Part 16

"Yes," said Violet, and because she was still unable to frame her lips to adequate thanks, she gave them as much of the story of her escape as she could give without mention of the name of her rescuer, who had warned her that he must not be publicly known to figure in the case.

"A man?" echoed the cynical Katie. "An' he didn't ask nothin' in return?"

"No."

"He must be worth knowin', that man."

"He only wants me to go somewhere an' swear to all Rose done to me."

"Oh!"--Katie's tone showed that she could now account for the gentleman's generosity.--"Well, don't you do it."

But Violet could not follow her.

"Why not?" she asked.

"I don't know just why; but don't you do it."

"I promised," said Violet.

"Och, listen to the poor dear!" Katie appealed to her fellow-lodger. "I wonder is it long she thinks he'd be keepin' his word to her."

Her own word freshened the ever-abiding terror in the runaway's heart, but Violet said no more about it.

"Would you have much to swear to?" asked Carrie, seated on the foot of the cot.

"What do you mean?" Violet parried.

"She means, Violet----" began Katie.

The fugitive, in her new surroundings, shrank from the name.

"Don't! Don't call me that!" she said.

"Sure an' ain't it the name you gave me yourself?"

"I know, but I don't want to hear it ever again. Call me Mary; call me Mary----"

And there, face to face with a new danger, Violet came to a stop. Her captivity had taught her much of bestiality, but it had taught her besides only that some unknown, tremendous power hated her; that she was debased and must never, at whatever cost of further suffering to herself, permit her degradation to attach to her family; that she must escape, but that she must also wholly divorce herself from all that life had meant her to be. She had no thought of the future; she had only a realization of what had been and what was.

"Mary what?" asked Carrie.

"Mary Morton," lied Violet. Perhaps she had heard the name before; perhaps the easy alliteration brought it first to her mind. At all events, she reflected, one name was as good as another, so long as it was not her own.

"Would you have much to swear to?" Carrie was continuing. "Is it as bad as they say--there?"

Violet looked at the round, serious face before her.

"I don't know what they say," she replied; "but it's worse than anybody can say. There's a lot of it you can't say, because there's a lot of it there ain't no words ever been made up for. Just you pray God you won't ever have to find out how bad it is."

They looked at her and saw on her the marks of which she was not yet aware.

Katie bent over and swiftly kissed the fevered forehead under its tumbled russet hair.

"You poor woman," she said with unintended implication, "an' how many years did you have to stand it?"

"It wasn't years; it was--it was only weeks."

"What? An' they could get a grown woman like you?"

Violet tried to smile.

"How old do you think I am?" she asked.

Katie made what she considered a charitable reply.

"Twenty-five?"

"I'm not seventeen."

Katie began to busy herself about the room, and Carrie turned her head.

"Ah, well," said Katie, "you're tired out, an' it's 'most mornin'. We must all go to sleep now."

"I only put on long dresses in April," said Violet.

But Katie seemed not to hear her. She hurried the arrangements for the night.

"Sleep as long as you like in the morning," said Carrie; "and if you can wear any of our things, wear 'em. We have to get up early, but don't mind us."

The latter injunction was unnecessary. Though Violet had for some time been excited by her escape, that excitement had already given place to utter exhaustion. The lamp had scarcely been extinguished before, with throbbing head, she passed into a sleep that was almost coma, and the lamp that was burning when she opened her aching eyes was the lamp of midmorning.

She was alone and afraid to be alone. Her head seemed splitting. She saw the milk and rolls that Katie had set out for her on the oilcloth-covered table, but her stomach revolted at the thought of food, and her poisoned nerves cried out for alcohol. She got up and managed to pull on some of the clothes belonging to her two hostesses.

From her first glance at the mirror, she drew back in bewilderment. During all her imprisonment she had been used, through her gradual change, to compare her morning appearance with that of her fellow slaves; but now there was fresh in her mind the standard, not of those pale and worn, though often fat and hardened, convicts, but of the pair of healthy girls that had, the night before, sheltered her; and from that standard her very image in the glass seemed to withdraw in horror. Lacking rouge, her cheeks, once so pink and firm, were pasty and pendant; her lips hung loose, her blue eyes were dull and blurred; even her hair appeared colorless and brittle. Little lines had formed at the corners of her eyes; her skin seemed rough and cracked, and other lines were already faintly showing from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

She sat down on the cot, sick and shivering. When she noticed a small pile of bedding in the corner behind the gas-stove, she shook at the memory of another such pile on another terrible morning, and by the time she had realized that one of her friends must have slept there in order to provide an extra couch, she was too wracked by suffering, physical and mental, to feel, at once, any great gratitude. The fever throbbed in her wrists, beat in her heart, hammered in her brain. She did not dare go to the street for whiskey or medicine. At every sound on the stairs she started up in the assurance that her keepers had come to recover her, and when, in the early afternoon, a loud knocking sounded on the door, she fell, in unresponding silence, before Katie's flaring lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary.

"Hello in there!" called a not overcautious voice. "I want to talk to Miss Violet!"

Violet raised her clasped hands to the printed face before her.

"Don't let them take me!" she whispered in a prayer to that visible sign of a power she had never before addressed. "Don't let them take me!"

"Open up, can't you?" the voice insisted. "I know there's somebody inside, an', honest, I'm not going to hurt you!"

Violet's hands fell. The voice, she realized, was at least unfamiliar.

"Come on," it wheedled. "I'm all right; I'm from Mr. Dyker."

"What do you want?" she inquired.

"He said Miss Violet would know," came the answer. "He said I would be expected--that it'd be all right if I just told you I came from him."

Violet had not forgotten Katie's warning, but she was unable wholly to doubt the one man that had befriended her. She opened the door.

The pink-and-white young clerk that entered was much embarrassed, and his hostess, in her fever, did not ease him. Nevertheless, after many hesitations on his own part, and more repetitions and explanations made necessary by Violet, he at last convinced her that he did indeed come from Wesley Dyker, and that there was waiting around the corner the cab that would convey her to an office where she could begin the redemption of her pledge.

Almost in a dream, and too ill now much to care what happened to her, she followed the messenger. Dazedly she greeted Dyker in the cab; confusedly she left that conveyance for an office where she answered interminable questions put to her by another young man who, she was told, was an Assistant District Attorney; vaguely she heard Dyker assure this official, as she affixed a signature to an offered paper, that Wesley would himself guarantee her appearance whenever it was required, and when she was at last wheeled back and had climbed the stairs and, alone, fallen again upon Carrie's cot, the only one of recent facts concerning which she was at all certain was that she had said she was a native of Pittsburgh and that her name was Mary Morton.

Katie and Carrie, returning together, found her flushed and babbling nonsense. When they approached her, she did not recognize them, and then, for an hour, they could get from her only the monotonous repetition:

"Don't let them get me! Don't tell them my name!"

It was eight o'clock before the patient, quieted by sympathy and stimulated by whiskey, could be taken to the nearest drugstore, and there, as soon as the experienced druggist set eyes on her, he refused to prescribe.

He beckoned Katie to a corner.

"That girl's got to go to a hospital," he said; "and if I was you, I wouldn't lose much time in getting her there."

Katie the competent lost none. After another drink to stifle possible protest, Violet was taken upon a car to Sixteenth Street, and was then walked quickly westward. During all the way she did not speak, and, when she reached the hospital's fortunately empty receiving-ward, she was nearly unconscious.

A white-capped nurse received the little party, the young doctor, in shirt-sleeves and duck trousers, hovering in the background among the glass shelves agleam with instruments of polished steel.

"What's the trouble?" asked the nurse.

"It's that that we've come to find out of you," answered Katie.

The nurse nodded to the doctor.

He came forward and made a quick examination.

"Bring this woman inside and put her on the table," he ordered. "And you girls, stop where you are."

Her head thrown back, her dry mouth wide, and her russet hair falling, the unresisting Violet was carried behind a door that shut smartly after her.

Too scared to speak, Katie and her companion stood outside. Five minutes passed. Then ten. After a quarter of an hour, the door reopened.

"What's this patient's name?" he asked.

"Mary Morton," said Carrie.

"Where does she live?"

Katie gave her own address, and the doctor, a pad of printed forms in hand, noted both the answers.

That done, he paused and bit his pencil.

"Married?" he asked quickly.

"Who?" parried Katie. "Me?"

"No; the patient."

"Well, now," began Katie, "I can't see as that's----"

But the calm voice of Carrie interrupted.

"She is married," she said.

The doctor pursed incredulous lips.

"Where's her husband?" he demanded.

Katie, who had caught the need of the moment, jumped into the breach.

"Where a lot of them are," she responded, "an' where as many more might as well be, for all the use they are to their poor wives."

"Where's that?"

"Faith, it's you, sir, ought to know: you're the man."

"Dead?"

"Run away."

"Not much later than yesterday, did he? Well, I must find her nearest relative or friend. Are you either?"

Katie's face lengthened.

"Och, doctor," she said, "you don't mean to--but it can't be that there's goin' to be a baby!"

The young interne grinned. Then, serious again, he answered:

"No, there is not. I only wish it was so simple. Where are her folks?"

"She's none in the world, an' no money. The hard truth is, doctor, that it's a charity-patient she'll have to be."

"That's all right; but are you her nearest friends?"

"Yes, doctor."

"That'll do, I guess. She's a nervous wreck--among other things. We've first of all got to get her round from that condition, and then I'll have to secure either her own or your permission, as her nearest friends, to do something more."

"More?" repeated Katie. "Ain't it bad enough as it is? What more do you mean to do to the poor--girl?"

"I don't mean to do anything myself, but this is a common enough kind of case around here to make me certain what the resident surgeon will do: he'll operate."

XVII

"A NET BY THE WAYSIDE"

Hermann Hoffmann, passing one evening to the little clothes-press behind the bar in Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and putting on the canvas coat that was his badge of office, heard the voice of the proprietor calling his name, and turned to see that stout German-American beckoning him to enter the back-room where, a month before, O'Malley had held with Wesley Dyker that conference which had proved so disastrous to Rose Légère.

He walked through the open door, whistling his Teutonic melody. He had not that fear of his employer which most employees have of the man for whom they work. Schleger had proved himself lenient and good-natured, and Hermann, whose cheerful round face and easy smile did not interfere with the use of a knotted arm and a mighty fist, was quite aware that there was no complaint justly to be made against the manner in which he performed his alloted tasks.

"Hoffmann," said Schleger, smiling, "you're all right."

"Sure," grinned Hermann.

"Yes," pursued the proprietor, "I been thinkin' about you that you sure have made good."

"I'm glad you vas sadisfied, Schleger."

"I am satisfied; but I think you need a little more time off now an' then. I haven't got nothin' to do this evenin'. I'll take your place."

Hermann's eyes brightened with unaffected pleasure. It had not always been pleasant to work in the nights when Katie was all day busy in the shop.

"Thanks," he said.

"Yes," nodded Schleger, benignantly; "it will be like old times for me. You take a night off."

"Shall I start out righd avay?"

"Certainly.--Of course you understand I'll want you around here the day of the primaries."

Hermann nodded.

"And Hermann, there's somethin' else I've been meanin' to talk to you about, and kep' forgettin' till O'Malley reminded me of it again this afternoon."

Hoffmann, pulling off his white jacket, stopped with arms extended.

"O'Malley?" he said in a strained voice. "Vat's dot man got to do vith me?"

"Well, you know he don't miss no tricks nowheres, an' some time back I was tellin' him what a good man you was, an' he said we ought to get you a little more active for him. A fellow behind a bar can do a whole lot that way, you know,--an' make a good thing of it."

"I know," replied Hermann, ripping off the coat, "but I ain't no politician."

"Nobody said you was, but all the fellows help a little."

"Sure; only I don't."

"Why not? We want to do well for the slate this time. Wesley Dyker's on it; you know him; he's all right."

"I ain't no politician, Schleger."

This stolid attitude plainly began to puzzle the proprietor.

"Don't be a fool, Hoffmann," he said. "The boys all have their eye on you, an' O'Malley don't forget any of his friends."

"Schleger, I got my own friends, und I make my own friends. I don't vant nussing I don't earn from nobody."

"But that sort of thing won't look right," argued Schleger. "You see, you're registered from here--

"No I ain't, Schleger; I'm registered from my own blace."

"Well, I didn't know that; you didn't tell me, an' so I registered you from here."

Hoffmann's pink cheeks became red. He folded his coat neatly over his arm.

"Vatch here, Schleger," he began. "I ain't no politician. I don't care----"

But he bit his lip and mastered himself to silence.

The proprietor saw this and appreciated the self-control that it manifested. There had been a time when he had felt as Hermann felt now, and so he was not disposed to use harsh argument. He came close to Hoffmann and, still smiling, dropped his voice to a whisper.

"That's all right," he said, soothingly. "I guess I know how you look at it. Don't say that I said so, but we'll let the matter drop if you only lay low a little and keep quiet. You know the brewery's backin' me in this saloon, an' you know, with the brewery pushin' me all the time for its money, I couldn't run the place a month if I didn't keep the side-door open Sundays. Well, then, how could I keep the place workin' Sundays if it wasn't for O'Malley? Just try not to be openly again' him, that's all."

Hermann did not commit himself, but his tone had softened when, in reply, he asked:

"Und should I take to-night off?"

"Certainly you should. Go along now, an' ferget it."

He went, but as he walked down the avenue, "Die Wacht Am Rhein" issued from his lips to the time of a funeral-march.

His sole consolation lay in the fact that, in the recent glimpses he had secured of Katie, that young lady had begun to evince signs of relenting from her former attitude of celibacy. He knew that she had gradually ceased to descant upon the impossibility of his supporting a wife, and he thought that she was entertaining hopes of a promotion in the shop to a position where her own earnings, added to his, would make a comfortable living-wage for two.

What he did not know--and this for the excellent reason that Katie would not tell it to him--was that, whatever their prospects for the future, both Katie and her roommate were still engaged in that battle with poverty and temptation which had lessened scarcely one whit since its beginning. For the former the fortunes of war were less than ever favorable, and for the latter the most that was expected was the maintenance of her stand in the face of every armed reason to surrender or retreat.

The strike dragged along its wearied length. Popular sympathy, which had aided the shirtwaist-makers in their former rebellion, had lost its interest in the cause, and, as the newspapers said less, the employers became more demonstrative. Hired thugs guarded the factories and beat whatever young women dared, by the simplest words, to plead, in public, with the scab laborers. When these battles occurred the police, knowing well the interests of their masters, arrested the mere girls for assault and battery upon the thugs, forcing them to remain, if detained, on benches with women old in immorality and crime; and the magistrates before whom these dangerous female criminals were hailed, not forgetting which party to the suit could vote at the coming election, would often send the offenders to the Reformatory or the Island, where they could no longer interfere, or would impose fines calculated still more to deplete a strike-fund already pitiably shrunken. Some of the unionists had already laid down their arms and returned to the factories; more had gone over to another enemy and disappeared beneath the dark current of the underworld. The rest--and Carrie was among the number--must soon come face to face with starvation.

Katie's difficulties, though as yet less physical, were scarcely less poignant. She found that she was rarely left long in one portion of the Lennox shop. From the chief woman's-hosiery department, she was shifted, without warning, to the handkerchief counter, and thence, again with no explanation, she was sent to help in the main aisle at a table where there was a special sale of stockings at reduced prices.

At first these frequent shiftings appeared to result from no apparent cause. She was fined as much as the other clerks, but no more than they, and she could in no wise account for the changes. But at last she noticed that after a shift for the worse the sacrosanct Mr. Porter would usually happen by and open a conversation, and then she remembered that, before such a shift, this same side-whiskered gentleman had generally made overtures, and that those overtures had not been well received. The theory arising from these observations she resolved to confirm. After the next move she made deliberate eyes at the man she detested, and she was next day promoted, with a twenty-five cent increase of pay per week, to the silk-stocking counter. From that day she saw her warfare developing into a dangerous game of hide-and-seek in which Mr. Porter was "It," and from that day dated her increasing tendency to reconsider the determination not to marry Hermann Hoffmann.

For Violet, meanwhile, the young interne's prophesy had been fulfilled. Four days after her admission to the hospital there had been performed upon her that operation which had been made necessary by her servitude, but to which, had she been consulted, her fears would never have allowed her to consent. For three weeks she lay in her narrow bed among other sufferers, and, when at last the fiction of discharging her as "cured" had been accomplished, and the five-cent carfare donated by the hospital to charity-patients had been given, she had been met by Katie and Carrie, and had tottered between them to their room.

During another week she had now rested there. Her eyes were still sunken, dull, dark-rimmed; her cheeks white and transparently thin. The knuckles of her fingers seemed to have grown larger, and her hands were nearly transparent. But her lips, though bloodless, had gained a new firmness. Clearly or deeply she could never think, without help from a stronger and better mind; yet she had made what use she might of her long leisure and had resolved, more or less definitely, upon what she would do with her life.

"I went out an' walked a block by myself yesterday," she confessed to her two friends early on the evening of Hermann's political discussion with his employer; "an' I didn't get any tired an' wasn't hardly any scared. Now I want you to take me for a longer walk to-night an' then by to-morrow I'll be all right."

They protested that she must not spur her convalescence, but she was determined. It was, she knew, impossible for them much longer to support her, and the last of her one ten-dollar bill had long ago been spent.

"I'll tell you what we might do," Carrie at last suggested. "There's some sort of a concert over at the settlement to-night. We might go to that. I used to know some of the ladies there, and there's always a chance that they can get you a job."

While she was speaking Hermann's whistle, more cheerful now than when he had left the saloon, sounded on the stairs, and Katie, surprised and glad, opened the door to his knock.

"Late to your work again," she said, with a smile that belied her. "How'll you ever be holdin' that job, anyhow?"

The newcomer's only answer was a courageous and unrebuked kiss. He turned to Carrie.

"Vat you sink of such a vay of meetin' me?" he appealed. "My boss gives me a nighd off, und I haf seen my girl not fur ten days und den----"

He paused as his unrecognizing eye fell upon Violet.

"Egscuse me," he began. "I didn't see----"

"Of course you didn't see it was your old friend Violet that was an' Miss Morton that is," interrupted Katie, with a quick desire to shield her charge. "You're gettin' that near-sighted I wonder how you can tell a whiskey-glass from a beer-stein."

Hermann hurried forward in rosy embarrassment and saved Violet from rising. He took her frail hand in his big paw and poured out a tumbling stream of polite lies upon the matter of her health.

"I guess it ain't quite as good as you say," replied Violet; "but it soon will be. Have you--I didn't get no news while I was sick. Have you heard anything about--things?"

"You knew Rose's place was pinched?"

"Yes, Katie told me that."