Part 6

Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.

"But anyway," he insisted, "you can do one thing that I can't."

She clutched at the straw.

"What's that?" she asked.

"You can get help from shore."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean that if you'll write a letter home, I'll mail it."

She shook her head: the straw crumpled in her fingers.

"There's no use of that," she said.

"Of course there is. After all, your father's your father, you see, and I don't know a father that wouldn't help his daughter out of the sort of mess you've got into."

"I know one," said Violet, grimly.

"Not till you try him, you don't."

"Yes, I do. If you was in my place would your father----"

"Which father?" laughed Beekman. "My one won't have anything to do with me because I live with the other, and the other won't have anything to do with me because I'm the son of his predecessor.--You take my advice and write home."

"I'd never get an answer."

She spoke in an even tone, but there was no mistaking the tragedy that underlay it.

Beekman looked at her and blinked queerly. He brought his fist down smartly among the jangling glasses.

"It's a rotten shame!" he said. "A dirty, rotten shame! Why, don't you know that that yid who got you into this makes a business of such things? Don't you know there's a whole army of them that do? I wish to the Lord I could do something, but there isn't a policeman or a magistrate in the city who'd listen to me--they know too well where they get the jam for their bread and butter--and I can't get a job for even myself, let alone you!"

She had not, however, heard his last sentence. Her blue eyes wide, she was hanging on his reference to Max.

"A business?" she repeated. "Do you mean that men make money--that way?"

"Of course I do." The film passed suddenly from Beekman's eyes, leaving them alert with purpose. "Look here," he said, "there is one thing I can do, and I don't know anything that I'd enjoy more: you give me that little kyke's name, and I'll push his face out of the back of his head!"

Then there happened a strange thing. She had long guessed and now she knew, but guessing or knowing, she would not believe. As much for her own sanity as for Max's safety, she lied.

"The name he gave me," she said, "wasn't his right one. It wasn't even one he mostly used. And I never knew no other."

Beekman raised his hands in more than mock despair, and got up to go.

"Well," he declared, "I don't know what I can do for you. If I got into any scandal, it would punch the last hole in my meal-ticket."

Violet, who was becoming accustomed to such replies, smiled kindly.

"I don't want you to get into no trouble for me," she said.

"I know you don't, and I couldn't be any use if I did. But I'll promise you this: I'll keep my eyes open, and if anything does turn up, I'll be Johnny-on-the-spot, all right."

"Thank you," said Violet.

"And look here," pursued Beekman, "I know that it's all rot to expect you to walk out of here without friends or a job; I know that, unless you've got one or the other, you're just simply in jail here; but if I can't get you anything, there must be those who can. Why don't you talk to the coal-men, or the gas-inspectors, or--I tell you, I've seen that tow-headed Dutchman who leaves the beer here. He looks straight, and he stops at the door. Why don't you talk to him? He's the sort that would know of a job for--for----"

Beekman hesitated, blushing like a schoolboy.

"For my sort?" asked Violet. "Maybe he is. Thank you. Anyhow I'll see."

And she did see. When Beekman left her, pressing into her hand the last piece of money that he would have for a week, he gave her at the same time so much of hope. Those who seemed rich could not help her; she would appeal to those who were poor.

She was up early and in the kitchen the next morning at the hour when she knew the brewery-wagon would stop outside, and she sent the ebon Cassie on an errand to the corner pharmacy. The maid had scarcely closed the door before Violet was summoned to open it to the German of whom Beekman had spoken.

Philip had observed well. The brewery's driver, who stood whistling in the areaway, was a short, stocky man with the neck and arms of a gladiator and the round, smiling face of a child. His blue overalls and dark cloth cap accentuated the fairness of his hair, and his round inquiring eyes were alive with continual good-humor. He had just piled a half-dozen cases of beer beside the doorway.

Violet, in her crimson kimona, took from the table the money that had been left for him.

"Good-morning," she said as she handed him the bills.

He accepted the money with his left hand and, with his right, raised his cap from his clustering curls. His lips ceased whistling, half regretfully.

"Goot-mornin'," he replied, smiling.

"Won't you come in and have a drink?" asked Violet, adopting Rose's form of salutation.

"No, t'ank you," the German shook his head. "I neffer trinks nussing bud beer."

"Well," said Violet, "we have lots of that now."

"Und I neffer trink dot till tinner."

There was an awkward pause. The German, not knowing how to leave without seeming rudeness, was shifting his weight from one heavily shod foot to the other. The woman, uncertain how to say the words she wanted to say, remained with her hand upon the knob.

"You don't?" she awkwardly repeated.

"No, und so I t'ink--I t'ink I besser be goin'," he hurriedly concluded, and began to turn on his heel.

The necessity for quick action roused her.

"Wait," she said. And then, as he faced her again in mute wonder, she pressed another bill into his hand. "I want you to help me," she continued. "I want to get a job somewhere, and I don't want Miss Rose to know nothing about it."

He looked from the bill to her, still wondering.

"So-o?" he responded.

"Yes, I want work--some other kind of work--and I thought perhaps you might"--her voice faltered--"might know of some kind."

The German's mobile face underwent a quick change. First astonishment and then something not far removed from tears came into his childlike eyes. He crushed the bill in his big red fist.

"So-o?" he repeated.

"Yes, I--you understand that I must have friends or a job if I am to get away from here, and I thought you might know of something."

The German bobbed his curls.

"I know dot right vell," he said; "bud I don' know no tshob chust now."

Violet's face darkened.

"All right," she answered, "I only hoped maybe----"

"Look here, miss," the driver cut in with a note of ready feeling in his voice. "You mean all dot?"

"All what?"

"About geddin' ozzer--aboud a real tshob."

"If I had the clothes and a place I'd go this minute."

"Vell, den, listen. I've chust god a new blace; I'm goin' to be bar-tender ofer on Segond Avenue, bud I gan send back here if I hear anysing.--Your name?"

"Violet--just Miss Violet."

"All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis dan you maybe t'ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex' Sunday I dake my girl to Coney, und den ve'll dalk sings ofer und ve'll see vhat Katie says."

In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet's face kindled.

"You're good," she said simply, "and I'll trust you."

"Oh, I make nussing," replied the German, smiling once more, "bud chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing."

Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the topmost beercase.

VII

HOLIDAY

That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming Second Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been a workday morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.

To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman in mortal agony or mortal fear.

Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs.

That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."

Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs--the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type--the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention; perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light gash in his upper lip.

He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror, cracking the glass across one corner.

"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!"

And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him through the darkened hallway.

To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets of carnations--one pink and the other white--and boarded a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead.

In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:

Here In Peace Lies The Body Of WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN, Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann, Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia, Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907. ------ "_Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also._"

The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language of Luther, as she had taught it him.

"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay She said it."

And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.

Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps from the subway at Park Place--the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.

"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"

"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue.

The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train vas lade from the cem't'ry in."

She understood and smiled.

"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.

"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe----"

"Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann--and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!"

They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning crowd.

"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin ad my new tshob."

"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think----"

There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train.

In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.

Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself with the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched her in frank admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her head, in that pose which, of all others, is the most becoming to her sex.

"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling, sidelong, blue glance at him.

But before her the strong man was a timid child.

"Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.

Katie laughed again.

"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a Castle Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to ask me now, I wonder."

Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.

"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking of brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my new tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good reason, gan dere?"

"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's one reason."

"Vat is 't?"

"Its name is Father Kelly."

"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"

"I will so."

"Und I haf to gome into your church, und--und all dem d'ings?"

"You do that."

Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they had held many a time before, and every time she would give him no answer to his suit until he should surrender in this particular. Now, however, he considered himself about to set foot upon the highroad to prosperity, and the prosperous can ill afford to skimp magnanimity.

"_All_ righd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with certain mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to enter: "I'm a strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I gan stand dot too. I'll do it."

He took her by surprise.

"Promise?" she asked.

"Sure I bromise."

"No backin' out whatever happens?"

"No packin' oud."

"Well, God bless you then."

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely, hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German had brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and she could think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he was so honestly anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and more to her from the first evening when he had seized her as she was falling from the platform of a surface-car that had started too quickly on its way, she had seen enough of the warfare with poverty in her own family to resolve that she would not marry until she could contribute her share to the wages of the resulting household, and now she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood of obtaining one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because she must not cry, she smiled.

Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.

"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.

Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:

"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."

"But Katie"--he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it--"you don' mean dot! You said--you dold me--you bromise----"

He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain silent. She faced him once more.

"It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious. "Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for--you said yourself it might end in a café o' your own--an' to get there you'll be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that."

He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down.

"Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine for a quarter if you hold your nose."

The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head.

"But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own. I don' vant a gafé: I vant you."

She smiled again.

"You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an' then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'--when she could get it--an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know it."

While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the story of Violet.

He spoke simply, which is to say forcibly, and he had an understanding, and therefore sympathetic, audience. Katie's face immediately softened.