Part 9

"But you had better come," urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was certain. "This is the last performance of the season."

"On the contrary," the merchant chuckled kindly, "I think you had better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am going to the first performance of a new season."

"Where's that?"

"To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union."

That made it Dyker's turn to smile.

"Oh, but I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm on the other side, you know."

"Against good government?" The elder man manifestly enjoyed this mild thrust.

"Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us from the street."

The merchant's cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker's lowered lids betrayed nothing.

"Yes," replied Lennox, dryly; "I heard that when Tammany Hall first came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take an older man's advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time."

Wesley's reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter it, Marian Lennox came into the room.

Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what she was certain were opinions of her own.

She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.

She caught her father's concluding words.

"While there is yet time," she paraphrased, "Mr. Dyker will withdraw from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire."

She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker's entrance into her waiting limousine with almost no delay whatever.

"There," she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their drive; "I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon."

Dyker laughed shortly.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I esteem your father so much that I should like him to like me."

"But you think that he doesn't like you?"

"I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest men."

"And may they?" bantered Marian.

"Well," he lightly accepted the challenge, "I shall take the specific case. There is no doubting your father's sincerity; there is no doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him, to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks at last."

"And on the other hand," said the girl, "I suppose I must generously refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?"

"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed."

"Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon."

"Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to another human being--and you should know that I am not to be suspected."

There was a ring in his voice that touched her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime."

"I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles."

"He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors."

"But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?"

"He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing--something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long--and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it."

Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued.

"If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a very terrible thing."

"Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work."

Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.

"Of course you're joking," he said.

"I am in cold earnest," she assured him.

"But that's absurd. You've--why you don't know what settlement-work means!"

"I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters."

"And you really mean----"

"I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is music to listen to."

Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.

Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.

He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in the _entr'actes_, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was "Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored.

His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.

One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week's work to his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that contractor learned of Wesley's service. At the ensuing trial the client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his patron's district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.

For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father's fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to marry her with as little delay as possible.

Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he meant to play his first lead.

He did play it--played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to the mood best suited to his own.

"May I talk now?" he asked ruefully.

She smiled.

"You mean to ask if you may argue," she answered. "No, you may not argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a man of your sort should want to."

"I don't intend to argue," he protested, leaning the merest trifle toward her. "I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite fixed."

She bowed her splendid head.

"Quite fixed," she said.

"So that argument would not shake it?"

"So that no argument could shake it."

"Nor any persuasion?"

His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the change.

"Nor any persuasion," she replied.

"Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but a condition?"

"But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me. You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty."

A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously sweet.

"What I understand," responded Dyker, "is that there is one situation in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that crowds all others from the board."

His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.

"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it--none even for the poor and suffering."

In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.

"Marian"--his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash--"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to answer me!"

He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.

But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.

"I am not unprepared," she answered. "I did know. But I know too that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better emotion."

The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play, and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she was more in love with renunciation.

The man, however, shook his head.

"No," he said, "love is something ultimate. You can't paint the lily; you can't part it and share it; you must either cherish it or kill it. Which do you mean to do?"

The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway's. He could not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her voice as she answered:

"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of."

"But that's folly, Marian!"

He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that youth most resents.

Marian withdrew her hands.

"It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor."

"I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help these people without training----"

"I can get training."

"Without knowing them?"

"The only way to know them is to go to them."

"But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways."

He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience that the settlement would supply her.

"Then you mean," he asked, "that you do care--that you care at least a little?"

He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them.

"I mean," she answered, "that we must wait."

XI

UNDER THE LASH

It was on the day following her eavesdropping upon Rose that Violet was awakened early--as early as eleven o'clock in the morning--by a sudden cry. The sound was one of some pain and more terror, beginning in the high note of horrified amazement and ending in an attenuating moan of despair.

Violet had been living in a highly charged atmosphere: she sat up in bed, sleep immediately banished from her brain. She remained still and listened. She heard Rose's now familiar footstep. She heard a door open and close. She heard that cry frightfully begin again, and then she heard it more frightfully stop in mid-power, cease in abrupt and hideous silence.

There came a discreet tapping at her own door.

"Are you alone, my dear?"

It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.

Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint little red veins that lay close below its white skin.

"My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and that"--she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come--"that's one of them."

She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony.

"What was it?" asked Violet.

"You ought to know. It was another of them."

"You mean----" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's whitening lips.

"Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for company."

"How--how did this happen?"

"How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them, my dear, and one about as narsty as the others."

"But this?"

"Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while their wives cook the dinners--three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma, the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly snake under the apple-tree."

"He brought her here?"

"Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have come along of her own self sometime."

"How could she?"

"How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living in--there isn't room for that--they're just to eat in, when you've got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you have to."

"So this girl had to live outside?"

"On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and down the street when it wasn't."

Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was less, because her surroundings had been better.

"That must have been pretty bad," she said.

"It was bad, but it wasn't so bad as being indoors, my dear. That's what most girls think about it anyway, and that's why they never go home before ten or eleven. How else do the moving-picture shows keep running and how else do the dance-halls make their cakes and ale?"

"The dance-halls?" The word was new to Violet.

"Yes, my dear, I said the dance-halls--where you pay five cents to dance in the dust, with the windows nailed fast to start a thirst, and then buy you bad beer of the kind proprietor. That's where the lodger took this girl, and that's where she learned to drink."

"Too much?"

"Chuck it, dearie, chuck it. Among all the wasters I've known, I've never found one drunkard: they all called themselves moderate drinkers. Well, this girlie played double for a bit, and then met a nice young man that wanted to marry her next day. She woke up here."

"Did they drug her?"

"Did they drug you? They don't have to drug you: you know that. The minute a girl tells me she was drugged, I say to myself: 'You're the kind that walk in and won't take "No" for an answer.' No, you catch flies with syrup; you don't shoot them with machine-guns. Narsty business, no?"

Violet was hearing for the first time how life made the net in which it had taken her. She passed her hand across her burning eyes.

"You seem to have seen a lot," she said.