Part 13

He left one door as the willingly assenting Cassie closed the other, and Violet flung herself on the sofa and buried her face in the cushions, now fearful that the servant, notwithstanding their precautions, had overheard her, now afraid that Dyker would change his purpose and fail to return, and again dreading that he might betray her to Rose. Since the night she had waited for Max to telephone in the café, since the terrible morning that had followed, it was the longest quarter of an hour that she had known, but it at last dragged its quivering length away. The doorbell rang. Cassie passed through the room to find Violet sitting suddenly upright, and at once returned with Dyker, his summer raincoat tossed across his arm.

As the servant left them, he lifted the coat. Below it, not wrapped in the paper usual to a new purchase, was a dark cloak. He unrolled it, uncovered a beaver hat, and handed them both to the panting Violet.

"Here you are," he said quietly.

She seized them and began to put them on.

"No," he cautioned, "on second thought, I guess I'd better carry them. The parlor door's open, and Evelyn and Fritzie are in there with a couple of men. I'll go ahead and open the vestibule door and the front door. Then you come by as if you were going upstairs."

"Evelyn'll come out to see if I have any money."

"She'll never learn that, though here, by the way, is a ten-dollar bill that will come in handy.--The doors will be open and I'll be on the pavement. Keep only a yard behind me. Riley's at the other end of his beat, and I have a cab at the curb. Ready?"

She could not speak, but she nodded her russet head.

He passed before her up the rosy twilight of the hall.

Violet, following, her lips tight, her breathing suspended, her heart pounding against her breast, was dimly aware of her own soft footfalls sounding hideously loud, of the blast of light and laughter from the parlor.

Dyker flung wide the vestibule door.

"Good-night!" he called to Evelyn.

"Going? Good-night!" Violet heard the Englishwoman answer.

She heard Evelyn rise. She heard the front door open. She saw Wesley raise his arm.

She hurried by the parlor door, and then, instead of turning to the stairs, gathered up her red kimona and ran through the vestibule, through a patch of soft, fresh darkness, and was tossed precipitately into a cab into which Dyker followed her just as the horse, under a quick blow, dashed madly up the street.

At the open cab-window the night air beat upon her fevered face. She drank it deep into her thirsting lungs. It was the wine of freedom.

XIV

RIVINGTON STREET

The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it never sleeps.

The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army of the workers begins to scurry westward.

First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth, and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black. Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely silent.

The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed, whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out, selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.

At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves, but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours, selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts.

The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.

Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze.

But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.

Into this street--into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time--the cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. The girl, through the dark thoroughfares that had preceded it, had answered a score of questions, which Dyker had asked her, the fever of escape beating high in her breast and tossing ready replies to her heated lips; but now, in the roar and brilliance of Rivington Street's nocturnal traffic, there had come upon her a terror almost equal to that which had assailed her when, with Max for her guide, the lighted length of East Fourteenth Street had first unrolled itself before her. The city was again an inimical monster awaiting her descent from the cab, and the newly acquired habit of seclusion, the habit of the prisoner, recoiled upon her. Freedom was strange; it became awesome, and when the horse was stopped and Violet knew that she must soon fare alone, she cowered in a corner, breathing hard.

"Can't go no furder, boss," said the cabby, leaning far around from his seat. "Where to now?"

"Nowhere right away," answered Dyker. "Just stand where you are for a minute."

Then he turned to Violet.

"Now," he said, not unkindly, "I'm afraid I'll have to drop you here. It wouldn't do for me to figure publicly as an active agent in this case, you know. But you needn't worry. Just get out and walk to the next corner. Turn to your right, take the next cross-street to your left, go up the first narrow street you come to, and your friend's house ought to be about the third in the row. It will be a little dark, but you won't have any trouble finding it."

Violet hesitated.

"I hope I won't," she said.

"Surely not. If you have, just ask the way of the first policeman you see."

"Not a policeman, Mr. Dyker!"

"Of course, a policeman. He won't hurt you as long as you keep your cloak tight. Now, you're sure you've given me the right address?"

"I gave you the one the man gave me."

"Yes, but I mean you're not lying to me?"

Violet's wide eyes should have been sufficient denial.

"Why would I do that?" she asked.

"That's so; only I thought--well, I beg your pardon, Violet. You have my office-address on that card. I'll send for you in a day or two--be sure to be home every afternoon--and then we'll fix Madame Rose with the District-Attorney.--Good-by. Sure you're not afraid?"

Her gratitude would not permit her to acknowledge fear.

"Not afraid," she smiled, rather grimly.

"Then remember: the first street to your right, the next to your left, and then to your right again--third or fourth house in the row."

He opened the cab-door and alighted, holding out his hand.

She straightened her beaver hat, drew the folds of her dark cloak tightly over the betraying crimson of her kimona, and, helped by his grasp, followed him to the swarming curb.

"I--I don't know how to thank you," she said.

"Then don't try," returned Dyker, laughing easily. "You can make it all right with me when you testify against Rose."

She kept his hand a moment longer, partly in fear of the human multitude about her and partly in genuine gratitude.

"But I do thank you," she said.

Dyker, not too well liking the white light of publicity in which this little scene was being enacted, pressed her hand and dropped it.

"That's all right," he responded. "Just don't forget your promise." He stepped back into the cab. "Good-by, and good luck," he said.

"Good-by," he heard her answer, and then, with his head out of the cab-window, he saw her pause bewilderedly. "To your right," he cautioned.

He watched her turn. He saw her plunge into the crowd. He saw the crowd swallow her up.

"Take me over to my office," he ordered the driver, and added his address.

Once there, he dismissed the cab, climbed the steps of what seemed an old and modest little house, and, opening the door and turning into the front room, lit a gas-jet the flame of which revealed an apartment surprisingly new and arrogant. The walls were lined with new bookcases holding rows of new law-books, and surrounded by rows of new chairs. The flat-top desk in the center, at which his stenographer sat by daylight, was a new desk, with new wire-baskets upon it, and a new telephone, to which Dyker now immediately proceeded and called a number.

"Hello," he said into the transmitter, adopting the low tone that he always used in his wired conversations. "Is that Schleger's?--It is?--That you, Ludwig?--This is Dyker.--Yes, good-evening, Ludwig.--Yes, pretty good, thank you. How are you, and how's business?--That's good. Mrs. Schleger and the babies all right?--I'll bet that boy's gained three pounds!--He has? I'm glad to hear it. You're a wonder.--Yes.--That's what I said. And, say, Ludwig, is O'Malley anywhere around?--He isn't?--Hasn't been in this evening?--Oh! Well, I wonder where I can find him.--You don't? Perhaps he's at Dugan's place.--No, it's not anything important: I just wanted to take a drink with him, that's all. He's sure to be at Dugan's or Venturio's, but I guess I won't bother. Ever so much obliged, Ludwig.--Good-by."

In spite of his word, Dyker did, however, bother. He called three other numbers in his quest of the political boss, and when he found him, the underling made a pressing appointment for an important conference on the next morning, though what it was that he wanted then to discuss he carefully neglected to mention over a telephone-wire.

He hung up the receiver in a glow of satisfaction.

"And now," he said, "I think I'll get away for the night. I don't care to have any arguments with Rose for a day or two."

Yet, even as he said it, the telephone-bell uttered its staccato summons. He stood uncertainly beside the desk.

"She wouldn't have the nerve to use the wire," he argued. "Perhaps it's O'Malley with more to say."

Again the bell rang, and his curiosity overcame his caution. He took up the receiver.

"Hello!" he said sharply, and then his tone mellowed, for the voice that came to him across the hurrying New York night was the voice of Marian Lennox.

"Is that Mr. Dyker's office?" it asked.

"It is the head of the firm himself," he answered, "and mighty glad to hear from you."

"I am glad you're glad," the voice pursued, "because I want to ask a favor."

"It is as good as performed. What is it?"

"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I want you, please, to take me home."

"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are you?"

"At the settlement."

"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.

"Yes."

"Very well, I'll be over right away."

He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker, who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked the distance.

In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms, persist as only feminine natures can persist.

They are college-bred women with the limitations and emancipations of their class; and they have a great deal to occupy their attention besides their essays in social entertainment. For the most part they pass their days in really practical investigation. One of them will inspect the public schools and impartially consider curricula and ventilation. Another will visit tenements and ask housewives personal questions for the tabular benefit of the Russell Sage Foundation. A third goes into the laundries of the best hotels and finds that these hostelries force their washerwomen to sleep twenty in a room. Yet, when they return to Rivington Street, these daylight investigators spur their wearied nerves to further exertion and go forward, not to teach the toilers the practical cause and remedy of the economic evil, but to form the boys and girls, the young women and young men, into reading groups, debating clubs, sewing circles, cooking classes, and elocutionary juntas. Their zeal is boundless, their martyrdom sadly genuine, and, if there is humor, there is something more than humor in their ultimate complaint:

"Some of our people we retain, but most of them slip away, and, even with the best of fortune, we seem, somehow, able to do so little."

Dyker knew the place by reputation. He had always scorned it for its own sake, and now he had come to hate it for Marian's. For want of a better term, it may be repeated that he was in love with Marian. Moreover, he wished the assistance that an early marriage with the daughter of a wealthy department-store owner would give him in the coming campaign. And, finally, his peculiar legal activities were already well enough known on the East Side to make it probable that any young woman entering the settlement would speedily learn of them.

After the night of the opera his cooler reflection had rejected Marian's plan of joining the Rivington Street colony as a fervently girlish dream destined to fade before the reality of action. He had decided that the best way to aid its dissipation was no longer to combat it, and he had even, during the months that had followed, seen Marian but rarely, and never alone. Occupied with politics and knowing the tactical value of restraint, he had not so much as pressed his wooing. He had relied upon what he chose to describe as his sweetheart's basic commonsense to work out their common salvation, and had decided that, this commonsense being what he esteemed it, Marian was a woman more likely to be won by a Fabian campaign than by a Varric attack.

The point wherein these calculations erred was their underestimation of the momentum of a girlish impulse. That method of consideration which makes one slow to reach convictions works beyond the convictions and retards one from action upon them, once they are achieved, but the impulsive mind that bolts a creed unmasticated straightway drives its owner, in the creed's behalf, to the thumbscrews or the wrack. It is from the pods of half-baked opinions that there is shaken the seed of the church: Marian meant to keep to her purpose.

Perhaps Wesley's silence and the subtle sense of pique that it awakened played a part in this; perhaps the purpose was self-sufficient; but, in either case, Marian missed scarcely an evening at the settlement. Two of her former classmates were knee-deep in the work there, and what she saw and what they told her served only to confirm her. It thus happened that, anxious again to see him alone, and more anxious to let him know the endurance of her resolution, she had, on this evening, telephoned on the chance of finding him late at his office.

"Good heavens!" he gasped as she met him at the settlement's door. "What on earth are you doing in this part of town at this hour of the night? Let me 'phone for a taxi."

What, as a matter of fact, she had been doing was to listen to slim little Luigi Malatesta and fat little Morris Binderwitz respectively attacking and defending the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a greater American than George Washington; but what she thought she had been doing was assisting in raising the lower half of society. Under this impression, her fine brown eyes shone with the consciousness of moral rectitude, her mouth was even more than usually firm, and her head even more than usually like some delicate cameo.

"One thing at a time, please," she imperturbably answered. "First, no taxicab. It isn't far to Second Avenue, which is quiet enough, and I want to walk for a few blocks."

She took the arm that he grimly offered, and he began to break his way through the noisy crowd under the flaring gasoline lamps of the push-carts. Coherent conversation was at first impossible, but Dyker felt a glow of pride as, with her fingers closed in tight trust upon him, he shouldered a passage for her, and Marian herself was not insusceptible to the thrill inherent in the situation. Nevertheless, the girl, as soon as they had turned northward, reverted to her former attitude; and the man, knowing well that all this meant that she was still determined upon a course necessarily delaying his wooing and perhaps resulting in his discovery, frankly resumed his opposition. He did more and worse: he swept aside all his method of silence, all his plans of conquest through non-resistance.

"Now," he said, continuing their interrupted talk, "I should really like to know what you, of all people in the world, were doing on Rivington Street."

"I was there," she announced serenely, "because I have made up my mind that it is I, of all people in the world, who ought to be there."

"Marian,"--he almost stopped as he said it--"are you really in earnest about this fancy? Do you honestly mean that you are seriously considering any such chimerical course?"

He had, naturally, chosen precisely the tone that, were any additional incentive required, would have compelled her to resolution. Her mind, as it chanced, was, however, made up, and what he now said served only to turn her toward that feminine logic which assumes as done that which is determined.

"I am past consideration," she said. "I have already virtually begun."

"Marian! You're joking."

"I am simply stating a fact. Why do you suppose I have been staying in town this summer? I begin my real work at the settlement with the first of next week."

Her classmates in Rivington Street, could they have heard this, would have been pleased, but they would also have been surprised. Nevertheless, she at once mentally decided to make good her declaration.

In the darkness Dyker bit the lip that, under his short, crisp mustache, trembled with vexation.

"You really mean that?"

She bowed a brief assent.

"Then what, if you please, do you propose to do when you get there?"

As to that Marian found herself suddenly certain.

"You ought to know," she said, "how these people are living; you ought to know how the girls--hundreds and hundreds of them--are every week going into lives of shame and death. I mean to do what I can to stop them."

It would have been a hard thing for her to say to him had he not wrought upon her anger, and had not the freshness of her partial glimpse of earth's lower seven-eighths fired her heart with a blind inspiration. She had the partial vision that makes the martyr: a vision that shows just enough of an evil to confirm the necessity of action and not enough to prove how little individual action individually directed can be worth.

For the second time Wesley gasped. Here were depths in her of which he had not dreamed, and because he had not dreamed of them he would not admit them.