Part 5

"You're a dear girl, after all," said the mistress, as she administered the grateful food. "You do as I say and you won't never be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I'm your friend."

Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer.

"And now," Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink."

And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.

The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured.

It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary's cell and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key.

They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant frame--a younger Rose--the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary's would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak.

"'Ello!" she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like pomegranate seeds. "We have come to make the call."

Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself.

Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word.

But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke curling toward the ceiling.

"My name," she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, "eet ees Celeste, an' my good frien' here," she continued with an easy gesture of the cigarette, "she ees Fritzie--chust a bar-bar-ous German."

Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless.

"An' you' name?" pursued Celeste, "eet ees--what?"

Fritzie supplied the answer, speaking in a ponderous contralto.

"Her name is Mary," said she.

"_Bien_--a pretty name," Celeste rattled on, precisely as if her unwilling entertainer had made the response. "I like eet well; but"--and she studied with unobtrusive care the russet-framed, indignant face before her--"eet ees not so good as ees yourself. I t'ink--let me see--yaas: I t'ink I shall call you 'Violet.'--Violet, why you don't eat more een dees 'ouse?"

"I'm hardly ever hungry," said Mary.

"Not hongry?--Oh-h, but you mohst be hongry! Anyone so young mohst want to eat, and anyone so beautiful mohst eat so as not to loose the beauty.--Ees eet not so, Fritzie?"

The German girl smiled gently and nodded her blonde head.

"Ach, yes," she rumbled. "The liebchen!"

"No," insisted Mary. "I don't care about nothing. I have a headache all the time. I have one now."

Celeste jumped lightly to the floor: it was as if to uncoil her feet and to reach the door required but a single movement.

"_Un moment!_" she laughed. "I shall feex the _mal de tête_ immediate!"

There was no time for remonstrance; the door closed upon her concluding word, and Mary was left there gazing into the stolid, sphinxlike face of the placidly smiling German. It was not a bad face, and soon Mary realized that it was a contented one.

Fritzie was returning her look with an equal curiosity.

"Are you vorried?" she finally inquired.

"No," lied Mary proudly.

"I dought you looked like vorried," the German continued. "Bud you should be nod. Dis iss a goot place. Dere are loads vorse blaces in New York dan dis: I know 'em."

She paused, but Mary's lips remained closed, her eyes fixed.

"You bed I know 'um!" Fritzie repeated. "Bud dis blace--vhy, ve haf de best meals, so goot nobody gould besser haf! I like dis blace."

A faint question shot into Mary's face. At once Fritzie answered it.

"Dat's righd. Listen: I gome over here two year ago in de steerage. Some of de vomen, men meet dem--oh, most all de nod-family vons--un' took dem to dese here intelligence office dat are only fakes, un' sold dem, vidout dere knowin' nussin' of it, fur ten un' fifteen dollar' each. Bud I vas careful. I get a real tshob.--Ach, himmel!"

She waved a broad palm in disgust.

"Id vas bad enough in de steerage mit all de sailor-mens kissin' you to-day un' kickin' you to-morrow; bud dat tshob of mine, dat vas de real limit! I gome over here because I vouldn't vork in de fields back home, bud in dat boarding-house vhere I get dat tshob, I get up at dree o'clock every mornin', because some of de mens vork in Jefferson Market, un' I haf to scrub, un' make de beds, un' help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes, un' sweep de whole house oud. Un' den till late at nighd I haf to help cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes some more still. Vhenever I am sick, or late, or break von dish, or a boarder don' pay, I gets docked. Un' almost every veek I'm sick or late or break a dish or a boarder don' pay. My vages is d'ree dollar a veek, un' I never gets more as two-fifty--sometime, two--un' dat vill nod pay my clothes ad first, un' don' pay my doctor bills aftervard."

The story was told monotonously, without much show of emotion, but it was enough of itself to wring a word from the woman to whom it was addressed.

"You got sick?" asked Mary.

"Who vouldn't?" said Fritzie. "You bed I get sick, un' vhen I gome oud of de hospital, de young doctor--he'd been makin' grand lofe to me--he tell me I vas too nice a girl to vork my hands off fur nussin' a veek, un' he gif me his visitin' card vith a writin' on it to a voman he knowed, un' I quit un' vent dere."

She paused, but Mary was silent, and the German resumed:

"It vas a goot place, bud nod so goot as dis von. I stay a mont' till she move to Philadelphia. Den I vent to anozzer house, not so goot as dat first, fur two mont's till the voman die. Un' den, after some more, I gome here, pretty soon, to Miss Rose's. No"--she waved her thick hand toward the door through which Celeste had lately passed--"I'm nod like dat Frenchie. She's vhat Phil Beekman calls a 'gongenital,' vatever dat iss; I vork hard enough now, und I vanted to vork righd den; bud I tell you I could not stand it, dough I vas so strong. No, I'm glad I gome here."

She leaned back upon her elbow.

"Now, dis Celeste----" she began, but the French girl, just then entering, came with an air that was a sufficient explanation of her never complex temperament.

"_Voilà!_" she smiled, holding aloft a long glass filled by a dull green liquid. "Let the leetle girl tak some of thees wheech I meex for her."

Before she had well realized what she was doing, Mary had accepted the glass.

"What is it?" she asked weakly.

"Absinthe," replied Celeste.

"It smells like licorice," said Mary.

"Ah, but no; eet ees not that. You try thees, an' then you can eat."

"But I don't think I want to eat."

"Poof! That ees folly! See, now, I meex thees myself--I myself have _frappé_ eet. Ees eet what you call polite that you say 'no' to me? Say, now: ees eet?"

Involuntarily Mary smiled. It was a rueful little smile, but it was a smile of exhausted consent.

"It won't hurt me?"

"Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache, of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve."

For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her they turned no key upon their exit.

So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of visitors--clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters, thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone filthy of mind--the green government note was their certificate of qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken? She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that--and she must not care.

And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims' brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was no more than supine acquiescence.

Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board and _lingerie_ demanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.

With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope of Max's return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic destiny.

Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.

And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release. Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source from which she could conceive of their coming.

VI

AN ANGEL UNAWARES

The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of her own age.

"Listen," she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, "I want you to do me a favor."

"Anything you say, Violet," he chuckled.

"Don't talk so loud, then. I--I want you to take me out of here."

The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered bewilderment.

"Like me as much as that, do you?" he sparred.

"You don't understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was----"

He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek.

"It's not me that don't tumble to the facts," he said; "it's you. I told you I was a family man. I couldn't put you anywhere."

"I don't mean that. I mean----"

But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.

"You girls!" he laughed, in palpable deception. "You all think I've got a lot of money. Why, there ain't no use thinkin' you can bleed me. I'm a business man, an' I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn't rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street."

Violet's answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should be so grossly misinterpreted--these things sent a red rage rushing to her now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs.

"Get away from me!" she whispered hoarsely. "Get away! I wouldn't have you for a gift!"

The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm. He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already becoming accustomed.

"You come down here," he courageously shouted, "and I'll give you the worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I'll have it pinched--you see if I don't! You can't make an easy thing out o' me! You've robbed me, anyhow. You'll get what's comin' to you!"--And he ended with the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed.

Rose ran out from the parlor.

"Shut up, you!" she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that nevertheless compelled obedience. "What's the trouble, Violet?"

Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she was also afraid.

"You heard him," she gasped.

"Yes," snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former timbre, "and you heard me, too!"

The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave.

"Well," said Rose, "tell me what she done."

Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue.

"He says he's been robbed!" she called down the stairs. And then she ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered but could not conceal. "Search me!" she commanded. "If you think I took a cent of yours, search me!"

She was a vision that brought conviction with it.

Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had, perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man's hat from the hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently propelled him through it.

"You're drunk," she said, "an' you'd better get out before I call the cop. There ain't no badger business in this house, an' don't you forget it!"

She shut the door, and turned calmly to Violet.

"How much did you get?" she asked.

"Why, Miss Rose, you know----"

"I mean what did you touch him for? You mustn't play that sort of game here: it gives the house a bad name. But just this once we'll divide up an' not say anything more about it."

Violet's eyes opened wide.

"I didn't steal a penny," she declared.

Rose regarded her with a softening countenance.

"Word of honor?" she asked.

"Word of honor," vowed Violet.

"All right, but even if you do touch them, you mustn't ever let them _think_ you do. A man'll forgive you for hurtin' him anywhere but in his pocket-book.--You're all worked up, dearie. Come on out to the kitchen an' have a bottle of beer."

As they were pouring the drinks, a heavy foot sounded in the outside passageway and a careful four knocks followed upon the rear door.

"That's Larry," said Rose, and drew the bolt.

A policeman's hat was poked through the doorway, followed by a flushed, genial Irish face, and a tall, hulking body in regulation uniform.

"I'm terrible dry," grinned Larry.

"Then you've come to the right shop," was Rose's greeting. "We're just havin' a little drop ourselves. Larry, this is my new friend, Violet."

The policeman grinned again, and sat carefully upon the edge of a kitchen-chair, in evident fear that his bulk might prove too great for it.

"Glad to know you," he said.

"Larry's on this beat nights," Rose explained to Violet, "an' him an' the lieutenant look after us--don't you, Riley?"

"Well, what use is a frind if he don't take care of yez, Miss Rose? We do the bist we can."

"I know that.--What'll it be, Larry? We're takin' beer, but there's wine on the ice if you want it."

"I'll just have a small drap of liquor, ma'am, please," said Riley.

Rose poured and handed to him a glass of whiskey.

"When you came by," she inquired, "did you see a fat man throwin' fits in our gutter?"

"Why, I did not. Have ye been afther havin' a rumpus the night?"

"Oh, no--only that fat little fellow that keeps the jewelry-store around the corner. He was drunk, an' I threw him out. If he tries to get gay, let me know, will you?"

"Of course I'll let ye know--an' here's to your very good health, ma'am an' miss.--But you may rist aisy; that there won't be no throuble."

"I know that: he's too scared of his wife.--Have another, won't you?"

The officer rose.

"No, thank ye kindly," he said. "I wanted but the drap, ma'am."

"And how are Mrs. Riley and the children?"

Larry's face became a web of smiling wrinkles.

"Grand," he said; "the auld woman's grand--you ought to see her in the new silk dress I bought 'er the day--all grane wid fancy trimmin's from Six' Avenoo. An' the kiddies is thrivin'. Cecilia'll soon be havin' to go to work an' help the family funds, she's that sthrong and hearty, an' young Van Wyck is such a divil that the teacher throwed him out of school. He's licked all the b'ys in his class, an' I think he'll end as a champeen pug."

He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed, there came into the younger woman's eyes the question that she would not have dared to ask.

"Yep," nodded Rose, "that's my week's pay for what they call protection."

"Isn't he afraid to take it?" Violet, thus encouraged, inquired.

"The man above him isn't afraid to take two-thirds of it," said Rose, "an' the best of it goes past him to the district boss--it's the regular system with the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain't afraid; an' if you ever tried to live on a copper's pay, you'd soon be afraid not to take it."

Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to be had from the law.

Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true.

"It's all right enough to want to get out of here," said her sagest adviser, who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; "but how are you going to live after you get out? You can't go home; you haven't got any trade; you can't cook; without a recommendation you can't get even a job at general housework or in a factory."

He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose's and, in his own little world, a position of some influence.

"You get me out," said Violet, "an' I'll do the rest."

But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry--she saw that; but what could he do?

It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.

Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle--the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.

"After all," he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through it of his long, nervous fingers--"after all, you see, you and I are in the same boat. You can't get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I daren't get out because I can't swim."