Part 27

But Mary never doubted her justice, and never regretted it. One only thought troubled her: she was afraid that, by telling Max, she might have given him a warning sufficiently early to defeat her own ultimate purpose. It was a large part of her plan that he should know whose hand had struck him, and, for a man in his business, the only way in which she could make that knowledge certain was the way that she had followed. Yet what if he were in time to profit by her information? What if, even were he too late, he should guard and doctor himself with proper caution? She turned the questions over and over in her mind, but she had always to end in the faith that the worst had happened.

Sometimes, in the moments of exhaustion from the mad round of these inquiries, she reverted for relief to matters that touched her less nearly, and endeavored to occupy herself with the affairs of others. She thought of Dyker, and without resentment. She knew that he would use her written retraction to regain Marian's confidence, and she hoped that he would be successful. Again she fell to speculating upon the fate of Carrie Berkowicz and to wondering what had become of Katie. But upon her own past and present she did not permit herself to dwell, and always, with the certainty of a machine, her brain recurred to Max and her vengeance on him.

On the third evening, however, her landlady, entering with supper, reminded her, without mincing matters, that the rent was due, and Mary recalled that her little stock of money was exhausted.

"Can you wait till to-morrow morning, Mrs. Foote?" she asked.

Mrs. Foote was an ample woman, with round cheeks and robust frame, whose only dissipations were an over-indulgence in ritualism, babies, and the hospital. She had a high-church cleric to whom she confessed the sins of her neighbors; a wraithlike husband whose sole occupation appeared to be that indispensable to the regular increase of her family--and whom she would otherwise have failed altogether to tolerate--and such a passion for being ill that she could never quite believe in the illnesses of others.

"I can wait just that long, Miss Morton," she said; "but I'm sufferin' so from rheumatism in my fingers that I just know my old gastric trouble is comin' on ag'in, an' that'll mean another of them hospital-bills."

Mary raised her aching head.

"You won't have to wait any longer," she answered.

"I'm glad of it, Miss Morton," responded Mrs. Foote, "for there was a young lady lookin' at this room to-day an' she offered me a dollar more a week for it, an' I wouldn't like to lose you."

"You won't lose me," said Mary, to whom even sustained conversation was physical pain. "I'm goin' out to-night, an' I'll have plenty for you by the mornin'."

"You're sure?" asked the landlady.

"Of course I am. It'd be a pity if I couldn't earn that much."

Mrs. Foote looked at Mary's face and seemed to doubt the foundation for her assurance.

"Well," she sighed, "I certainly hope you can."

For some minutes after the door closed, Mary lay still. She had again been brought face to face with the most poignant of tragedies, the tragedy of living.

An hour earlier, had she questioned herself, she would have said that she was careless of life, that neither this earth nor the quitting of it interested her, that continued existence was a matter of indifference. Then she was in that state of exultation above things mundane which is produced only by great sorrow, great joy, or the great revenges that are both grief and triumph. But now the words of the landlady had brought her back from the indulgence of contemplation to the necessity of action. Mary's insidious, implacable disease had completed what her business had begun, and what her business alone would have completed far more slowly. The few emotions that she was now capable of feeling were the more intense because of their rarity, but their intensity was equaled by their brevity and, when the moment had gone, it left her even more of a moral weakling than it had found her.

She knew Mrs. Foote and her tribe too well to deceive herself as to what must happen should the morning dawn upon an empty stocking. Life held nothing for which Mary greatly cared, but the instant of death contained all of which she was afraid. She did not greatly want to harm others by plying her trade in her present condition, but she could not think of others. Each step would be a separate wound to her tortured body and her throbbing head, but she understood that the landlady had to wring out the rents by the means that conditions had forced upon her; and so the worst of fears, the fear of poverty, which is the fear of death, took this sick woman from her bed, dressed her in her best frock, and sent her out into the street.

Along Sixth Avenue, where fortune had often, theretofore, been kind to her, she met no significant glances. A passing girl or two, having missed her for the last few evenings, proffered a casual sympathy; but that was all. Through the open doors of the Haymarket, she turned in, but there even the women at first disregarded her. Several men that she recognized in the boxes of the gallery around the little hall nodded, but immediately looked away. The one man that she happened to know better than any of the others did not appear at all to remember her, and his neighbor, who had frequently accompanied her, signaled elsewhere.

She was lonely. She approached two women who were circling the floor, arm in arm. She addressed them with the familiarity of the craft.

"Hello," she said.

The one woman smiled, but her companion, a formidable, tailor-made personage, swelled with dignity.

"You better beat it," she declared.

Mary flushed.

"What's eatin' you?" she demanded.

"You don't belong here," the woman answered. She made a lofty survey of Mary's finery, and then added: "Goin'?"

Mary's heart sickened, but she stood her ground.

"No," she said, "I ain't."

The floor-manager was passing. The social arbiter turned to him.

"Will," she asked, and her shrill voice seemed to carry over all the room; "what's this place comin' to? Throw that Fourteenth Street woman out o' here!"

This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard. She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in a great ulster.

"Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?"

The man looked at her and swore.

"You must think I'm blind," he ended.

She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money. She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced; and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal. It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next dark figure that she stopped--she did not look at his face or care what sort of face it was--answered her with sharp laughter.

"A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old girl!"

"A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously.

"I got just a half--an' you ain't worth a cent more."

She took it--what would she not have taken?--and she worked on into the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond the sum due for rent.

During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end, there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but the craven passion for life.

Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest.

Mary twisted her helpless hands.

"How can I afford to take it?" she asked.

"Save your money," said he, patting her thin shoulders, and chuckling prosperously. "You girls never put aside a cent."

"We don't earn enough."

"Poof! That's what you all say. I know--I know. We men aren't such fools as you take us for."

But Mary, as each evening she made up before her little mirror, noted the gradual depreciation of her wares; each week she found it harder to pay rent and retain enough money for food. Mrs. Foote seemed to come every day, instead of every seventh, and yet each night business grew more difficult. Whenever Mary missed a few evenings, or whenever she changed her hunting-grounds, the police needed fresh payments. She surrendered one uptown cross-street after another. At last she deserted Broadway and patrolled only that Fourteenth Street which the woman at the Haymarket had so scornfully referred to and which had so wonderfully burst upon Mary's sight when she first stepped from the Hudson Tunnel upon the surface of Manhattan.

Spring, summer, and autumn passed, and a lean winter followed them. Mary caught another cold and was ill for a week. She went to work too soon and had to go back to bed for several days and remain idle for several nights. At last, with the ancient fear of the white race--the fear of that poverty which is death--gnawing at her vitals, she struggled to her feet and tramped once more along Fourteenth Street from Sixth Avenue to Third.

But now the sword descended. Even the Fourteenth Street saloon best known for her purposes gave no fish to her net, and Eighth Street was little better. She was too tired to go farther; she had, the next morning, to offer Mrs. Foote only a third of what was due.

The landlady, whose bulk seemed to crowd the hall-bedroom, leaned heavily against its frail door. Mary thought the woman's slow, brown eyes more than commonly suspicious and her round face implacably hard. The tenant, with all explanation frozen upon her lips, handed over the clinking bits of money. They fell into the big, extended palm as a few drops of water might fall into a basin. Mrs. Foote began slowly to count the coins.

Mary watched, in fascinated silence, the counting of those few pieces of silver, each one of which seemed stained with her blood. She saw the landlady's expression change to one of incredulity. She saw the counting repeated.

Mrs. Foote again thrust out her grimy fingers.

"What's this?" she demanded.

"It's----" Mary looked at the floor. "It's the rent," she concluded, in a whisper.

"_What's_ the rent?"

"That's all I have--just now. I thought--I thought, considerin' how long I've been here, you might wait a day for the rest, Mrs. Foote."

The landlady opened her hand, and Mary's little store of coin dropped to the bed.

"I can't take this," she said.

"You mean," asked Mary, with a quick gasp of hope, "that you'll let me keep it till I get the rest?"

"No, I don't mean nothin' of the sort," said Mrs. Foote. "I mean I've got to have the whole bill--right now."

Mary's heart sank.

"That's all I have," she said.

She had sunk to a seat on the tumbled bed, beside her scattered coins. Her thin hands were locked across her knees; the dirty pink kimona slipped lower from her shoulders at every frequent cough, and her eyes sought those of Mrs. Foote in dumb appeal. Her russet hair fell dully disordered about her hollow cheeks, and the rouge on her lips was purple.

"I'm sorry," pursued Mrs. Foote, who was too used to such incidents greatly to concern herself; "but I've got to make my living like anybody else does."

"I was expectin' some money this evenin'," said Mary.

"Hump!" sniffed the landlady.

"You don't believe that?"

"I don't care, Miss Morton; I can't care."

"But I"--Mary's fingers knotted tighter about her knees--"I was promised it," she lied, "an' I'm dead sure to get it then."

"I've heard that so many times," said Mrs. Foote, "that I knowed it by heart three year' ago."

"I could pawn somethin'," suggested Mary.

The landlady swept the bare room with a critical glance.

"What?" she asked.

There was no adequate answer to be made. Mary had tried to pledge her coat a few days before, and had been offered only an inadequate twenty-five cents for it.

"Then you won't--you can't wait?"

"No, I can't. I'm a sick woman myself; my rent's due, Miss Mary, an' the honest truth is that there's such a lot of women wantin' rooms that I'd only be doin' a injustice to my children not to take in a lady that could pay prompt--for a while."

Mary said nothing more. She packed her few belongings into her trunk, left it in the hall to be called for, and, as the chill evening fell, went away from the house with no idea where she was to find a lodging for the night. For an hour, though she was still weak, and the time was as yet so early, she walked up Broadway and, in the Forties, turned eastward for a few blocks, and so south again. Not far from the Grand Central Station she saw a little crowd gathered at a corner, and she stopped, rather for the luxury of standing still than from any curiosity.

The place was a church. Colored lights streamed from its rich stained-glass windows. Through its swinging doors there stole the scent of flowers and the sound of delicate music. A long row of carriages, the coachmen walking up and down to keep warm, stretched far around the corner.

Mary, shivering, worked her way quietly through the group of men and women on the sidewalk. In order to avoid a particularly entangled portion of the press, she started to walk along the steps by the tower-entrance, and then, seeing a side-door open, she listlessly turned toward it and looked in.

Far away up the vaulted nave the altar stood, white with damask and yellow with candles. The chancel was a garden, the whole building heavy with scent. Acolytes in scarlet were grouped about the robed priests. The choir had risen and, preceded by a lad that bore aloft a great brass cross, were forming into a singing procession, which slowly filed down the center aisle.

With a subdued scuffle and swish, the congregation also rose as the double line of choristers moved between them. Women craned their necks and men, pretending to look stolidly ahead of them, looked really out of the corners of their eyes. The choir, at the main door, divided and stood still. High overhead a deep-toned organ was playing the wedding-march from Lohengrin, and through the respectful line of white-clad boys there moved a man of regular features with lowered lids that hid his eyes, and a crisp brown mustache, which concealed his lips, and, on his arm, in the costume of a bride, a tall, graceful, pure woman, whose face was like a Greek cameo and in whose hand was a huge bunch of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley.

The fingers of a policeman touched Mary's arm.

"You'll have to get back," he said. "The people'll be comin' out in a minute."

But Mary did not wish to move.

"I've got a right here," she answered.

"You?" The policeman looked at her, and then laughed. "What right?" he asked.

"Isn't that Miss Lennox?"

"It was."

"And Judge Dyker?"

"Sure."

"Well, I gave him his marriage-license."

The policeman's good-nature was amused, but he forced her back to the street.

"No use," he said.

"An' I guess," said Mary bitterly--"I guess I paid for the bride's bouquet."

He did not reply, nor would she have heard him had he spoken, for in the stream of lesser guests now flowing from the rear of the church, which had been assigned to them, she was met by Katie Flanagan.

Not the piquant Katie of that photograph which used to adorn the bureau in the shabby tenement of bachelor Hermann Hoffmann, or the saucy girl of the second-hand clothing-store, or yet the frightened clerk that had at first evaded and at last defied the whiskered Mr. Porter. Those days were patently passed; Katie, like many another strong soul, had faced temptation and conquered it; and in the stead of the old days had come new days that brought a maturity and a dignity with which Katie was consciously satisfied. Her blue eyes were as glad as Mary remembered them, but their happiness was calm; her black hair was gathered in a formal knot, and her gown, though a better gown than that she used to wear, was of a simplicity almost severe.

Nevertheless, when she saw Mary, who sought evasion, Katie came frankly forward with outstretched hand. She recognized with regret, the change in her former acquaintance, but, knowing, as she must have known, its cause, she decided to ask no questions concerning it, and, if she offered no assistance, she at least proffered no advice.

"I just come to see the last o' Miss Marian," she explained. "Near the half of old Rivington Street's been tucked in here among th' swells to give the good word to her--Jews an' Irish--an' if the rabbis won't mind for the sheenies to come to such a heathen church, I thought Father Kelly might manage to forgive me."

Mary's brain was just then too dull to make any but a commonplace answer.

"You're lookin' well," she said.

"I ought to be, though there's a youngster expected. I tell Hermann--we was married a few weeks after last election--I don't know how we'll keep a family; but he just whistles an' says we'll make out some way, an' I guess we will."

"I'm glad," said Mary, "that you're married."

"Well, so am I--most of the time. Of course, the man has some queer ideas, but I'm doin' me best, with Father Kelly's help, to get 'em out of the head of him, an' nowadays, when he goes to one of them Socialist meetin's by night, I make him make up by goin' with me to early mass next mornin'."

She paused and surveyed again the pale woman before her. Essentially Katie had not changed. She had still, and would always have, the big, kind heart and the ready hand of her earlier days. But her condition had altered, and Mary's had evidently again fallen; she looked through an alien atmosphere, and her gaze was distant: the responsibilities and adjustment of young married life shackled her, and must continue to shackle her until they were no longer new. She did not know how to suggest any assistance, did not even believe that it was desired; but, though she still felt that she must refrain from intimate inquiry, one effort she tried to make.

"An' you," she asked--"how're you gettin' on, Mary?"

Mary bit her lip.

"Fine," she answered, huskily.

"Are you----? There ain't----?" Katie floundered in a maze that she would, a few months previously or a few months in the future, have cut her way through with a strong directness. "There ain't nothin' I could----?"

Mary's head shook, almost mechanically. It was not entirely that she felt unable to accept assistance from her former protector; it was rather that she felt only that she must run away.

"Oh, no," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm doin' grand."

The gala crowd was sweeping about them. It jostled both girls and threatened momentarily to separate them. After all, there was nothing more to be said.

"I--I got to go," murmured Mary. "I got an appointment----"

"But you'll come to see us sometime, won't you Mary?" asked Katie, and she gave her address. "We'll have a fine party at the christening an' I'll want you to see the baby."

"Oh, yes," said Mary; "yes, of course."

But Katie was hesitant.

"You're sure I can't do nothin'?" she asked.

"No, no. I----" Mary caught and pressed with what warmth there was left in her fingers, the Irish girl's hand. "Good-by," she concluded, and then, in order to keep up the farce of an appointment, she got upon a passing car.

Even if panic had not possessed her, she could not have accepted anything that Katie might offer. The most that could have been given her would have been but temporary, and what she must have was a means of earning a living.

She rode well downtown, and then walked farther southward. She slipped along the broad, yellow-lighted Bowery, gathering one or two quarters on her way, and wandered into the narrow, serpentine, fevered alleys of Chinatown. When an ugly rain began to fall, the open door of a mission attracted her, and she went in to rest.

It was the typical mission-room, very different from the uptown church where she had seen the wedding. This new place was mean; it had a low ceiling and was none too clean. The lights were flaring and the dull walls were enlivened by boldly lettered Bible texts. The air was close; on the platform, at the front of the place, a well-fed man was pleading, in sweat and tears, the cause of his religion; nearby, his double was making ready the reed-organ. Crowded into the unsteady benches were pimpled boys with lolling mouths and preternaturally knowing eyes; youths already old in disease and drink and crime; full-grown men, frog-eyed or blear-eyed, who needed only the faculty of firmness and the chance to cultivate it; old men, who had lost their hold upon work in a country still too barbarous to pension its aged; and, though there were no young girls, here and there Mary saw a few women, bedraggled, sodden, hideous, because men had at some time thought them _chic_, dainty, beautiful.

One of the "workers" attached to the place--a bland, prosperous man, with a pleasant smile--approached Mary and shook her hand as if he were an old acquaintance. He had fat red cheeks, firm teeth, and kindly eyes.

"I'm glad to see you, sister," he said. "Are you saved?"