Part 21

The homely, brown-haired Lithuanian, whose cheeks were less round now than they had been, and whose hair that needed no covering in the summer, was still uncovered, went to her weary picket-duty in Waverley Place the next morning--the morning, as it happened, that preceded Hermann's little brush with Mirka--with a slow step and a heavy heart. She knew the futility of the work she was performing; she saw it even in the relaxed vigilance of the policemen on the corners and in the mocking grins of the girls and toughs at the gloomy factory-door. All day as, sometimes companioned and sometimes alone, she plodded her eventless round, the irony of the task bit into her soul. Something she must do, and soon. Already she was deep in Katie's debt, and Katie was near dismissal.

The early autumn twilight dropped among the grimy buildings. The evening tide of Broadway rose and roared into Waverley Place. A cold wind lashed the dust into little whirlpools, wound the girl's cheap lawn skirt tightly about her aching knees, and ate through that thin material to the tingling skin. There was no one with her now, and she felt more than ever alone.

From the shadow of a doorway a man crossed the street and approached her.

He was a man of uncertain age, of almost any age below the early thirties. As he bowed to her, the girl saw that his hair was dark and curly; that the back of his hand, which was not the hand of a worker, was covered with a black down, and that through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks there shone the blue-black banners of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick until they smiled, above white teeth, in greeting, and his gray glance had the character of an appraisement of whatever it looked upon. Carrie noticed, protruding from his breast-coatpocket, a purple bordered handkerchief.

"Hello," he said.

She looked at him gravely. She had never seen him before, but with his kind she had lately grown enough familiar. Wherever there are women on strike, men of his sort gather, as the vultures gather about dying animals in a jungle. Yet Carrie said nothing. She was, as she had expressed it to Katie, still wondering.

"I've been _vatch_in' you," said the man. "I've been vatchin' you all _tay_."

"Have you?" Carrie was totally incurious.

"Yes, I'd think you'd be pretty tired of sooch _fool_ishness."

"I am tired."

"You can't vin. If you go back it will be _choost_ the same hell-mill it vas be_fore_."

"I suppose it would."

"Vell then"--his hands spread themselves in protest--"vhy don't you _qvit_? A pretty, strong girl like you could make _loads_ of money fer herself."

Carrie was leaning against the factory wall. She did not move.

"How?" she asked.

"Vell, you hafn't got no _od_der trade, eh?"

"No."

"Und you vouldn't vant to be a _ser_vant?"

"Why not?"

"Because that's vorse nor a _shirt_vaist-factory."

"Then I wouldn't want to be a servant."

Again the man extended his hands.

"Vell?" he said.

"But I knew one girl that went into a house," affirmed Carrie, "and I wouldn't do that for a fortune."

Her practical manner might have disconcerted most men, but this man's business had accustomed him to all forms of rejoinder. He immediately began an endeavor to persuade her by economic arguments.

But Carrie interrupted him.

"No," she said, "if I do it, it will be only because I have to, and then I'll not do it that way. Thank you, just the same. Here comes my relief: I don't have to wait till the girls come out to-day. Good-by."

He essayed to protest, but she walked quietly by him, made her brief report to the oncoming women, and started on her journey homeward. The man, whose trade imposed patience, said no more. He did not again approach her, and, though she knew that he was following her, through the growing crowd that rolled eastward, to mark her hiding-place, she did not attempt to elude him. She was very tired.

This was the evening that preceded the early morning call of Angel the Italian and Mirka the Austrian to Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and it was about eight hours later that Hermann, having seen his assailants leave, turned his back to the bar-room door and, alone in the place, set about washing the discarded glasses. Except that he was sleepy, he was in his usual spirits and he was whistling "Die Wacht Am Rhein." He was whistling so loudly that he did not hear the door reopen.

There was a flash as of a thousand blinding lights, a roar as if a train had fallen from the elevated road overhead, and Hermann, in the smoke-filled saloon, himself fell crashing behind the bar, and lay there, huddled and still.

Mirka quietly reclosed the door and darted around the corner.

XXII

THE SERPENTS' DEN

Poverty, which produces the slave, breeds, just as surely, the slaver. Take where you will the trail of the trafficker in women, this rule is proven. It is proven in puritan Boston and protected New Orleans, in Chicago and Washington, in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and on the heroic scale it is nowhere more plainly proven than in the heroic city of New York.

On Manhattan Island is, indeed, the Mother-Church, however unconsciously organized, of the black faith, and though, of necessity, there spontaneously arise elsewhere congregations that reach back to her, here is founded and established the Congregation of the Propaganda that reaches out to them. Its missionaries--its women, men, and methods--have stretched to Nome and the Canal Zone; they are preaching their own brand of dogma against the native versions of Buenos Ayres and Sydney, of Shanghai and Cape Town; and within its home city the hierarchy is entrenched by financial strength, political power, and legal negligence. As an industry, it has its wholesalers and retailers; or, as a church, its bishops sit in their national house of peers, while its younger orders, its proselyting priests and evangelizing deacons, perform their especial tasks, the young appealing to the young, the poor preying upon poverty.

The entrance to these lower orders lies, as in most orders and most businesses, through a period of probation: the lad of sixteen plays the rôle of watchdog and spy for his superiors, for which he earns an occasional fifty-cent piece, or a casual kettle of beer, vastly increasing his income if he now and then diverts, as he generally does, his energies to the occupation of amateur theft. From this stage he is admitted, by his own efforts, to the possession of one girl, whom he bullies into working for him along the streets. He may occasionally deign to appear as a waiter in a café, and offer his woman to its drunken habitués; but most frequently he scorns all menial labor, for which, in fact, conditions have utterly unfitted him. Sometimes he increases his slave-holdings to a trio of women, and even farms out his victims to friends in his own or other neighborhoods or towns: more often he delivers his human wares to the proprietors of houses intended for their reception, being paid in a lump sum, or on a royalty basis; but in either case his ambition is, naturally, to rise to the position of the large property-holder or the political receiver of tribute. If he is an Italian, common consent limits his operations to the southern end of the Bowery; if he is a Jew, his field lies about the Houston and Essex Streets districts; whatever his European parentage, he seeks his fellow-countrywomen, and if he is American born he has the freedom of Broadway.

His means are multitude. Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary, this "cadet," offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic mill; the restless neurotic native-daughters untrained for work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they call the American language, learn what they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.

Where training is as yet too strong or distress too weak to make serve the offer of partnership, the promise of marriage usually suffices. The thing is done, and once done, blows and starvation perpetuate it with the ignorant, and threats of exposure and public shame rivet the shackles on the more knowing. The former suffer for their darkness; the latter are held the faster in proportion to their previous respectability.

One has said that this church is established; in every city it maintains its incestuous marriage to the state. It controls real votes by the thousands and provides false ones by the tens of thousands. It is a church that may be considered to exercise the old ecclesiastical right of trying its own offenders in its own courts. When the magistrates have not begun as slavers, when they own no poor, but highly rented, houses, leased for prostitution, when they do not even accept tithes from the traffic, it is still largely the traffic that elects and can defeat them. What the Black Church owes to the political powers for their protection, the political powers owe to the church for its ballots.

It was this condition that made possible the impunity of such a deed as the Austrian Mirka had done upon Hermann Hoffmann, the bar-keeper; that made certain the assailant's escape, and that made of the entire matter merely a question as to which of several handy means should be employed to free the slaver in the eyes of the law. About those means there had, however, been some debate, and so it befell that, early on the Sunday evening following the shooting, Rafael Angelelli sat in a recognized New York meeting-place of the church's proselyting order, engaged in pleasant converse with Wesley Dyker, candidate for a magistracy. This place was the back-room of a saloon. It was filled with cigarette-smoking young missionaries, who talked shop, and quoted prices, and discussed the prospects of a good season in precisely the businesslike way that men in a livestock-dealers' club talk shop, and quote prices, and discuss the prospects of a good season. Dyker had not at all wanted to come there, but O'Malley had ordered, and so, making peace with the tolerant Angelelli, he had been forced to obey. A special counsel for the sheriff of New York had once been a member of the legal corps of the missionaries and so had two State Senators: O'Malley, remembering Dyker's previous career, could see no reason for present pride.

The room was clouded with smoke. Waiters hurried about serving beer from brass platters and swabbing the small tables with damp rags. There was a buzz of conversation broken by that peculiar form of laughter which responds only to obscenities, and now and then, out of the general clamor, there arose oaths almost technical, descriptions of women that sounded like auctioneers' announcements in a horse-market, and fragments of stories in which the teller bragged of a sharp deal he had effected in capturing a slave or in bargaining with a proprietress.

"I understand," said Dyker, with his eyelids characteristically lowered, "that you want to see me in regard to something about this shooting-affair of your friend Mirka."

Angel's oily head bobbed a ready assent.

"Where's the fellow that was hurt?"

"In Bellevue."

"Is he going to die?"

"Naw; eet was only a leetle one in hees shoulder."

"Anybody else in the bar when it happened?"

"Naw."

That was better. Wesley took a sip of beer.

"Mirka was alone, too?"

"Yas."

"Did the bar-keeper see him?"

"Naw; hees back was rounda to da door."

"There'd been a quarrel beforehand, though?"

"Ah, some small word only."

"And nobody saw Mirka come back or leave the place the second time?"

Nobody had seen him.

Then how was it that the injured man, in the hospital, had said that Mirka had done the shooting?

Angel explained that Hermann based his accusation partly on an uncertain and partial glimpse of Mirka caught in the bar-mirror at the instant that the shot was fired, but largely on the preceding quarrel.

"This Hoffmann couldn't swear to Mirka's identity from that mere glimpse?"

The Italian thought not.

"Well, then," said Wesley, "it all ought to be easy enough. Every bar-keeper knows a lot of drunks that might want to hurt him."

Rafael shrugged.

"You can feex eet," he said. "Meest' O'Malley say you feex eet easy."

"But," replied Dyker, "I don't see how I can act as Mirka's lawyer, unless it is all done quickly. You know, I'm about to be elected magistrate."

"Poof!" said Angel, blowing a thin spiral of blue cigarette-smoke. "We gotta da lawyer."

"Oh!" Dyker looked up quickly, and quickly down again. "Then you want me--I see."

"Good."

The prospective magistrate began making rings on the table with his wet glass.

"But I should think there were other ways. The man hasn't been arrested yet?"

"Naw."

"Then why need the police find him?"

"Thees O'Malley say eet looka better."

"He might jump his bail."

"Naw."

"It's often done that way."

"O'Malley say 'naw'."

"Or he might go up for trial. There's no real evidence against him: nobody saw the shot fired. And besides, even if we couldn't fix things in court, which is always easy enough, we could get him a pardon as we did for Pud Morley or Frank Da Silva."

But Angel would have none of these propositions. Michael O'Malley was, it seemed, inexorable. There had been enough bail-jumping, queer verdicts, and pardons for a few months. The case must come before the new magistrate, and the new magistrate must declare that the testimony was not sufficient to warrant holding the prisoner for court.

"Where is Mirka now?" asked Dyker.

"Een Philadelph'," said Angel.

"Loafing?"

"Naw. He tooka one of heesa girls along. I am takin' care of dees other one."

"Can't we get hold of the Dutchman and make him see who's back of all this?"

"Naw; dees Dutch' ees a fool."

"Won't even be bought?"

"Naw."

"And can't be scared?"

"Naw; I tell you dees Dutch' ees a damn fool."

Wesley did not like the plan; he did not like it at all; but he was already harnessed fast, and he had learned that it was best to follow without protest the directing rein. He achieved a smile.

"All right," he agreed.

The Italian's face lighted with gratification.

"You do eet?" he asked.

"I'll arrange it; don't worry."

"Good! Good! That's good!"

Angel's pleasure was so pronounced that Dyker for a moment feared--though it would have made small difference--lest the cadet make to the entire company a public announcement of his promise. He need not, however, have worried. Rafael was wholly used to these legal fictions and to the etiquette that imposed their formal observance; his delight took the shape of an order for another pair of drinks, and, those dispatched, he leisurely got upon his little feet.

"Now," said he, "I go. I hava da businesses."

He smiled wisely at the concluding word.

Wesley also rose.

"I'll have to be getting along myself," he remarked.

"Ah, but you can stay eef you feel like," said Angel. "I maka you know deesa mens."

"Thanks. I do know most of them," replied Dyker, nodding to two or three of the nearby cadets as he spoke. "But I have some business, too. These are busy times with me."

They both made their way to the saloon's side door.

"Goin' so soon?" chorused some of the habitués as Angel moved among them.

He nodded, smiling cheerfully.

"Goin' to kop out a new skirt?" inquired one.

"Yas," responded Rafael, now with a frank, satisfied chuckle.

"Then here's luck!" cried another.

As the health was being drunk, Dyker passed through the door and turned, alone, into the cool night air of the street.

Notwithstanding his natural bias, his severe schooling, and his honestly cynical and cynically limited view of this portion of his little world, he was ashamed of what he had just seen and heard and done, and he was disgusted. He walked down the avenue in the deepened shadows, for the first time in a long while more than half inclined to ask himself whether what he was to get was worth the price that he had already begun to pay for it; and for the first time, by way of answer, frankly facing the fact that the position of a corrupt magistrate was not much worse than that of a corrupt lawyer, and that neither position was much worse, and both certainly better paid, than the position in which his task had been to render anonymous assistance to the no less dubious course of more esteemed corporation attorneys.

He was too occupied with these reflections, disquieting and consolatory, to observe well the persons that passed him. He continued his way along the curb rather because he had started upon it than because he at all cared about whither it led him, much as he was continuing his progress in the political maze in which his lot was cast. He kept his head bent, and so he did not see a pale-faced, large-eyed woman that, turning a hasty corner, almost collided with him and then suddenly drew back and crossed the street.

There were changes in the woman's face, which might have precluded recognition. He had last seen her on the eve of a surgical operation and she had looked ill, but now, the cumulative effect of that and many other crises sat upon her, and it was only in her habitual gait, the swaying languid pace of an unstudied young animal, that he might have found enough to recall her to his memory. But Dyker's eyes were directed inward and so, when she turned aside to avoid the man that she fancied she had wronged, he did not realize that he had almost touched elbows with the woman he had once rescued, fresh from her dismissal from the sacred precincts of Mrs. Ferdinand Chamberlin's home.

She had started away from Washington Square in the same dull pain in which she had previously left the Ninth Street boarding-house presided over by the stony-breasted Mrs. Alberta Turner; she had been only a wounded dog, whose sole desire was to find a dark corner in which she could suffer unobserved; but slowly there reasserted itself in her torpid brain that new impulse toward a questioning of life which had so appalled Philip Beekman. The whole she could not see; her own case bulked so far in the foreground that little else of the picture was visible to her. But she knew that an ill-constructed world was against her; she concluded that all legitimate doors were closed upon her, and she felt gradually kindling a wrath that would end in general reprisal.

How she chanced into Rivington Street she did not know. She had no clear idea as to where she was to go, except that she must not return to burden Katie Flanagan. Yet, almost before she was clearly conscious of her whereabouts, she found herself accosted by a voice that proved to come from the lips of Marian Lennox.

"Mary Morton! How do you do? Where are you going? Where on earth have you been? Come in here; I'm just getting back from a walk. I am so anxious to hear how you are getting on, and I have been so disappointed because you never let me hear from you."

The rivulet of cheerful words poured from the calm-faced woman with unheeding force. Each one of them fell upon her auditor with an unintended shock. Mary, who had almost forgotten the pseudonym under which she had been presented at the Settlement, could say nothing. She was carried up the steps and into the house, up the stairs and into the deserted sitting-room on the second floor; and there she sank limply into a wicker chair beside a magazine-littered table, tête-à-tête with her former benefactress.

Marian, all good intentions, rested her delicate chin upon her white hands.

"Now," she said, "I am anxious to hear all about you."

Mary, with a perplexed frown, looked hard at the floor.

"Why, there isn't much to tell, Miss Lennox," she replied.

"Nonsense. Of course there is, my dear. You must understand that I am interested in everything about you--in everything."

Mary's eyes sought, for a moment, the pure, cameo-like face. They could see no evil there, and they could see much kindliness.

"Well, then," she hesitated, "I don't know exactly where to begin."

"At the beginning, of course. How do you like your place?"

"Which place, Miss Lennox?"

"The place we sent you to."

"I'm not there no more."

"Not there?" Marian raised her perfectly arched brows. "But, my dear Mary, why not? Didn't you like it?"

"I didn't mind."

"Then you have found a better place?"

Again Mary studied her questioner.

"Miss Lennox," she said, "I guess you people here have all sorts of girls comin' around, don't you?"

There was a surprise in this departure, and Marian's deep eyes mirrored it. The questioner had become the questioned.

"A great many kinds," she replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Girls that work at all sorts of things?"

"To be sure."

"And you want to help 'em?"

"We try to help them all."

"Yes; I thought so. Can you help 'em all, Miss Lennox?"

"When they let us, I think we can."

"Then what do you do about them that hasn't been straight?"

Marian softly caught her breath.

"Oh," she said; "I----" She had learned, since their last meeting, a little about the girls concerning whom Mary was inquiring, and she had learned much regarding the Settlement's attitude toward them; but she had learned, also, that the work of the place most lay with the flowers that bloomed among the weeds, and so, "Well, you see," she lamely continued, "Well, we do the best we can."

"What's that, please, Miss Lennox? I've got a particular reason for wanting to know."

Marian understood. She spoke softly, and softly laced and interlaced her long white fingers, resting in her lap.

"We do the best we can, Mary," she repeated, more confidently. "When we have investigated the case and are sure such a girl is sorry, or wasn't entirely to blame, and that she means to do what is right in the future, we make her our personal friend. We encourage her to come here and talk to us and get all the help possible. We have her around to all the entertainments----"

"Can she learn?" asked Mary.

"Learn?" Marian's voice was puzzled.