Part 25

Yet gradually one great passion was growing within her. That process of thought which had begun in her encounter with Philip Beekman, when she left his mother's employment, had been hastened in its growth by what Marian Lennox had said and failed to do, and the shock of the girl's embarkation upon her new profession had only momentarily retarded it. She was not large enough--few of us are--to see the conditions behind the individual, nor yet greatly to concern herself with individuals that did not directly concern her; but she saw clearly her own plight, and now saw, or thought she saw, that this plight was due entirely to the machinations of the man who had taken her from her home and brought her to New York. She could have loved him, and so she hated him; she could still feel a tenderness for what he might have been, so she permitted herself to feel only animosity for what he had proved himself to be. To him she traced directly all that had befallen her, and as she could not go beyond him, so from him, she slowly and finally resolved, she would exact payment. That thought waxed in her tired mind; it was fed with every throe of her pained body until it dominated her circumscribed outlook upon the world. It even saved her from suffering, because it so possessed her that it armored her against all lesser things. She had found, at last, a purpose in life.

It was almost coincident with her realization of this that Mary realized something else. She went immediately to a physician.

Dr. Helwig, a man with an enormous paunch and a round face and triple chin, was one of the many excellent practitioners that depend for their living--and it is a good one--upon the class to which Mary belonged. He treated the matter for what it was: a commonplace in his day's work. At the end of a week he confirmed her fears.

For a moment she reeled under the blow. The bookcases with their ponderous volumes in dark bindings, the shelves burdened with phials, the glass medicine-case, the convertible table for minor operations, the crowded desk, and even the fat physician before it, seemed to whirl in a mad saraband.

"Come, come!" she heard the doctor say, as he thrust an uncorked bottle of smelling-salts under her nose.

"How long will it last?" she panted.

"We must keep up our treatment for six months or a year," he answered. "Meantime, diet and quiet. No liquor. If you were a millionaire, I'd prescribe a long sea-voyage or a trip to Hot Springs."

Out of the chaos of her brain a sudden idea was shaping.

"What," she inquired, "about other people catching this?"

He knew her business perfectly, and he knew that what he had to say on this point would weigh but little in the scale against want. Nevertheless, he made the common answer.

After that she listened to all the instructions that he gave her. More than ever now she had her purpose in life.

XXVI

"THE LEAST OF THESE"

A week later, in a lamp-lighted street, Mary and Carrie met. Each girl was too conscious of her own business to remark that it was the business of her acquaintance, and each tried to avoid the other; but before recognition was complete they were face to face. Silence was confession. Mary spoke.

"Hello," she said, "it's a long time since I seen you. How are you, anyways?"

Carrie, though still a homely girl, wore a close-fitting coat that made the best of her figure. Her hat was wide and new and, as she answered, she turned from the light.

"Pretty well," she said, and paused short.

"I guess," said Mary, "you thought it was queer, my never comin' to see you; but I haven't had a single chance. I'll come soon, honest I will. How's Katie?"

"I don't know," Carrie slowly answered, "I'm not living with her any more."

"You ain't? Since when ain't you?"

"Oh, I don't know--a couple of weeks."

"You two didn't scrap?"

"No. I had to go away." And then, to divert the fire, Carrie added: "Are you still working at that place the Settlement-people got for you?"

"No, I left that long ago. Have you gone back to the shirtwaist-factory?"

"I couldn't: the strike was never settled, and, anyhow, they wouldn't have taken me back if I'd been willing to go."

Mary looked at the long coat and the gray hat.

"But, say," she began, "you don't look----"

Her eyes dropped to Carrie's and, suddenly, she knew. Her voice softened.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I had to do it, too."

Silently they touched hands. The Lithuanian's breast rose and fell quickly.

"I couldn't do anything else," said Carrie, but only in explanation, not in extenuation or excuse. "There was no other work I could do."

"I know," said Mary.

"And everywhere I went," continued Carrie, "he followed me. He was always just behind me when I walked, always just around the corner when I stood still. When I was dizzy and hungry, he always looked well fed and always had the money in his hand. He waited, waited, waited."

"You mean your fellow?" Mary asked.

Carrie assented. "If you can call him that," she said. "He has two or three others working for him, or he'd be across the street now. I'm different from them--freer. I'm not afraid of him, and so he is a little afraid of me."

Mary took the girl's arm.

"They won't let us stop this way on the pavement," she said. "Come in here and have a drink."

They went into the women's room of one of the quieter saloons. Mary, mindful of the doctor's directions, took only carbonated water, but Carrie ordered whiskey.

Mary, with her stomach crying out for the alcohol, and, in that wrenching desire, nearly seizing her companion's liquor, sipped the water.

"I've quit it," she averred. "It don't pay."

"Most of the men make you take it," said Carrie.

"Yes," Mary admitted, "but you can chuck it on the floor if you're fly." She took another sip of the water, and then asked: "Why don't you shake this man if you're not scared of him. You can come with me, you know."

"It wouldn't be good business," Carrie declared. "I need somebody with influence to look after me in case I'm arrested."

Mary was silent for a minute, thinking.

"Perhaps you're right," she granted; "there's one of 'em I'd like to find."

"Who is it?"

"I'll tell you sometime.--Look here: I don't feel like workin' Broadway to-night, an' I've got some money. Let's do a dance-hall."

They "did" several. At the first a mask-ball was in progress; the bachanalian guests had rented extravagant costumes; confetti was tossed by the onlookers, and swiftly shifting lights of red and blue, of green and purple, played upon the dancers, whose whirling shadows, monstrously magnified, were thrown upon sheeted walls. At another, there was an explosion of obscene epithets followed by a fight, which made retreat advisable; and at a third, the dances were so short and the intervals provided for the solicitations of the waiters were so long that both girls wearied of the scene.

On Tenth Avenue they at last found, however, a place more to their liking. It was the usual type of room, enlarged by tearing out the thin partitions that had once divided it into several tenements. The lights shone sick through the clouding smoke, and the air was heavy with the odors of dust, tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. But the music was lively, the floor crowded, and the little tables along the walls were surrounded by laughing groups of drinking men and women. Of the former, though most were hollow-chested, pale-cheeked, hawk-nosed, some showed clearly that they came to plunder; and if the majority of the latter were gum-chewing working-girls still in their earliest teens, many were of the variety to which the two newcomers now belonged.

Mary and her companion sat down at a table near the door. They nodded to the burly, cigar-smoking "Boss," who moved energetically about, urging bloodless lads to find partners, and now and then himself taking a turn with a neglected girl. They exchanged familiar greetings, though they had never before seen her, with the false-jeweled woman whose business it was to assist the boss in stimulating the dancers by precept and example. And they watched the scene with a gaze grave and calculating.

Here a child of thirteen, with closed eyes and her peach-tinted cheek against her pimpled partner's, undulated to the music, scarcely moving her feet. Nearby there whirled, like a dervish, a girl to whose consumptive face the revolutions brought a glow that mimicked health. Now and then a woman would leap from one of the tables, embrace an unembarrassed man about the neck and so waltz off with him, at once passionate and mocking, both of them deaf to the plaudits of their spectators. From time to time the lights were suddenly extinguished, and the dance went on in the darkness amid a chorus of kisses, cries, and giggling. Most of the boys and men, and nearly all of the little girls, were drunk.

Among the dancers, doubtless plying his trade, Mary saw Rafael Angelelli, sleek and radiant in a new suit of pale buff. He detected her a little later and, disposing of a pure-faced child, who had been in his arms, made a skillful way to his old acquaintance. He shook Mary's reluctant hand and, nodding to Carrie as if she were a familiar friend, sat down between the two women.

"Where you been?" he affably inquired of Mary.

"Out of town," said Mary, coldly.

Angel shrugged his shoulders. He knew she lied, but he rarely contradicted a lady.

"Meester Dyk' been lookin' all over theesa town for you, Violet," he said.

Mary did not like the news. She was still afraid that she might be wanted in connection with her contradictory affidavits.

Angel, however, readily reassured her. Just what Dyker wanted he did not, he said, know; but he was certain that it was something for her benefit. The magistrate had commissioned him to find her, and Angel had been searching, sporadically, for several weeks, even tracing her course back to the employment-agency and to that Mrs. Turner's where she had first worked.

"Theesa woman say you steal," said the Italian.

"She's a liar," answered Mary, hotly.

"She say she tol' you so."

"She tried to make out I took a cake of soap."

"But she say after you leave she meess two dollar an' some silka stockin'."

"That woman never wore no silk stockin's in her life, an' there wasn't two dollars in the house."

Again the Italian shrugged his shoulders. He gave Mary to understand that, in his opinion, any woman who could steal and did not was a fool, and that any woman who stole and acknowledged it was a worse fool. But what, plainly, most interested him was the execution of his commission from Dyker. He talked so earnestly about it that he failed entirely to lay Mary's fears. She refused to give him her address, and as soon as he had left the table she endeavored to quit the hall.

The entrance of an acquaintance detained her. There were words that had to be said and drinks that had to be bought. Half an hour passed, and then, as she started with Carrie for the door, Mary saw Wesley Dyker standing outside. He was wrapped in a heavy overcoat with its military collar turned up about his chin and his black derby pulled far over his eyes; but Mary feared him too much to fail of recognition.

"There he is!" she whispered, catching her companion's arm. "The Dago telephoned him. I was afraid of that."

Escape was hopeless. She sent Carrie back to the dancers, and, going out, met Dyker, her head erect.

"I heard you was lookin' for me," she said.

Wesley raised his hat.

"Yes," he said dryly; "walk a block or two with me."

They went for some time in silence, Mary too much upon the defensive to risk beginning a conversation, and Dyker trying in vain to command the anger that had been growing with every day since he had learned how she had betrayed him to Marian. At the first dark street into which he turned her, his resentment burst its guard.

"What in hell do you mean by telling everybody all you know about me?" he demanded.

Mary shrank away.

"No, you don't!" he said, and seized her hand. "Didn't I do you the best turn that was ever done you?"

"Yes," the woman quavered. "An' I wouldn't pay you back the way you say I done. I never talked about you to nobody."

"Don't lie. You know you did."

Mary remembered, but she shook her head determinedly.

"I've never once spoke your name," she said.

"I tell you to stop lying!" rejoined Dyker. "You told it once at the Settlement on Rivington Street. I know it. I learned it there myself."

"What did I tell?" asked Mary. Her tone was defiant, but her endeavor was to draw his fire.

They walked forward.

"You said I hung out at Rose's," he protested. "You said I was her lover and yours."

"I never said I had nothing to do with you, Mr. Dyker. I don't care who told you I did; I never said no such thing."

"You said I went to Rose's. I know you did."

She confessed to that, for she was truly sorry for it.

"But I didn't mean to, Mr. Dyker," she added; "honest, I didn't. It just slipped out. I didn't know Miss Marian knowed you. Why, she told me she didn't know you, an' how'd I ever think she'd lie?"

That was a question which, ignorant of Miss Lennox's precise method of evasion, Wesley did not, even to himself, attempt to answer.

"It didn't matter whether she knew me or not," he said; "you had no right to tell it."

"I know that. It just slipped out. But it won't never happen again. I wasn't so wise as I am now."

"I hope not," he said, a trifle mollified by the sincerity in her tone. "But you've done me a big amount of harm there, Violet, and you have got to undo it."

Her first sensation had been one of relief in finding that her false affidavit was not held against her; her next had been fright at his anger; but now she was all penitence for the ill she had wrought him. Dyker was the one man in New York that had done her a kindness, and she held that kindness as the greatest possible.

"What do you want?" she asked. "I'd do most anything for you, Mr. Dyker: you know that."

They were under the uncertain light of a crossing. He eyed her narrowly, mistrustingly.

"I want you," he replied, "to come to my office to-morrow evening at six. Here's my card. Will you do it?"

She took the card and thrust it through the opening of her shirtwaist.

"What do you want with me when you get me there?" she wondered.

"I want you to come with me to Miss Lennox, and deny the story that you told her about me."

Mary's heart sank. She could not bear the thought of facing Marian.

"What's the use o' that?" she pleaded.

"What's the use? Why, how else are you going to put me right with her?"

"But I couldn't."

"You must."

"I couldn't, Mr. Dyker. Honest, I couldn't. She'd know I was lyin' to her."

"You leave that to me."

"What excuse'd I give her?"

"We'll fix that up to-morrow."

"Please don't make me do it, Mr. Dyker!"

"I've got to. What else can I do?--It's all your own fault. What's your address?"

She gave it to him tremulously.

"All right," he said. "I'll have a cab there for you to-morrow at five-thirty."

Her body shook with frightened sobs.

"Oh, Mr. Dyker," she repeated, "please don't make me do this! I'd do anythin', 'most, under the sun for you; but I can't face Miss Marian--honest to God, I can't."

What he should have done was to play upon her gratitude, but what he did do was again to allow his mistrust and anger to have their rein.

"I won't have any nonsense about this, Violet," he said. "If you don't come to my office to-morrow at six, I'll have you arrested--and I'll see to it that you won't escape with a mere fine, either."

"It won't----" She could not grasp it. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean I'll have you arrested on a big charge."

Her lips stiffened with that common terror of the law, about the only terror that the law ever succeeds nowadays in creating: the unreasoning terror that seldom serves as a deterrent.

"I ain't done nothin' but this," she said, in the full knowledge that what she had or had not done would be no factor in the problem.

"You'll find out about that when the time comes," he answered. "What I want to know is whether you'll do me this favor or not."

He had stopped and confronted her. Even in the semi-darkness her anxious eyes managed to read his pale, determined face, but even in the daylight they could have found there no relenting.

She gave him a despairing smile.

"I guess I've got to," she said.

"Yes, you'll have to."

"All right."

"You'll do it?"

"I'll do it, all right."

"No bluff?"

"No."

"Remember: if you don't, I'll fix you."

Mary turned away.

"I'll not forget," she said.

"If you don't," he called after her, "you won't be sorry."

"I won't forget," she repeated.

And yet, even as she walked away from him, the sickness of indecision was upon her. Like all narrow experiences, her narrow experience made her afraid of everything beyond its own limits. Her habit of life was the habit of the weakened bird of prey that attacks only the defenseless and flies before the strong. She had become a moral coward, and the progress of her physical disease directly accentuated the insidious encroachments of her moral illness. She could not openly face Marian; she did not dare openly to defy Dyker. She wanted only to run away.

By four o'clock the next afternoon she had run away. The night had been a wearisome journey backward and forward between the decision to obey the magistrate and the decision to evade him. She thought that she owed him much, but she knew that she could not successfully face Marian and lie. She was tremblingly afraid of Wesley's vengeance, but she was more afraid of Marian's honest eyes. All day she lay upon her bed, dizzy from this circling process of thought, but at last, in an attack of dread of the lie more severe than any that had preceded it, she flung her clothes into a little trunk, which she had recently purchased, and, calling a cab, drove to a new lodging-house.

She did not go out that evening, but the next she had to go, and she had not been on Broadway for two hours before a plain-clothes man touched her arm.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said, "but you've got to come along with me."

Instinctively she recoiled, but the detective's fingers had slipped to her wrist and tightened on it. The sword had fallen.

"Where to?" she asked.

She knew the man. She had given him money, and more than money, yet she expected no mercy, expected nothing but an explanation.

"Jefferson Market," said her captor. "But if you've got anybody handy who'll go your bail, I'll take you to see him first, before we go down to Ninth Street."

Mary shook her head. Helpless horror had her for its own.

"No use," she answered.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Certain sure," she said, and then, a little wistfully: "I guess there ain't no good in tryin' to talk business to you?"

The detective was a big, black-mustached man. His face was not unkindly, but he was helpless.

"No," he said; "this here's orders from the front. If you haven't got some fellow to be ready with bail, I guess we'd better hurry up."

They crossed to Sixth Avenue and walked down that noisy thoroughfare to the towering brick fortress that stands like a castle to guard the gateway of old Greenwich Village.

By day that somber building seems to hide behind the grim planks of the elevated railroad; it is ugly, neglected, innocent; under its protecting wings are the stalls of white-aproned butchers and the open establishments of green-grocers and hucksters plying their several occupations. But no sooner does the darkness drop its curtain over the webbed streets, the dirty courts, and the foul alleys that surround the place, than Jefferson Market ceases to be a building for the dispensation of food and becomes a court for the dispensation of the commodity that we carelessly label Justice. The hands of the large clock in the high tower are hurried toward the hour of twelve; long rays of sinister light are shot from windows narrow and barred; and under a vaulted entrance-way there pours, from year's end to year's end, an unending army of those women of the street who have lost, for one reason or another, their ability any longer to purchase the protection of the Law.

It is not often that what the statutes designate as crime comes to the Night Court: Crime may wait for the morning. It is the drunkard, the vagrant, the licenseless pedlar, and, above all, unfriended Maria Peripatetica, the human being that humanity has spoiled in the making, who is taken there. Above all, the Marias Peripateticæ that have, once fostered by the Law, quarreled with it, failed to bribe it, or openly rebelled against it. Black and white, short-skirted and gray-haired, besilked and bedraggled, from nine in the evening until early morning, five thousand in a twelvemonth, they are brought to the Jefferson Market Court for judgment from the power that has made them what they are.

And judgment is what they receive. The law is a mill that was made to grind out one thing, and can grind no other; the courts were constituted to make criminals and to punish them, not to prevent or to cure; our present justice is not mercy; it is formulæ, not sentiment. There is one woman that has some small authority in this tribunal, one woman that sees an occasional girl with some promise in her face and takes her away to Waverley House for observation and to be given, if all goes well, a chance at other employment; but Waverley House is small, it is poor, and there is small chance for her that has been twice stricken. One woman cannot do much against the grinding mill, and the grinding mill, between January and December, sends only seventeen girls to a semi-sane reformatory as compared to three thousand that it sends to the university of crime which is known as "The Island."

Mary was hurried up a short flight of stone steps and into a small hallway. A metal gate was opened for her and snapped shut as she passed it. A stocky man took her name and address and got, from her conductor, in a voice that she could not hear, the charge on which she had been arrested, and then, after one turn to the left and another to the right, she was shoved through a door and into a brightly-lighted, heavily-barred detention-pen.