Part 7

He was on the verge of carrying out this resolve and addressing Claire, when an event occurred which had the effect of thwarting his meditated impertinence.

The mind of James MacNab was dull and sluggish. But he had seen a way of perhaps securing for himself the undivided attention of Josie. He did not wait for the latter to sanction his design; he feared her opposition to it, and suddenly spoke, leaning forward again with his look directed full upon Claire.

"Miss Twinin'," he said, "'low me t' intrerdooce a friend o' mine, Mr. Slocumb. Mr. Slocumb, Miss Twinin'; Miss Twinin', Mr. Slocumb."

During this ponderous formula of presentation Claire had started, colored, turned toward the neighbor thus pointedly named, and finally bowed with extreme coldness, at once re-averting her face after doing so.

She seized the chance of whispering to Josie: "Why did he do that? I don't want to meet any strangers to-night. I hoped he would understand."

"He'd _ought_ to," replied Josie, in swift aside. "I do declare it's _too_ bad!"

The next moment she addressed Mr. MacNab. Claire could not hear what she said to him, but her brisk asperity of gesture somewhat plainly denoted reprimand. Her remarks, whatever their nature, were met in stolid silence. He who received them rather enjoyed being scolded by Josie. Her wrath had the charm of exclusiveness; for the time, at least, it vouchsafed to him her unshared heed.

Slocumb made prompt use of his new opportunity. "I guess we'll have a putty decent show to-night," he said. "They say it lays over most ev'rything that's been here fur a year or two."

Claire was now forced to turn and look at the speaker. To ignore him was no longer to preserve dignity. He had received his right of way beyond the barriers of her disregard; he had become an authorized nuisance; civility from herself had taken the instant shape of a debt, due her present escort.

"I shall be glad if it is a good play," she said. Her tones were chill and forced; her manner was repellent because so restrained. Immediately after speaking she looked at the stage. The orchestra had just stopped its brassy tumults. The green width of curtain was slowly rolling upward.

The play began. It was one of those melodramas that are the despair of reformatory critics, yet reach the protective approval of the populace through scenic novelty, swift action, and vivid, if coarse-lined, portraitures. Claire was too infrequent a theatre-goer not promptly to fall under the spell wrought by a playwright deft enough for the capture of others far more experienced than she in tricks of climax, dialogue, and situation.

Occasionally, during the progress of this act, she would murmur pleased comments to Josie. She betrayed an interest that was childish; she had forgotten the proximity of Slocumb. He still stared at her; he had not been effectually repulsed by her suppressed, colorless demeanor. Her refined accent and the musical quality inseparable at all times from her voice had affected him like a new sensation. He failed to follow the actors while they diligently stored up material for future agony. He had enormous confidence in his own powers of fascination with women. It did not occur to him that Claire might be a lady. He knew nothing of ladies. He had met some women who disliked him at sight, who would have none of him, whose fortresses of prejudice he could not storm. But these incidents of disfavor were rare; his list of conquests far outnumbered them.

"She's playin' off," sped his further reflections, once more shaped in the vernacular of actual speech. "I'll let up on her fur a spell. When the fust act's through I'll tackle her agin. _She_ aint 's offish as she looks. Bet she ain't!"

The act progressed, and at length ended. Its _finale_ foretold a plentitude of woe and disaster; a great deal of pipe, so to speak, had been laid for future calamity; everything promised to be inclement and tempestuous. The audience exchanged murmurs of grim approbation; it was going to get its money's worth of horror.

But now an event abruptly took place which for lurid reality far eclipsed all within the limits of canvas and calcium. Just as the drop-curtain had reached half-way in its descent, a sudden burst of flame was seen to issue from one of the wings. It may at once be said that the fire was completely extinguished soon after the curtain had touched the boards, and that nothing more serious had caused it than the momentary conflagration of some gauze side-scene which was to serve in a coming effect of misty moonlight.

But the large mass of people who witnessed the blaze, and who saw and smelt the smoke as it curled and eddied in black spirts forth from behind the edges of the fallen curtain, had no knowledge of their own slight peril. Here, in the upper tiers, they rose impetuously; it was a prompt and general panic. Dashes were made on every hand toward the staircases. Cries of "fire" sounded from many throats. Claire felt herself swept by sheer bodily pressure at least twenty yards. A few seconds before this she had heard a sort of whimpering shriek from Josie Morley, and then had seen a sidelong wedge of close-packed humanity pry itself between her own form and that of the girl. Josie was clinging with both hands to the arm of James MacNab at the moment of her disappearance.

Claire was more shocked than frightened. She had never before found herself in physical danger; to-night was a crucial test for her nerve and coolness. Both stood the test well. John Slocumb, who had kept close at her side, with his stout arm firmly clasped about her waist, now felt a thrill of admiration as she turned to him and quietly said, while they stood jammed together in the panting throng, whose very fierceness of impetus had produced for it a brief, terrible calm, "I wish you would not hold me like that, please. There's no need of it."

We sometimes hear of the ruling passion that is strong in death. Claire knew there was danger of her being crushed. But she had not lost her head, as the phrase goes. She could still prefer solitary extinction to the fate of being annihilated while in the embrace of Mr. John Slocumb.

He removed his arm. "All right," he muttered, "if you'd rather go it alone."

"I would, thank you," said Claire.

VI.

But, as it happened, they were not separated. The crowd, pouring down either staircase, soon thinned. There was better breathing-space, and a fairer chance as well, for the more demoralized to push and struggle. Slocumb kept close behind Claire. He warded off from her a number of desperate thrusts. She was not aware of these defensive tactics; she paid no further heed to her former champion; as her sense of danger lessened, the idea of re-meeting Josie took shape and strength. When the first step of the staircase was reached, she stumbled, and then regained herself. She had no suspicion, at this moment, what actually doughty work Slocumb was doing, just in her rear. He was a man of unusual muscular power, and, like not a few of his rough, pugnacious species, endowed with dogged physical courage. At sight Claire had keenly attracted him; her recent aversion had piqued him into liking her still more. If the occasion had grown one of sharper immediate jeopardy, it is by no means doubtful that he might have shown intrepid heroism as her rescuer. He was gross, coarse, unprincipled, but he had that quality of stubbornly defending what he liked which we often see in the finest of brutes and sometimes in the least fine of men.

Up to this time the prevailing affright had meant bitter ill to all whom it had seized. The threat of a hideous destruction had by no means passed when the crowd about Claire grew less dense; for not far behind her were two opposite streams of life that had met and were each destroying the other's progress by their very madness of encounter. Below stairs, and at one of the intermediate landings, numerous people had already been severely hurt; limbs had been broken, and acute injuries of other kinds had been dealt. The cries heard here and there were made as much by pain as fear.

But powers of good were working with ardor among the lower quarters of the building. A man had sprung forth upon the stage, and was imploring order amid the smoke which partly enveloped him, while at the same time he shouted to the multitude that the fire was now under perfect control. Two policemen and two ushers were abetting him further on, where neither his entreaties nor explanations could reach. Suddenly, with the same speed shown by the panic at its origin, an orderly lull was manifest in its haphazard turmoil. A few caught the sense of the cheering intelligence, and these spread it swiftly from tongue to tongue. At the moment when this change began to be clearly assertive, Claire and Slocumb had almost gained the last landing of the stairs. By the time they were in the lower part of the theatre, not a few persons who desired to air their bravery, now that safety seemed certain, were returning to their seats in dress-circle or parquette. "It's on'y a hoax, after all," said Slocumb. "There's a heap more scared nor hurt. S'pose we git upstairs again? Hey? What d'yer think?"

Claire shook her head. "No, I want to find Josie," she answered. "I don't care to go back. I think she will not, either."

"All right," said Slocumb; "jus' take my hook, an' we'll git out o' here, an' watch fur Jim an' her where they're mos' likely to be."

He extended an arm to Claire as he spoke, and pointed at the same time toward a spacious outer hallway, in which the terrified multitude had already become much more tractable. But Claire resolutely refused to see the offered arm. She had begun to tremble; now that the cause for fright had passed, she was made to realize with how strong a wrench she had screwed her nerves to the sticking-point. A touch of giddiness came upon her; then a knot rose in her throat, and she fought transiently, but with silent success, against a novel sensation that only slight self-surrender might have encouraged into turbid hysteria. Still, she preserved her repugnance, as it were. She would not accept Slocumb's arm. She had made up her mind that he was a vulgar and worthless creature, and moreover she had a distressing instinct that he had thus stayed at her side because of some new-born personal enticement.

He saw plainly her rebuff, though she did not put it in any salient way, choosing to let him suppose it a mere unconscious omission. But he preferred not to let it pass unnoticed.

"Oho," he said, with surly force, while still keeping his arm crooked, and shoving it so prominently toward her that no further subterfuge was possible. "So y' ain't goin' to ketch on, hey? W'at's the reason? We can git 'long better. Come, now, _let's_."

"No," said Claire, driven to bay. "I am very much obliged to you, but I don't need any help."

"Oh! You'll go it alone. All right."

But Mr. Slocumb did not look as if he thought it by any means right. His hard, brown face had clouded with sulky disapprobation. A little gleam of teeth had stolen out under his crisp, short mustache, with an effect not unlike what we see when an angry dog snarls. He felt offended, and this meant that he should either sting with his tongue or smite with his fists. But in the present case a fresh glance at Claire, whose profile was turned to him, made his spleen swiftly perish. Her cheek had got a deep tint of rose; he saw the liquid sparkle of one dark-blue eye, and the dense, rippling hair, chestnut threaded with gold, flowing above one faint-veined temple.

'_Ain't_ she a stunner!' he thought. After that he forgot to be offended. They were now in a spacious hallway leading directly to the street. The panic had quite subsided. Knots of people were standing here and there, loudly discussing their late alarms. Some of the women looked and acted as if they were midway between mirth and tears. Most of the men seemed grave; a few were laughing, but in a nervous, furtive way. Along the centre of the broad passage pressed a line of people whom the shock had left too dispirited for further sojourn in the house.

Claire, with her adherent, was among these latter. In quest of Josie, she scanned every face within her field of vision. She had already caught sight of more than one injured unfortunate, further back, where the rush on the lower floor had been most disastrous, and just before she and Slocumb had gained their present open quarters. On this account, rather than because of the wild stampede itself, she had quite lost desire to wait through the rest of the play. It was now her fixed design to regain Josie and urge the plan of an immediate return to Greenpoint. Her sense of having met her father's known wishes with overt disrespect had become an assailant self-reproach. The very harshness of the event which had so rudely broken in upon her enjoyment seemed to have borrowed its disrelish from the rebuke that she had known as waiting all along to shame her. Providence, for the time, had gone with her father; it had abetted him; it had been telling her, in stern terms of personal threat, how flagrant was her filial disloyalty.

She searched for Josie, but found her nowhere visible. She had soon reached the limit of the large passage. A gate now confronted her, where a man waited, ready to give those who sought egress a strip of cardboard insuring their readmission.

Claire took this guarantee of further diversion unconsciously. The man had stood at his post through all the furor that had just ended. He was a sort of new Horatius at the bridge, though possibly with less sublime motive, his wage being a permanent annuity, and his position one of easy proximity to Broadway.

Claire stood in the vestibule of the theatre, and felt the breeze from the street blow on her heated face, before she was well aware just what vantage of exit she had secured. Still she had not seen Josie. And she now began to realize that there was a very strong chance of not seeing Josie. True, the girl might have returned with Mr. MacNab to their former seats in the second gallery of the theatre. But Claire's reluctance to place herself again within the walls of the building had by this time grown a fierce distaste. Meanwhile, Slocumb had maintained an unrelenting nearness to her. She knew this perfectly well. If possible, a more meagre means than the extreme corner of each eye had told her of it; for so great was her repugnance that she had thus far grudged him even the knowledge of receiving the most minute regard. But now she was forced to turn and look at him.

"Do you think Josie can have gone back into the theatre?" she asked, not being herself aware just what frost and distance she had put into voice and manner.

"Dunno," said Slocumb. "Guess she ain't, though. Guess her an' him's out there in the crowd." The crowd to which he referred was already dense, and every moment increasing. It flooded the flag-stones and a portion of the middle street. Three or four policemen were stirring it to the needful sense of decorum, no less by application than menace of their clubs.

"I am afraid I should never find her there," Claire said, hopelessly.

"That's so," quickly returned Slocumb. "You'd better come inside agin. The scare'll be over in a minnit. The piece'll go on, 'fore long, certain sure."

"I don't care for the piece," replied Claire, with a little toss of the head, more anxious than imperious. "I don't want to see the rest of it. I want to find Josie, and have her take me home at once."

"All right. Jus' step inside an' wait fur 'em both."

Claire looked straight at the speaker. She did not know of the droop in each full-fringed lid of her beautiful eyes. It was an unconscious token of her abhorrence.

"Suppose that they should not return," she said.

"All right," replied Slocumb, brutally impervious. "_I'll_ take yer home, if they don't."

"Thank you," faltered Claire. This view of the question gave her a new shock. It was like hearing that the ferry-boats between New York and Greenpoint had stopped running for the night. "But I won't trouble you," she added, trying to make her voice and mien indifferently calm. "I will wait here a little while, and then, if I don't find Josie, I will go home alone."

"Go home alone?" repeated Slocumb, with a sort of sympathetic interrogation that was detestable to her. "Why, how far is it?"

"Oh, not very far," she replied, turning her back on him, and feeling that in another moment she might treat his offensive persistence with the blunt rigor it deserved.

"I thought you was livin' over to Greenpoint," said Slocumb, shifting with tough pertinacity round to her side.

What a man of cleaner life and thought would simply have praised as sweet and chaste about her fired in this corrupt oaf his one gross substitute for sentiment. She could no more appeal to him by her fineness of line, coloring, or movement than the field-flower when cropped by the brute mouth whose appetite its very grace and perfume may perhaps whet. And Claire divined this. Pure things know impure ones, all through the large scheme of nature. There are nicer grades of intelligence, of course, as we move along the upward scale of such antagonisms. The milk will not cloud till we dilute it with the ink-drop, but a white soul can usually note a black one by earlier and wiser signals of alarm.

"Why should I not go home alone?" Claire had been saying to herself. "No one would know me--I could reach the Tenth Street Ferry--I could ask some one, and get the right car--Yes, I will try no more to find Josie--I will break away from this low creature--I have enough money to bring me safely home--I don't care; I will take my chances and slip off--he will not follow me when he sees me shun him like that."

She ignored his last remark. She did not even glance at him where he now stood. Her gaze was fixed on the crowd, and she was watching to find a brief break in its edge, through which she might flit and be lost. The next instant such a chance came. Claire seized it. She made an oblique dart through the large doorway, slanted her nimble steps across the pavement, and was soon breasting the adverse tide, so to speak, of a little human sea. Each man or woman stood in the place of a choppy, obstructive wave. At every moment poor Claire found herself gently buffeting a new impediment, male or female, as the case might be. Since she wanted to move in a course different from that of nearly every one before or beside her, the carrying out of her object involved a good amount of determined propulsion. But she at length gained the open, as it were. She had now only to strike along in a northerly direction until she reached the point at which a certain line of small cars crossed Broadway. She was not sure at just what street this intersection occurred; she knew that it was by no means near by. A cumbrous omnibus rolled clamorously toward her, and for a moment she was inclined to hail it; but a swift look into its lighted space, well freighted with passengers, made her shrink from the concentration of stares that her sex and loneliness must equally provoke. The publicity of the long, lamp-fringed sidewalk, with its incidents of potential if not always tangible policemen, expressed, after all, a more secure privacy. When she took one of the little trundling cars which would bring her eastward to the ferry, she would not be forced to clamber and stoop and stagger before getting a seat. Their mode of conveyance, too, would be somehow more safely plebeian; they would hold their last fragments of the work-a-day world going back to Greenpoint; in case of insult, she might have her final appeal to some reputable occupant bound for the same destination as herself.

Meanwhile, the big-bodied omnibus clattered by. Claire had resolved to walk. The high-perched driver had not seen her pause, hurry to the curbstone, and then lift a hand which was straightway dropped at the bidding of her changed mood. But this action, while it wrought delay in her progress, rendered somewhat earlier her meeting with one who still obstinately pursued her. Just as she had again started, with slightly quickened pace, the inexterminable Slocumb appeared at her side. He seemed to have used no effort in catching up with her. There was a terrible ease in the way his length of limb accommodated its free stride to Claire's more repressed motions. He had not immediately given chase. She had got rather deep into the crowd about the theatre-doors before his impudence, positive as it always was, had trumped up sufficient real nerve to follow her. Claire continued walking; but she looked at him with fixity as she said, "I suppose you saw that I wanted to go alone."

"'T aint right, nohow," he replied, peering into her face with his bad, hard eyes. "A putty gal like you hadn't ought t' walk the streets all by herself after dark. You lemme go along. Don' look scared; I wouldn't hurt ye fur a cent."

"Oh, I am not afraid of you," said Claire, between her teeth. "Why should I be?"

"That's the ticket. W'y should ye be?"

"I don't want your company. I have shown this to you, and now I tell it to you."

Slocumb laughed. It seemed to Claire that his laugh had the cold of ice and the thrust of steel in it. His lowered arm touched hers with intentional pressure, but she swerved sideways, at once thwarting the contact. He, however, promptly narrowed the distance thus made between them.

"Say!" he now broke forth, in peculiar, confidential undertone, as though a third party were listening. "W'at ye mad fur, hey? You was along with Jimmy MacNab, wasn't ye? An' wasn't we intrerdooced all reg'lar? I'm a better feller 'n Jim, any day in the year. Jus' gimme a show. Won't ye? Say, now, _won't_ ye? I took a dead shine to you the minnit I clapped eyes on them two nice pink cheeks--blowed if I didn't! I sez to myself, 'She can walk round any gal I've seen fur a devil of a time,' I sez."

Claire looked straight ahead. She still went quickly along. Her feet and limbs felt light, almost void of sense. Fear had to do with this, and she was keenly frightened. For the first time in her life she knew the terror that feminine honesty has when fronted with the close chance of physical insult.

Slocumb justified her dread. He had no more regard for common laws of restraint than the majority of untamed brutes, when conscious, as in his case, of firm thews and active bulk. As for moral bravery, his nature harbored no concern with such nicer elements. The only vices he did not possess were those for which he had never known an hour of temptation. His father had drank himself to death, and he inherited what was perhaps an embryo taste in the same direction. He got drunk once a fortnight, now, in his twenty-seventh year, whereas, two years ago, these diversions had been much rarer; in a decade, under his uncontrolled conditions, there was a fair chance of his becoming a sot. To speak more generally, the vast social momentum of heredity, which seems to be so plainly understood and so ill appreciated in our golden century, had Slocumb well in its stern grip. There were no outward incident forces, as the philosophic phrase goes, to make his case in any way a hopeful one. He had seen Claire; he had exchanged a word with her; he had liked her. If his liking were put in the baldest form of explanation it would have to deal with rather darksome realisms. And it is always preferable that the pursuant satyr and the unwilling nymph be treated wholly from the poetic and picturesque point of view.