come within the white circle of the street lamp near the doorway.
When the lamp lifted the shadows from her face, a great thrill ran through him. Ah, how beautiful it was!—beauty of contour and colour, yes, but here the fleshly beauty, which so often is merely flesh for flesh's sake, was the beautiful expression of a beautiful soul. There was a high dignity in the face, and understanding, and womanly tenderness. It was a face that for seven years had to him summed up the richest, rarest womanhood.
She passed so close that he could have touched her, but he flattened himself within the doorway's shadow. After she had gone by he leaned out and followed her with his hungry eyes.
Could he ever, ever win her respect?
The next day the search for work had to be begun, and David felt himself squarely against the beginning of his new career as an ex-convict. He saw this career, not as a part to be abandoned when it wearied him, like a rôle assumed for a season by a sociological investigator, but as the part he must play, mustlive, to the end of his days. His immediate struggle, his whole future, would not be one whit other than if he were in truth the thief the world had branded him. Writing for the magazines was not to be thought of, for he needed quick, certain money. He was friendless; he had no profession; he had no trade; he had never held a position; he had no experience of a commercial value. All in all his equipment for facing the world, barring his education, was identical with the equipment of the average discharged convict.
David did not look forward into this career with resignation. There was nothing of the willing martyr in him. The life he must follow was not going to be easy; it would demand his all of courage and endurance. He longed to stand before the world a clean man, and the longing was at times a fierce rebellion. He had bought a great good, but he was paying therefor a bitter price, and every day of his life he must pay the price anew. Yet he faced the future with determination, if not with happiness. He believed that earnest work and earnest living would regain the world's respect—would slowly force the world to yield him place.
He tried to forbid himself thinking of Helen Chambers as having the slightest part in his future. She was a thousand times farther removed than four years before, when his name had been fair, and then the space of the universe had stretched between them. And yet the desire some day to appear well in her eyes was after all the strongest motive, stronger even than the instinct of self-preservation, that urged him upon the long, uphill struggle.
David had determined first to seek work on a newspaper. Some of the things he had written in that far-away time beyond the prison, came back to him. They were not bad—they were really good! If he could get on one of the papers, and could manage to hold his place for a few months without his story being learned, perhaps by then he would have so proved his worth that he would be retained despite his prison record. He would do his best! Who knew?—life might have a very endurable place for him somewhere in the years ahead. He grew almost excited as he gazed at the dimly-seen success.
Before starting out upon his first try at fortune, he gazed into the mirror above his wash-stand and for a long time studied his face, wondering if the men he was going to meet would read his record there. The forehead was broad, and about the grey eyes and the wide mouth were the little puckering wrinkles that announce the dreamer. The chin was the chin of the man of will. In health the face would have suggested a rare combination of idealism and will-power; but now there brooded over it that hesitancy, that blanched gloom, which come from living within the dark shadows of prison. No one looking at his thin, slightly stooping figure would have ever guessed that here was Dave Aldrich, the great half-back of '95.
After filling the forenoon by writing for his belongings, which his New Jersey landlady had promised to keep till he should send for them, and by dreaming of the future, David set out for the hurly-burly that seethes within and without the sky-supporting buildings of Park Row. At the entrance to the first newspaper office, his courage suddenly all flowed from him. Would he be recognised as a jail-bird? His ill-fitting prison-made suit, that clothed him in reproach, that burned him—was it not an announcement of his record? He turned away in panic.
But he had to go in, and fiercely mastering his throbbing agitation, he returned to the office and entered. The city editor, a sharp-faced young man, after hearing that David had no newspaper experience, snapped out in a quick voice, "Sorry, for I need a man—but I've got no time to break in a green hand," and the following instant was shouting to a "copy" boy for proofs.
At the next place the slip on which David had been required to write his business, came back to him with the two added words, "Nothing doing." At the third place the returned slip bore the statement, "Got all the men I need." The fourth editor, whom he saw, gave him a short negative. The fifth editor sent word by mouth of the office boy that his staff was full. It required all David's determination to mount to the sixth office, that of an able and aggressively respectable paper.
The boy who took in his request to the city editor returned at once and led David across a large dingy room, with littered floor, and grime-streaked windows. Young men, coatless, high-geared, sat at desks scribbling with pencils and clicking typewriters; boys, answering the quick cries of "copy!" scurried about through the heavy tobacco smoke. The room was a rectangular solid of bustling intensity.
The city editor, who occupied a corner of the room, waved David to a chair. Again David repeated the formula of his desire, and again he was asked his experience.
"I've had no experience on a paper," he replied, "but I've done a lot of writing in a private way."
"You're practically a new man, then." The editor thought for a moment, and David eagerly watched his face. It was business-like, but kindly. "Why, I guess I might take the trouble to lick a man into shape—if he seemed to have the right stuff in him. Anyhow, I might give you a trial. But you're not very young to be just beginning the game. What've you been working at?"
David felt the guilty colour warming his cheeks. "Writing."
"All the time?"
He tried to speak naturally. "The last few years I have been trying to do some—manual work."
"Here in the city?"
"No. Out of town."
The editor could not but notice David's flushed face and its strained look. He eyed David narrowly, and his brow wrinkled in thought. David strove to force a natural look upon his face. "Aldrich," the editor said to himself, "Aldrich—David Aldrich you said. That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that in the last few days?"
"I don't know," said David, his lips dry; but he thought of a paragraph he had read on the ride from prison announcing his discharge.
"O-o-h!" said the editor, and his eyes sharpened. David understood. The editor had also remembered the paragraph.
The editor's gaze dropped to his desk, as though embarrassed. "I'm very sorry—but I'm afraid I can't use you after all. I really don't need any men. But I hope you'll find something without trouble."
The blow was gently delivered, but it was still a blow—one that, as he walked dazedly from the office, made his courage totter. He told himself that he had counted upon just such experiences as this, that he had planned for a month of rebuffs—and gradually, as the evening wore away, he preached spirit back into himself. However, he would make no further attempts to find newspaper work. Even should he be so lucky as to secure a place, some one of the score or two score fellow-workers would be certain to connect him with the newly-liberated convict, as the editor had done, and then—discharge. For the present, it would be better to seek a position among the large business houses.
At dawn the next morning David was reading the "Help Wanted" columns of a newspaper, and two hours later he was sitting in the office of the superintendent of the shipping department of a wholesale dress-goods house that had advertised for a shipping clerk. The superintendent scrutinised David's face, making David feel that the prison mark was appearing, like an image on a developing plate, and then demanded: "Why do you want a job like this? This ain't your class."
"Because I need it."
"Had any experience as a shipping clerk?"
"No. But I'm mighty willing to learn."
"Well, let's see your letters from previous employers."
David hesitated. "I have none." He felt the red proclamation of his record begin to burn in his cheeks.
"Have none!" The superintendent looked suspicious. "No references at all?"
David shook his head; his cheeks flamed redder.
"Who've you worked for?"
To mention here his four years of writing would be absurd. "No one," he stammered—"that is, I've had no business experience."
The superintendent's reply came out sharply: "No experience—no references—can't use you. Good morning."
David stumbled out, not noticing the relief his dejection gave the other applicants waiting outside the office. He saw the difficulty of his situation with a new, startling clearness; the superintendent had summed it up with business-like conciseness—"no experience, no references." A sudden fear, a sudden consternation, clutched him. Would he ever be able to pass that great wall standing between him and a position?—that wall builded of his prison record, of no experience, of no references?
Whether or not, he must try. He hurried to another office that had advertised for help, and to another, and to another—and so on for days. Usually he was turned away because there was really no work, but several times because to the penetrating questions he could return only his distrust-rousing answers. His courage tried to escape; but he caught it and held it, desperately.
Saturday evening an expressman delivered a box sent by his old New Jersey landlady. The charge was a dollar, and the dollar's payment was a tragedy. The box contained only a few of the things he had left behind him. His landlady, though kind, was careless, his things had become scattered during the four years, and the contents of the box were all she had been able to get together. There were a few of his books, a few photographs and prints, a few ornaments, a pair of boxing gloves, most of his manuscripts, and an overcoat. The overcoat at least was worth having, with cool weather but a few weeks off.
The second week was an elaboration of the first few days, and the first half of the third was the same. Then he had three days' work at addressing envelopes—girls' work and boys' work, for which he was paid eighty-five cents a day. Then the search again.
At length he found a place. It was in a small department store in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street—a store that in fifteen years had developed from a notion shop occupying a mere hole in the wall. The proprietor was one of those men who do not see the master chances, the thousands and the millions, but who see a multitude of little chances, the pennies and the dollars. He squeezed his creditors, his customers, his shopgirls—kept open later than other stores to squeeze a few last drops of profit from the day. His success was the sum of thousands of petty advantages.
When David came to him he saw that here was a man in cruel need. The labour of a man in cruel need is yours at your own price—is, in fact, a bargain. He had had enough experience with bargains in merchandise to know that when a rarely good bargain offers it is best to snap it up and not question too closely into the reasons for its cheapness. So he offered David a place in the kitchen furnishing department. Salary, five dollars a week.
David accepted. His first week's salary, minus ten cents a day for car fare and ten cents for luncheon, amounted to three dollars and eighty cents. He had begun a second month in his room, and his landlady, seeing how poor he was, again demanded her rent in advance. After paying her, David had a dollar and a quarter left. But he had a job—a poor job, but still a job.
The following Sunday afternoon, as he sat at his window, pretending to read, but in reality staring dreamily down through the spider's-web of clothes lines into the deep, dreary backyard, Kate Morgan came in. It was the first time he had seen her since her visit of a month before, though he had called several times at her flat, to be told by her father that she was away at work.
"Good afternoon!" she cried, and giving him her hand she marched in before he could speak. "Take the chair yourself this time," she said, and sat down on the bed, her feet hanging clear.
She wore a black tailored suit and a beplumed hat. Evidently she had just come in from walking, for the warm colour of the late October air was in her cheeks. There was no doubt about it this time—she was pretty. And there was a lightness, a sauciness, in her manner that had not showed on her previous visit.
"Well, sir, how've you been?" she demanded, after David had taken the chair.
He tried, somewhat heavily, to fit his mood to hers. "I can't say I've cornered the happiness market. You haven't noticed a rise in quotations, have you?"
"Nope," she said, swinging her feet—and David had to see that they were very shapely and in neat patent leather shoes, and that the ankles were very trim. "I just got back this morning. How's dad been? And how many loans has he stuck you for?"
"To be exact, he's tried seven times and failed seven times."
"Good! But dad's better now than he used to be. When I first began to go away I'd leave him enough money to last for a week, or till I'd be home again. He always went off on a spree—never failed. So now I mail him thirty cents every day. It ain't quite enough to live decent on, and at the same time it ain't quite enough to get drunk on. See? So I guess he keeps pretty sober."
"I guess he does," said David, not quite able to restrain a smile. "But how've you been?"
"Me?" She shook her head with a doleful little air. "I've been having a regular hell of a time. I've been nurse girl in a swell house on Fifth Avenue. It's built out of gold and diamonds and such stuff. The missus was one of these society head-liners. You know the sort—good shape, good complexion, swell dresses, and that's all. Somebody made the dresses, her make-up box made her complexion, and her corset made her figure. Soul, heart, brain—pst! Once every day or two she'd come to the nursery just long enough to rub a bit of her complexion on the children's faces. And she treated me like I wasn't there. Oh, but wouldn't I like to wring her neck! But I'll get square with her, you bet!"
She gave a grimly threatening jerk of her little head, then smiled again. "But what's your luck? Got a job yet?"
"Yes."
"What doing?"
David shrunk from telling this brilliantly-dressed creature how lowly his work was, but he had to confess. "Clerking in a department store."
"How much do you make?"
That awful inquisitiveness!
"Five dollars a week."
Her black eyes stared at him, then suddenly she leaned back and laughed. He reddened. She straightened up, bent forward till her elbows rested on her knees, and gazed into his face.
"Five—dollars—a—week!" she said. "And you a king crook!" She shook her head wonderingly. "And, please sir, how do you like being honest at five dollars a week?"
"Hardly as well as I would at six," he answered, trying to speak lightly.
She was silent for almost a minute, her eyes incredulously on him. "Mr. David Aldrich," she remarked slowly, "you're a fool!"
He was startled—and his wonderment about her returned. "I've often said the same," he agreed. "But do you mind telling why you think so?"
"A man that can make his hundreds a week, works for his living at five."
He assumed such innocence of appearance as he could command. "I'm a little surprised to hear this, especially from a woman who also works for her living."
Her look of wonderment gave place to a queer little smile. "Hum!" She straightened up. "D'you mind if I smoke?" she asked abruptly, drawing a silver cigarette case from a pocket of her skirt.
The women David had known had not smoked. But he said "no" and accepted a cigarette when she offered him the open box. She struck a match, held the flame first to him, then lit her own cigarette.
She drew deeply. "To-day's the first time I've dared smoke for a month. Ah, but it's good!"
She stared again at David, and now with that penetrating gaze of her last visit. A minute passed. David grew very uncomfortable. Then she announced abruptly: "You're on the dead level!"
The queer little smile came back. "Yes, I work for my living. And I keep my flat, keep my father, dress myself, have plenty of money for good times, and put aside enough so that I can knock off work whenever I like—all on a maid's twenty a month. And how do you suppose I do it?"
David wondered what was coming next, but did not answer. A fear that had been creeping into his mind suddenly grew into definiteness.
"People around here think I've got a rich old lover," she said.
He felt a sinking at his heart. This had been his sudden fear. And she took the shame in such a matter-of-fact way!
"I let 'em think so, for that explains everything to them. But they're wrong." The queer smile broadened. "What do you think?"
"I could never guess," said David.
She leaned forward, and her voice lowered to a whisper. "You and me—we're in the same trade."
"What! You're a——" He hesitated.
"That's it," she said. "A nurse girl or a maid in a rich house sees a lot of things lying around. Or, if she wants to, she can stay for two or three weeks or a month, learn where the valuables are kept, make a plan of the house, get hold of keys. Then she gets a pal, and they clean the place out. That's me."
There was a glow of excitement in her eyes, and pride, and a triumphant sense of having startled him. For the moment he merely stared at her, could make no response.
"There, we know each other now," she said, and took several puffs at her cigarette. "But ain't you tired of the honesty life at five per?"
"No."
"You soon will be!" she declared. "Then you'll go back to the old thing. All the other boys that try the honesty stunt do. They're up against too stiff a proposition. You're way out of my class, but when you get tired, mebbe I can put something in your way that won't be so bad. By-the-by, you ain't ready for something now, are you?" A vindictive look came into her face. "Mrs. Make-Up-Box gets it next. And she'll get it, too!"
"I'm going to stick it out," said David.
She gave a little sniff. "We'll see!"
Her eyes swept the room, fell upon the little heap of photographs and prints lying on the box in which he had stacked his books. "Why don't you put those things up?"
"I don't know—I just haven't."
"We'll do it now."
She slipped to her feet, went out the door, and two minutes later reappeared with a handful of tacks, a hammer, and a white curtain. She took off her hat and coat, and for the next half hour she was tacking the pictures upon the scaling walls—first trying them here and there, occasionally asking David's advice and ignoring it if it did not please her. Then she ordered him upon the chair, and made him, under her direction, fasten the curtain into place.
"Well, things look a little better," she said when all was done, surveying the room. Then, without so much as "by your leave," she washed her hands in his wash-bowl and arranged her hair before his mirror, chatting all the while. Hat and coat on again, she opened the door. "Mister," she said, nodding her head and smiling a keen little smile, "I give you two months. Then—the old way!"
She closed the door and was gone.
On the third morning of the new week, as David left the elevated station to walk the few blocks to the store, he noticed that a policeman's eyes were on him. David thought he recognised the officer as one who had been present at his trial, and hurried uneasily away. A block further on he glanced over his shoulder; the policeman was following. The uneasiness became apprehension, and the apprehension would have become consternation had he, a little after entering the store, seen the officer also come in.
A few minutes after he had begun to dust his tinware, he was summoned to the office. The proprietor's little pig-eyes were gleaming, his great pig-jowl flushing. He sprang to his full height, which was near David's shoulder. "You dirty, lying, cut-throat of a convict!" he roared. "Get out o' my store!"
"What's that?" gasped David.
The proprietor shook a fat fist at David's face. "Get out o' here! You came to me as an honest man! I hired you as an honest man! You deceived me. You're nothing but a dirty, sneaking jail-bird! You came in here just to get a chance to rob me! You'd have done it, too, if a policeman hadn't give me a tip as to what you are! Get out o' here, or I'll have you kicked out!"
David grew afire with wrath. It was useless to plead for his place; but there was a dollar and seventy cents due him. For that he choked his anger down. "Very well, I'll go," he said, as calmly as he could. "But first pay me for my two days."
"Not one red cent!" David's two days' pay was one of the kind of atoms of which his success was composed. "Not a cent!" he roared. "You say another word about pay, and I'll have you arrested for the things you've already stolen from me. Now clear out!—you low, thieving jail-bird you!"
A wild rage, the eruptive sum of long insults and suffering, burst forth in David. He took one step forward, and his open hand smacked explosively upon the flesh-padded cheek of the proprietor. The proprietor tottered, sputteringly recovered his balance—and again the hand smacked with a sharp report.
When the proprietor gained his balance a second time, it was to find David towering over him, face inflamed, fists clenched.
"My money, or by God I'll smash your head off!" David cried furiously.
The proprietor blanched, trembled. A fear-impelled hand drew silver from his pocket and gave David the amount. David glanced at it, and obeying an impulse that he was to regret again and again, flung the hard coins straight into the man's face. Then he walked out of the office, secured his hat from the cloak-room near by, and marched through the store. At the door the frantic proprietor, who had rushed ahead to call for the police, tried to block David's way, but David bore down upon him with so menacing a look that he stepped aside.
Fortunately the street was filled with people, and the next instant David was lost among them. For half an hour he aimlessly walked the streets with his wrath. Then the realisation of his situation began to cool him. However unjust had been his discharge, and however brutish its manner, the great fact was not thereby changed. He was discharged, and he had in his pocket less than a dollar.
Then the wearying, heart-breaking search for work began anew. That he had found one situation made him think he might find another, but at the end of a week he had met with nothing but failure. He still kept on the march, but the spirit was gone out of him. The search for work became purely an affair of the muscles: his legs carried him from office to office, at each his lips repeated their request. Muscle, that was all—muscle whipped to action by the fear of starvation.
But though his spirit was worn weak, his resentment was not. He raged—at times frantically. Why did the world refuse work to the poor beings the prisons sent back to it? Some of them were inspired by good resolutions; to them life was dear; they were worth saving. How did the world expect them to live and be honest, if it refused them means of life and of honesty? He could find but one answer to his questions: the world was selfish, heartless. He cursed the world, and he cursed the God that made it.
And he cursed himself, his foolishness that had brought him here; and he cursed Morton and St. Christopher's. At times he burned with the desire to clear his name, come what might to the people of the Mission. It is so hard for one, unfed, cold, hopeless, to be heroic. But his judgment told him that the truth from him would go unbelieved; and the great resolution behind his bargain, the long habit of silence, also restrained his declaration of innocence.
But even amid these gloomy weeks there were gentler periods. He often slipped at night into the neighbourhood of St. Christopher's, and stealthily gazed at the club-house, its windows aglow with friendliness to all but himself; at the chapel, with the Morton memorial window sending its warm inspiration into the streets—as it did, so he had learned, throughout the night. He told himself, when he thus stood with his work before his eyes, that he should be content. His struggles were hard—yes; his suffering was great. But that his suffering, the suffering of one man, should hold these hundreds a little nearer to the plain decencies of life, to truth and purity and honour, a little nearer to God—this was worth while. Yes, the bargain was a great bargain.
And every Wednesday evening he looked forth from the shadow of a doorway upon Helen Chambers as she left the Mission. And at the moment she passed his door he each time felt the same supreme pang. Three feet away!—as far away as the stars!