Part 28

Mary's childhood had heard some of the phraseology of evangelicalism. She understood, but she had come to receive worldly, not spiritual, warmth.

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

The "worker," however, was accustomed to that reply. He patted her shoulder.

"Don't you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked.

"Well," said Mary, "I never thought much about Him."

She looked at the floor. She was cold and hungry and afraid.

"Then," responded the man, with genuine earnestness, "you ought to begin to think. No man knoweth the hour of His comin'. He is ready with the Free Gift. Don't you want to come to Him?"

Mary's life had been one in which there had been small time for the cultivation of religious emotion, and no time at all for the cultivation of religious thought. At her home she had learned as much by rote as she had had to learn, but what she got she held only as so many tasks performed. The words were lessons to be mastered; if they had any relation to facts, those facts were things not to be faced until an age of discretion, and, pending the arrival of that age, the lessons had been stored away with a bland, childish practicality. What followed later had driven out all that preceded it. The shock of her capture; the wild, new order of existence; the endeavor to escape; the battle of service among new conditions; and, at last, the dulling of all the finer sensibilities and the final fight for a mere chance to continue alive--these were circumstances neither propitious to theology nor favorable to faith.

She glanced at the mission-worker, and then glanced away.

"I dunno," she said. "I guess I ain't the kind of woman religion can do much for."

"Don't say that," protested the man. His eyes shone with zeal and his voice was tender. "His grace is free for all who come. His mercy is from everlastin' to everlastin'. I've been a sinner myself"--the speaker's voice swelled with a real pride--"a terrible sinner, an' I know what I say, praise the Lord. The meaner an' viler we are, the more Jesus needs us. Just open your heart. Just accept Him, an' you'll never know no more trouble in this world nor the next."

"Would I get a job?" asked Mary.

The man shook his head, sadly.

"That ain't no way to think about salvation," he declared. "What's freely given ought to be freely received. Now is the appointed time."

"But I gotta make a livin'."

"I know it, I know it. We've all got to do that, but ain't it better to make one an' be saved than to make one an' be sent to hell-fire?"

She assented. "Only," she added, "I don't want to starve, even if I am saved."

It was his old difficulty.

"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about religion."

She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over a saloon--a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up occasional blasts of heat from the basement.

The rapidity with which one may descend from bad to worse is to be believed only by those who have been penniless and friendless in the larger cities. During the nights that followed, when Mary's clothes grew speedily ragged, dirty, and odorous, and when she earned just enough money to postpone starvation, she became a familiar of Chinatown, learned something of its blind paths and the tangled passages of its fetid tenements. The almond-eyed Orientals tolerantly received her. She came to know the heavy odors of the opium, to chat with clay-white American girls, morphine-eaters, and cocaine and chloral victims, whose Chinese lovers were kind to them, and who never wanted to breathe the open air. She was borne with, but the market was over-supplied there, and she found no regular keeper. She came to envy the drug-enslaved women who had first sought the Mott Street district as missionaries, even the little Mongolian girls over whose slavery, so much lighter than her own, the city, from time to time, grew ludicrously excited. Her illness progressed, but, thanks to her hardy birth and the exercise of what care was at all possible, it progressed with a step so tardy as to give no indication of reaching its tragic end, other things being equal, for two years or more. She did not again go to see the doctor; she did not have to. The only things that he could have advised were the things that she was in no position to do. Beyond a certain limited amount of routine care, she was helpless.

One night, wet and exhausted, she met a sailor in Chatham Square, and drank long with him.

"Where you goin' to sleep to-night?" he asked, as they were about to part.

He was a short, black-browed man, who walked with a bow-legged roll. The short sleeves of his jacket displayed sinewy, bronze wrists with anchors tattooed upon them. His neck rose out of his low-cut mariner's shirt like the neck of a brown, fighting bull, and his black eyes, set deep under bushy, frowning brows, were red, like those of a bull that is dangerous. He had been taken with a drunken passion for her, and though, when he kissed her, his upper lip scraped her face like a file, though his incessant grip of her hands hurt her, and though his heavy foot, seeking hers beneath the saloon-table, nearly crushed her own, she had to answer him with the professional smile.

"I dunno where I'll sleep," she said. "I guess Lee Hung's Letty'll put me up."

The sailor chucked her pointed chin so roughly that she thought her neck would crack.

"Why don't you come along o' me?" he inquired.

"Where's that?"

"To one o' our places. I know a beauty, an' I'll take good care o' you, an' afterward you can stay on."

"One of your places? What's those?"

"Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a daisy--Big Lou's keepin' it--an' they needs a new gal there, for I stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday."

Mary shuddered.

"Is it all right?" she asked.

"All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"--his black eyes leaped into a sudden threat--"I'm takin' you to-night. No philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal."

She looked away.

"Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an' the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a steady job there."

She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver. After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure of food to eat and a roof to cover her--and so she came to Summerton's.

XXIX

THE DOORS OF THE SHADOW

It is a winding and tortuous way across Greenwich Village to Summerton's. The mazed course runs through streets that squirm like worms between a fisherman's fingers; it skirts cobbled courts that are in twilight at midday and damp in the longest drought; it turns and doubles up passages that seem blind, dodges through the very bones of tumble-down warehouses, storehouses, houses so ramshackle that the imagination can conjure no possible use for them, and it comes out at last into a foul thoroughfare that appears to be no better than a stinking alley, so close to the water's edge that the masts of the river's cluttered craft look as if they grew upon the dirty, sagging roofs opposite, and so near to the wharves that the green walls of the buildings are wet and odorous as if from a continuous application of bilge-water.

By day, when its residents are asleep, this street is loud with straining Norman horses, and clattering vans, and whip-cracking carters from the docks; but by night--and the nights are very dark down there--it becomes the haunt of sailors and longshoremen, drunk and shouting, or still and drugged. Then the blue electric lamps snap hysterically at distant corners; the uneven pavement mounts steeply upward, or dashes precipitately downward, with no warning; laughter and curses and the crash of breaking glass or spluttering oaths issue now and again from the blackness at one's elbow, where, hidden among the warehouses, stand the houses for the storing of another sort of wares: the slave-houses maintained for mariners. Grotesque men, could you see them, stagger into dim entrances; terrible caricatures of women, if the light would show them, steal out and dart upon gutter-couched drunkards to paw their pockets. The night is alive with shadows, and the whole street a hungry, quivering quicksand.

Only by urging her eyes to their utmost could Mary make out anything of the house before which she and her unsteady companion came to pause. Even then all of which she could be sure was that, cowering under the shadow of some huge brick building, and skulking beneath its own rotting eaves, it was a half-sunken, old, narrow house, long since abandoned as unfit for legitimate purposes, and leaning rakishly to one side, like an ancient libertine that knows his evil and grins at it.

The sailor knocked lightly at an almost unseen door. A panel of it slid open and threw a ray of light on his face.

"Who's there?" asked a voice that was like the rasping of a file.

"It's Billy," said the sailor.

"Billy who?"

"Billy Stevens. Le'me in, Lou."

A pair of swollen eyes came to the open panel and looked, down the shaft of light, into the sinister face of Bill.

"Who's that with you?" croaked the voice.

"A gal I got for you."

"Is she all right?"

"O' course she is, Lou; else what in hell'd she be doin' with me? Come on; le'me in."

The swollen eyes disappeared, and the panel was shut. There was a sound of the withdrawal of several bolts. Then the door swung open, was closed and relocked behind the newcomers, and Mary found herself in an unfurnished hall, not more than fifteen feet square, lighted by a dim lamp standing on the lowest step of a steep flight of stairs, and guarded by the owner of the swollen eyes.

At least in height, "Big Lou" was gigantic. She was fully six feet tall; she stooped a little and was extremely thin, with a hollow chest and narrow flanks, partially hidden by an old red cotton dressing-gown; but the long arms were like flails, and Lou had a temper that did not hesitate to use them as such. Her dirty brown hair was already touched with gray; she had almost no chin; her nose was a smudge in her sodden face and her cheeks were heavy with years of drunkenness. Her mouth hung loose and quarrelsome, and, as she bent over to look hard at Mary, her breath was foul.

She addressed herself, however, entirely to the black-browed Stevens.

"Where'd you git her?" she asked, as if Mary were one of the animals not gifted with articulate speech.

Stevens told of their meeting.

"Where's she from?"

The sailor gave a rapid and wholly fictitious biography.

"How old?"

"Twenty," said Bill.

"I ain't!" protested Mary.

But the sailor shot her an ugly look.

"Close your trap," he told her, and then, to Big Lou, he repeated: "Twenty."

Big Lou picked up the lamp and, holding it in one blackened claw, passed the other over Mary, with dexterous appraisement, from shoulders to knees.

"I'll give you a five-spot for her," she croaked.

"You'll go to the devil," retorted Bill.

"Six?"

"Ten."

"You're a damned thief, Stevens, that's what you are," growled the old woman. "I'll give you seven, an' not another God damned cent."

Mary leaned against the moist wall. She was now past caring, and she hardly heard.

"Make it seven-seventy-five," said Bill, with sudden ingratiation.

Big Lou raised the lamp again and again regarded the animal, her swollen eyes sharpening.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," she said, once more facing the sailor. "Are you goin' to stop here to-night?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll come up in the mornin' and take a closer look. If she passes that, I'll give you seven-fifty."

Bill's brown face worked in thought, but the thirst for liquor was upon him, and he compromised.

"All right," he said--"if you'll give me five down on account."

The giantess flung aside her red dressing-gown and, from a black cotton stocking that hung loose upon a shriveled shank, drew a few greasy bills. From these she reluctantly counted five, handed them to Stevens, and returned the rest to their original place of safety.

"G'on up," she said. "I stay here till work's done, an' take tolls."

From somewhere in the shadows she produced a black flask and, as Mary, with the sailor's tattooed hand tightly under her arm, began the steep ascent, Big Lou settled herself at her post of gatekeeper upon the lowest step.

Those stairs seemed almost perpendicular. They rose out of the darkness of the hallway at an alarming angle; each step was close upon a foot high; they were not a yard wide, their upper half was boxed between two walls, and they opened directly into the room that evidently served as the parlor of Big Lou Summerton's establishment.

The room was small and badly lighted by a kerosene hand-lamp, which stood upon a circular center-table and sent up a thin column of smoke to the sooty ceiling. A spotted lounge with dilapidated springs stood in one corner; the faded paper was peeling from the plaster, and a broken stove, which glowed an angry red, heated the place to a degree that was well-nigh unbearable. The air was stale and rancid, both from the company that was present and from a long entertainment of similar companies, in days gone by.

There were only two persons in the room. Both were seated at the table, both were drinking whiskey poured into ragged-edged glasses from a bottle that stood between them, and both were, or had been, women. Of these one coughed so sharply and constantly between her toothless gums, and was so shrunken under her blue calico mother-hubbard, that it was plain she would soon be nothing; while the other was a creature with face red and bloated, features stunted and coarse, eyes that glowed dully, and the voice of a crow.

Stevens presented Mary to them, and wasted no formalities.

"This here's a new one," he said, and, motioning his charge to a third chair, himself pulled up a fourth.

The two inmates received her with a loud duet that was almost a choral jeer. Two more glasses were produced from a shadowy cupboard, and the drinking recommenced.

Mary took one long drink and, wasted by privation, passed at once for some time into a daze in which, though she saw all, she reckoned little. She heard Stevens drop into the babbling stage of drunkenness; she noted that, though the women kept pace with his potations, they poured water into their own whiskey and gin into the sailor's; she saw him loll in his chair and sway over the table; she felt his heavy head drop at last on her thin shoulder, and she did not move while, as he lay there, his companions--now hers--went through his clothes and tiptoed out of a rear door.

It was then that, with a quick start, she regained control of herself at the sound of speech below and the tread of feet on the stairs. A rough voice had assured Big Lou that "it was all right," and another voice was supplementing:

"Rest easy, my dear lady: we are paying as we go. Michael, here, is, as you know, a deck-hand on the admirable yacht of my admirable friend Marsden Payne, with whom I have been on a winter excursion; and he has kindly consented to show me his own section of little old New York."

Mary knew that voice, although she could not at once identify it; but, though she sprang up so quickly that she wakened the tumbling Stevens, who slipped to the floor, she could not escape before she found herself directly regarding the flushed face, glowing gray eyes, and disordered hair of Philip Beekman.

Still young and slim in his yachting clothes, he looked at her, swaying a little in the doorway, his back to those perilous stairs, and with no clear recognition.

"Hello!" he said. "I think I've had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before."

Mary's mouth tightened. She had herself now well in hand. She shook her russet head.

"I guess not," she said.

But her voice betrayed her.

"Good Lord!" said Beekman. The flush deepened on his face. With one hand he snatched his yachting-cap from his black hair; the other he suddenly held out to her, trembling. "Good Lord!" he repeated, this time with something that was nearly awe in his tone. "I--I--it's _Violet_! Will you----? Won't you _please_ shake hands?"

Scarcely less amazed by his manner than was he by her appearance, she took his hand.

Beekman turned to someone on the stairs behind him.

"Get out, Mike!" he said. "I've found a friend."

There was a plucking at his sleeve and the murmur of a concerned voice from the rear.

"No," said Philip; "get out. I tell you that I have found a friend. Go down to the tall lady and hand her your money and then make tracks for the yacht. You may tell Mr. Payne that I shall return in an hour."

Again a muffled protest from the dangerous stairway.

"Pardon me a moment," said Beekman, and turned full around. "Now, then," he continued to his guide, "you get out. I am perfectly well able to take care of myself, and I want a private talk. Do you expect me to kick you downstairs? No? I should probably break your back if I did.--Then, good-night."

He stood there while the deckhand's heavy feet clattered downward; waited until he had heard Big Lou grumblingly give Mike the means of exit, and then he turned again to Mary.

"What," he rapidly began, and his handsome face grew once more earnest, "what in the name of heaven are you doing in this den?--No," he continued, raising a quick hand; "don't tell me; I remember how I sent you out of my mother's house and, upon my word, I'm afraid to hear. I couldn't do anything else--but I don't know. Anyhow, there's one thing sure: you need money. Well, I made a little in the game to-night--not much for Payne, but a good slice for me--and it's yours--it's yours--the Lord knows it ought to go to you!"

She had tried to stop him until he spoke of money; but when he mentioned that, she let him run on, let him search his pockets, and at last let him thrust something into her open hand.

"Here," he said; "take it; take it as a favor to me; take it, and remember what I said to you in Rose's. Watch your chance; get out of here; and for God's sake go back to your own home."

Her fingers closed upon the bills and transferred them to her stocking; and as she did this a movement on the floor made them both turn.

Bill Stevens, whom Mary had forgotten and whom Beekman had not seen, gathered himself together, and at last stood more or less upright upon his unsteady bowed legs. His heavy body rocked uneasily, but his dark face, with its bushy brows and sinister eyes, was thrust forward glowering. One sinewy tattooed hand gripped the back of a chair; the other, knotted into a hard fist, he raised slowly toward Beekman.

"It's your turn to go," he said, with a lingering oath. "This here's my gal; she b'longs to me--an' so does any money she gits."

Instantly Philip was his old, assured self. That quality which was most characteristic of him, that curious mixture of much that was bitter and a little that was sweet, lighted his eyes and rang in his voice.

"Where do _you_ come from?" he asked, smiling. "You look as if you got out of a trap-door, like the fairy in the play."

"None o' your business where I come from," said Bill. "The point is where I'll send you, if you ain't careful."

Mary, who did not like the looks of things, tried to interpose. She put the palms of her hands against the sailor's rough cheeks.

"Listen, Bill," she said, "this is an old friend of mine----"

"Likely!" grunted Bill.

"He is, though; ain't you?" Mary appealed, with a sidelong glance at Beekman.

"Certainly I am," said Philip.

Stevens lowered his fist, but his red eyes remained full of hate.

"I don't care who you are," he rumbled; "this here's my woman."

"All right," said Beekman; "that's to your credit, I'm sure: a man is known by the woman he keeps, and you can't have a better. Only, you see, my friend----"

"I ain't yer friend."

Once more Mary interposed.

"Just sit down, Bill," she urged. "Sit down an' have a drink with us. You can hear all we got to say."

Stevens sank into a chair, but when Beekman, with Mary between them, pushed the bottle toward Bill, the sailor would have none of it.

"I'll stop a bit," he said, "but I ain't goin' to drink with you, an' you needn't think it."

Philip was still undisturbed.

"Have it your own way," he said. "I know how it is: when a man falls in love, he swears off liquor; when he falls out of love he takes to liquor again--one sort of drunkenness is as much as he can stand at a time. I'll take a drink."

Mary, who now began to fear acute trouble, slipped a hand to Stevens, but he drew away.

"I think I'll smoke--if I may," continued the undisturbed Beekman. "A pipe is domestic, a cigar is philosophic, and a cigarette is a cynic: I shall have a cigarette. William?"--And he offered his silver case to the sailor.

"No," said Stevens, shortly.

Beekman tossed his head. Mary saw his gray eyes snap.

"William," he said, "you have got to learn that the best girl is never so good as the next. And you have got to learn manners. If you won't behave yourself properly, I think you had better leave."

Stevens's fingers opened and closed slowly.

"You go to hell," he said.

Beekman rose quietly. His cigarette was in one hand, and with the other, instead of threatening, he pointed to the stairway.

"Run along," he said.