Part 22

"Can she go to the clubs and the classes they talked about when I was here first?" explained Mary.

Marian shook a doubtful head.

"You see that wouldn't do, right away, Mary," she said. "We have to think of the other girls, and we have to protect the girls that _are_ straight as well as help those that haven't been. These are their clubs, after all, and they wouldn't like it, if they knew. It wouldn't be just for us to deceive them, and they have the first claim on our protection."

"Why?"

It was the hardest question that Marian Lennox had ever had put to her. She tried to form an answer, but though she could think of many that seemed to her logical, she could think of none that seemed kind. Sympathy sprang to her eyes. She put out her hands.

"Mary!" she said.

But Mary had received her reply.

"It don't matter, Miss Lennox," she said, and she said it so calmly and so coldly that Marian involuntarily drew back in her chair. "I just wondered, that was all."

She stopped an instant. Her hostess tried to speak and could not, but presently the girl pursued:

"I wasn't square with you, that night you gave me the recommedation to Mrs. Turner, Miss Lennox. I suppose I ought to've told you all about myself, but I had to get work, an' I knew if I told you I wouldn't get no job. I'd been--I'd been in a house. I wanted to get away, an' a man had just got me out a little more'n a month or so before."

"It was not exactly honest of you," said Marian.

She was sorry as soon as she had spoken, but Mary, showing no sign of hurt or resentment, was continuing before reparation or explanation could be made.

Very simply she told the hard outward facts of her story. She did not give the history of her capture, because her experience with Mrs. Turner, with the homely little woman that had called at the employment-agency, and with Philip Beekman had shown her that this could not lessen the extent of her contamination. Honestly rejecting her deception of Marian, goaded by that glimpse of Wesley Dyker into an impulse to make, at any cost to herself, the amend of truth for what fault she had committed, she was still more powerfully moved by a determination to accept without reservation the part that the world had now assigned her, and to fight under no colors save her own.

Marian, her fine face drawn with pain, heard the narrative in a silence broken only when Mary had concluded with her departure from the hospital. The girl had mentioned no names.

"And even this one man," murmured Marian at last, "even this man who had the courage to rescue you--even he was a visitor at such a place?"

"Why, of course," said Mary, as yet unused to the idea of any blame attaching to the mere male patronage of slavery. "How else could I have got him for help?"

"But you said he was in love with that woman who conducted the--house."

"With Miss Rose?"

"What did you call her?"

"Mrs. Rose Légère she called herself, but I guess that wasn't her name. Yes, he was kind of in love with her. He was one of her favorites anyhow, but that was just because he had a pull with the politicians, you see. She let him love her so's she could work him, an' when I put him wise to that, he was glad to help me."

Marian clinched her fist.

"The abominable cur!" she said.

"Oh, no! Not that," protested Mary. She had failed this man by retracting her affidavit, but she meant to be loyal to him wheresoever she could. His name slipped from her with no thought of consequences. "It took a lot of nerve an' goodness to do for me what Mr. Dyker done."

Marian's gaze became fixed. She was a woman whose whole training had shaped her against sudden betrayal of emotion, but she needed every precept of that training now. She did not start, she did not flush, but her hands moved to the arms of her chair and gripped them hard.

"Did you say Mr. Wesley Dyker?" she asked.

Her voice did not betray her to the woman opposite, but Mary feared lest her own desire to defend her deliverer had betrayed him.

"That's who it was, Miss Lennox," she admitted, adding anxiously: "But I didn't go to mention it.

"You won't tell it to no one that could use it against him, will you?"

"Oh, no!" Marian laughed a short, hard laugh and rose to hide whatever might be seen of her confusion. "Oh, no," she said; "I shan't speak of this to any enemy."

Her movement had seemed to Mary as a sign that the interview was ending, but the laughter chilled her. She also rose, and stood before her hostess.

"You don't know him?" she tremulously inquired.

"I think," said Marian, "that I used to know somebody by some such name, but I do not know him now. He need not disturb himself, and when you see him you need not disturb him by saying that you spoke of this to me."

"Oh, I won't see him," Mary assured her. "It ain't likely I'll ever see see him again."

Marian's eyes searched her, but they detected nothing disingenuous.

"You have quarreled?" she demanded.

"No, only he wanted me to testify against Miss Rose, an' I was too scared. I just hid myself."

There was a simple appeal in the bare words that brought their hearer to her better self. Within her there burned a new and mounting fire, but her face was cool and her actions were reasoned.

"Mary," she said, determined to sink herself and to be true to her code, "I am very sorry to have heard all this. I am sorry that I seemed harsh when I said you had not been quite honest with us."

"But I hadn't been, Miss Lennox."

"It was not altogether your fault if you weren't, Mary. I begin to see that it must be rather hard, sometimes, to be quite honest."

"It is, sometimes."

"But you have been honest now with me, and I want to help you. I want you to come around here in the way I described. I want you to come often."

She paused, and then, as Mary did not respond, she added:

"Will you?"

Mary's eyes were on the floor.

"Do you think you can get me a job?" she asked. "Do you think anyone can?"

Marian had thought nothing about it.

"Why, really, I don't know, Mary. But I suppose so. Anyhow, I'll see what I can do--though of course I shouldn't feel justified in procuring you a position under false pretenses. You understand that?"

"Yes," said Mary, "I understand."

"And, at any rate, you will come around to-morrow?"

Still Mary did not look up.

"You will come?" repeated Marian.

"Yes, Miss Lennox," said Mary.

"Very well, then: to-morrow afternoon."

Something in the girl's attitude made Marian uneasy. She insisted on her point, but again Mary was slow to answer, and again Marian asked:

"Will you?"

"Yes, Miss Lennox."

"At five o'clock, Mary."

"I'll try, Miss Lennox."

"Promise."

Mary stepped to the door. She looked up and put out her hand, but, although Marian saw this, and started to respond, the settlement-worker's hand fell back to her side. Mary seemed first to observe and then not at all to have observed it.

"I promise," she said quietly, and left the room and the house.

Inside, Marian was looking at her hand as if, because it had refused to seek that of the woman who, she concluded, had shared Rose Légère's intimacy with Dyker, it had been scorched by the new passion aflame in her own heart. Outside, Mary, tramping the evening street, saw, in her memory of that hand withheld, a hand pointing her definitely away from the keeping of her promise, pointing her onward down the street as the place where, for the future, she must live and work.

XXIII

KATIE'S DAY

The election came, and went in just the way that everybody expected it to go. Wesley Dyker's political craft, along with many others, was carried on the inrushing waves of his party's success to the haven where he had desired it to rest, and the prosperity that had raised the price of votes to five dollars apiece immediately resumed its unostentatious levy upon the voters against the next election. The defeated candidates forgot their so recent denunciations and congratulated their victorious opponents; the victorious opponents forgot their tinsel pledges and resumed the safe and sure business of government for revenue only, and the population of New York, like the population of most cities, forgot all the good things that had been pledged it, and turned its energies to the everyday task of taking what it could get.

Meanwhile Carrie Berkowicz, homely and hopeless, pursued, with a dogged earnestness, the path that conditions had hewn for her, and always she pursued it not alone. As the waiting beast prowls behind the slowly weakening traveler lost in a jungle, as the bird of prey circles calmly above the wounded man in the forest, as both beast and bird stand by until there comes the moment when strength can no longer oppose them, so, day after day, rarely speaking, but always watching, there followed in this girl's footsteps the dark young man with curling hair and shining teeth, who had accosted her on Waverley Place. He seemed to watch for her morning entrance upon the street, and to be the last to see her when she dragged her wasting body into the tenement at night. Much of the time he dogged her like a foul shadow. She would pass him in a doorway, she would see him lounging at a corner, she would catch glimpses of him across a crowded street. There were times when she feared to look up lest she should have to answer that prosperous leer and ornate bow; there were others, at last, when, as his well-fed body brushed by her, she almost plucked at his sleeve with her hungry hands. He never stopped, but sometime, she knew, he would stop; he never said more than "Good-morning" or "Good-evening,", but sometime, sometime soon, he would, she knew, say more.

And meanwhile, too, the politically unaffected routine of the Lennox department-store began gradually to provide for one of its victims at least the sense of approaching variety: Katie Flanagan realized that the end of her usefulness--as that phrase is termed by employers, boarding-school principals, and others in authority--was rapidly nearing. She managed to avoid the immaculate Mr. Porter for one week, and, but for her worry over the condition of the wounded Hermann, would have had moments when the sport was amusing. As the taskmaster paused at her counter one time during the second week, she achieved a sick aunt, who sufficed to account for her occupied evenings. But when the days and the nights dragged by with no change for either the better or the worse in the condition of this bed-ridden relative, and when the girl's invention began to flag, and her spirit to tire, Mr. Porter's glance grew more and more searching, his manner less and less warm, and Katie knew that she must soon retreat or surrender.

"I have not seen much of you lately, Miss Flanagan," remarked Mr. Porter as, late one afternoon, he came mincing to the counter where she stood.

"I've been here pretty regular, Mr. Porter," answered Katie.

Mr. Porter caressed a gray side-whisker.

"Um," said he. "I presume, then, that your grandmother is no worse."

"It's me aunt, sir," rejoined Katie, with the mental addition: "You didn't catch me that time, you ould tom-cat." And she added: "The good woman's some better, thanks."

"I see," said Mr. Porter, and, indeed, his cold gaze seemed to see a great deal more than he was inclined to mention. "At this rate of improvement, I hope you will soon find time to consider the matter we discussed that day in my office."

"I hope that, Mr. Porter," smiled Katie.

"Yes," concluded Mr. Porter, turning from her--he always turned away when he was most significant. "I hope so, too, for I can't well keep your case under advisement much longer."

Several of the salesgirls nearby laughed openly, and Katie, when he was out of sight, looked at them with a grimace half sad, half mocking.

The next morning she was transferred to a bargain-counter for the day.

What the outcome might have been there is no imagining. What it was depended, at any rate in part, upon the fact that, on what proved to be her last day at the shop, she had come to work with a tired body and an aching head. She had sat up half the night in a long endeavor to persuade Carrie to leave the futile battle of the strikers and turn to other employment; and, when Carrie had rejected all proposals on the ground that, though the fight was lost, she knew no other sort of work, Katie had spent about all the remainder of the dark hours in an attempt to convince her roommate that the Irish girl's wages were enough to support both of them for some time to come. The result, so far as went her conduct at the store, was a temper ready to explode with the first spark, and that spark came when, in midafternoon, a nervous woman, who persisted in examining everything and buying nothing, interpreted Katie's lassitude as indifference and so reported it to the floor-walker.

Katie was sent for to come to Mr. Porter's office.

Mr. Porter looked up from the light at his desk, and then down again. He stroked a whisker.

"Sit down, Miss Flanagan," he said.

"Thanks," replied Katie, "I can take it just as well standin'."

"Take what?" asked Mr. Porter.

"Anythin' at all you have to say," said Katie.

Mr. Porter continued to look at his desk and, by the name of "Miss Flanagan," addressed it severely.

"Miss Flanagan," he said, "you have again been reported to me for discourtesy to a customer. The other case had not yet been adjusted. It might have been adjusted had not your cousin----"

"Me aunt," prompted Katie.

"Your aunt," frowned Mr. Porter to his desk, "had not your aunt been so disinclined to recover."

"She was gettin' absent treatment from a bad doctor."

"I know nothing of that----"

"I think meself it was Malicious Animal Magnetism."

"Please do not interrupt," said Mr. Porter, shaking his whiskers at the desk. "I say that the previous case was not adjusted, though it might have been, if your mother had not remained so ill."

"Me aunt."

"Your aunt, if you prefer it. Now comes this second case, and really, I am curious to know whether you can suggest anything that will make me regard it with the smallest degree of lenience."

He looked again at the desk, as if the desk were the case he had referred to, but neither the desk nor Katie answered.

"If you cannot," he at last concluded, "I see no course but one for me to pursue."

Katie folded her arms across her breast and tossed her black head.

"There's only one thing I can think of," said she, and waited.

Mr. Porter breathed hard.

"And what," he inquired, still without looking at her, "is that?"

Katie took a soft step forward. She rested her hands upon the arm of his desk and leaned her face toward him.

"Don't you know?" she asked in a low voice.

Mr. Porter shot, from the corner of his eyes, one of his crooked glances at her.

"I am not quite sure," he said.

"Then," replied Katie, "I'll tell you. The only one thing I can think of that'd get you to let me off is the only one you can think of yourself--_an' that's the one I won't do!_"

Her voice, which had begun so softly, ended in a loud note. Her hands, which had been open, clinched. Her body, which had been relaxed, stiffened.

Mr. Porter sprang back from her, looked at her with hot fright in his usually cool eyes, and then shrank as far away as his desk-armchair would permit.

"Miss Flanagan," he spluttered, "not so loud, please! You will alarm the store."

"I wish I could alarm it!" said Katie.

"But what--what--I don't understand----"

"Yes, you do understand, all right, all right, Mr. Porter. I know what you want; I've known it all along, an' if I hadn't liked to make a fool of you, I'd have told you long since what I tell you now: _You won't get it!_"

If it were possible for Mr. Porter to grow whiter than his habit, he grew whiter then.

"I shall--I shall ring for assistance!" he protested.

"No you won't; you won't dare; you'll sit there, an' write me out a recommendation an' an order for me pay--if your hand ain't shakin' too much, an' if it is, I'll write it for you."

And he did write it. After one look at her, he wrote it without a word, and "without," as Katie carefully stipulated, "any dockin' for the last offense," and as she left him she delivered one Parthian bolt.

"Remember me to the girl you start after in the mornin'," she said; "an' when you go home to-night, just give me grandmother-mother-aunt-cousin's best regards to your grown-up great-grandchildren."

The taste in which her revolution expressed itself may have been as doubtful as the courage that inspired it was certain; but, had Mr. Porter been able to see into her mind as she hurried homeward, he would have been gratified at what he found there. The excitement had gone, and with it the bravery. She had preserved her individual ideals, but she now realized at what a cost she had preserved them. Against masculine attack it was sometimes inspiriting to defend herself, but to the slow and continuous advance of penury she well knew that, at last, she must succumb.

She passed her ugly little parish-church, and, remembering that she had missed her last confession, entered its forbidding doors.

The swinging portal closed softly behind her. It shut out the glare of the day, it shut out the noises of the street, and it seemed to shut out the entire malicious power of the world. Inside the cruel sunshine became kindly shade and comforting candle-light; the only sound was the occasional footfall of an unseen suppliant, and on the distant high altar, shimmering and white at the end of the long perspective of the empty aisle, there rested the power she believed more powerful than all on earth beside.

She made her confession--not the easy and formal confession of the strong, who need it most, but the frank probing question and full reply of the weak, who can profit by it least--and at its end she received not only the benediction that she traced to Heaven, but the shrewd advice that came direct from the big heart of a worldly-wise and beneficent man.

"Thank you, father," she added to the words of the ritual, as she rose to go, "I'll do me best to stick it out, but times be when it's powerful hard."

The experience had encouraged her, but, when she came at last into her barren home, there fell a blow that shook to its foundations the structure of hope which she had so briefly reared. On the bare table was a single sheet of paper, and on the paper was written:

"Dear Katie:--I have gone away. There was no use in saying good-by, for that would only have hurt both of us, and I could not have made you see that I was right not to board here any longer at your expense, any more than you could make me see last night that you were right on your side. Pretty soon I'll come to see you and bring the money I owe you, but I can't ever pay you back all your other goodness, although I would give my right arm to do it.

"Another thing. By the time you get this letter Hermann will be to see you at the store. I was around to Bellevue yesterday, and we kept it as a surprise for you that he was coming out to-day. I hope by this time you two will have fixed it all up; but if you haven't, well, I never talked to you about it much before, but I feel I must say something now, because I seem to know more about life than I used to: take him, Katie dear, for there are only horrors ahead for any girls like you and me if we don't marry. He's a fine man and you love him, and the two of you will do better together than you can do apart.

"Now, good-by. Don't please bother to hunt for me--I won't be on picket-duty any more, but _I am all right_.

"Lovingly, "CARRIE."

Katie Flanagan put down the note. She went to the narrow window and gazed blindly at the unsightly wing of the tenement across the narrow court outside.

"All right?" she said, the paper crumpling in her tightened hand. "All right? The poor girl's got no money an' no job. I know what she's thinking an' there's no good followin'. 'All right,' she says! Dear God, pity her: she means, 'all wrong'!"

Katie felt too deeply for her lost comrade to think much, if at all, of that portion of the note which touched her own interest. Her eyes clouded; her shoulders shook; she fell upon her knees before the window-sill, and it was there that Hermann's strong arms went about her neck.

Even then, glad as she was to have him back again, she could do little but sob brokenly with her cheek against his breast, while he told her how he had gone to the store, learned of her dismissal, and come at once to the tenement, not pausing to knock when he heard her sobs. He comforted her as best he could, but it was some time before any comfort availed.

All had ended well for Hermann, but all had not easily so ended. His wound had proved relatively slight, and he was sound and whole again: but, the day before his dismissal from the hospital, Schleger had waited upon him shamefacedly to confess that the rulers of the ward, dissatisfied with the bar-keeper's Laodicean attitude toward their political labors, and urged by Mirka's friends, had forbidden his re-engagement in the saloon. Ludwig had been sorry, but helpless, and then, after exacting a score of promises, had disclosed his plan to open incognito a grocery-store on the West Side, himself remaining in charge of the saloon and Hoffmann appearing, on a good salary, as the owner of the new venture.

Katie looked up at him with eyes shining blue through a dispersing mist of tears.

"An' what about the dirty Dago that shot you?" she inquired.

Hermann smiled broadly. His face was thinner and not so ruddy as once, but it was cheerful still and more determined than of old.

"The Austrian?" he asked.

"'Tis the same thing," said she.

"Ach, vell, I guess ve von't do nussing about him."

"You won't be lettin' him go?"

"Vhy not? Dere's none to swear fur me and a hun'red to swear fur him. I kind of belief Schleger gif me de new blace as brice fur keepin' quiet, so dere's nussing to gain und efferysing to lose."