Chapter 19

A SLUM POST

"Sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."

Despair fells; suspense tortures. The forty odd hours which lay between the ending of the Grahams' dinner and the promised interview with Winifred Anstice stretched out into an eternity to the impatience of Flint. By turns he tried occupation and diversion; yet his ear caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy to have retarded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.

"What! going so early?" called Brooke from his desk.

"Yes, a man cannot do any work here with this everlasting steam-drill outside."

"You are growing too sensitive for this world, Flint. We shall have to build you a padded room, like Carlyle's, on top of the building."

Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to order some cards; but passing out he stopped surreptitiously before the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare-- He caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the door.

He paused again at a fashionable florist's shop tucked deftly in among the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,--one binding up a cross of lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table. Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. "I've seen 'em like that," he said to himself, "and two or three years after they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if they _were_ brought in yesterday."

Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections, Flint tossed him his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving mass of humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club and looked over the latest numbers of "Life" and "Punch."

Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was just five o'clock,--exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner.

He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the platform of the moving cable-car at imminent peril to life and limb. He rode on in a sort of daze, till he was roused by a sudden jerk and the conductor's call of: "Central Park--all out here!" Moving with the moving stream of passengers, he stepped out of the car, and refusing a green transfer ticket he crossed the street and entered the park at the Seventh Avenue gate, where the path makes a sudden dip from the level of the street. The sun was near its setting, and the chilly wind had swept the walks clear of tricycles and baby carriages. The gray-coated guardian of the peace blinked at him from his sentry box. Otherwise he had the park to himself, and found an intense pleasure in the solitude, the keen air, and the sharp outlines of the dreary autumn branches against the gorgeous sky.

The west had that peculiar brilliancy which the dwellers on Manhattan would recognize as characteristic of their island in November, if there were not so few who ever get a peep at the sky except perpendicularly at noonday, as they emerge from rows of brownstone houses or overshadowing buildings of fabulous height. Flint was in no mood to sentimentalize over sunsets. The intensely human interests before him drove Nature far away, as a cold abstraction akin to death; yet half unconsciously the scene imprinted itself upon his senses, and long afterward he recalled distinctly the pale grayish-blue of the zenith shading into the rare, cold tint of green, and that again barred over with light gossamer clouds, beneath which lay the glowing bands of orange, red, and violet.

As the sun dropped, the temperature followed it. The wind whistled more keenly through the bare branches. Flint turned up the collar of his overcoat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and quickened his pace.

The relief of rapid motion told upon his overstrained condition. By the time he had rounded the lakes he was calmer. The ascent of the steep, rock-hewn steps of the ramble rested his nerves as much as it taxed his wind, and as he came stramming down the mall, his mind was sufficiently detached from its own hopes and fears to be able to realize that the overhanging elms recalled agreeably the long walk at Oxford, and that the Cathedral spires were fine in the gathering dusk, as one emerged from the Fifth Avenue entrance. The return to the world of men stimulated him, and the long undulating waves of electric lights seemed to beckon to him hopefully as he went on.

The afternoon was gone. That was one comfort, he said, as he reached his own room. It would take half-an-hour to dress for dinner, and that meal might be prolonged to cover another hour; but the evening still stretched onward, seeming interminable to his restless fancy. It was a relief when Brady came in and suggested that they drop in at a meeting of the Salvation Army to be held at a slum post in a region of the city known as Berry Hill.

"Will I go?" he said, echoing the question of his friend, who stood looking out of the window with an appearance of indifference, which deceived no one. "Yes, I will; but I want you to understand that I don't go as you do, out of pure emotional piety, but only to see and hear Nora Costello."

"Well, she is worth it, isn't she?" Brady responded.

"Worth a trip down-town? Without doubt; but that is not the question that is lying down in the depths of the locality you are pleased to call your heart. Come, now," he added, walking across to the window and throwing his arm over Brady's shoulder with one of his rare exhibitions of affection,--"come; make a clean breast of it, and let us talk the thing out from A to Z. _Imprimis_, you are in love with Nora Costello."

Brady started and moved away a trifle, but made no effort at denial till after a minute, when he said rather weakly, "What makes you think so?"

"_Think_ so! Why, man, I must be deaf, dumb, and blind not to _know_ it. Do you suppose I believed that a man at your time of life, brought up as you have been, had suddenly gone daft on this Salvation Army business?"

"It's a 'business', as you call it, that does more good than all the churches put together," answered Brady, hotly.

"Hear him!" echoed Flint, mockingly.

"Hear this son of New England actually declaring that there may be a way to heaven which does not lie between church-pews or start from a pulpit!"

"Flint, you are a scoffer."

"What do I scoff at?"

"Religion."

"Pardon me, but I do not."

"Well, theology, anyway."

"Ah, that is a different matter."

"You call yourself an agnostic."

"No, I don't. 'Agnostic' is too long and too pretentious a word. I prefer to translate it and call myself a know-nothing."

"Don't you believe in God and a future life--and--and all that sort of thing?" Brady ended rather disjointedly.

"Don't you believe Mars is inhabited? and that the lines on its surface are canals for irrigation?"

"I don't know," answered Brady, whose mental processes were simple.

"Neither do I," said Flint; "and what is more, neither does any man, any more than he knows about God and a future life; and so why should we go to making up creeds and breaking the heads of people who don't agree with us when we are all just guessers, and probably all of us wrong?"

"Then you would take away faith out of the world?"

"Not I,--at least not unless I could see something to take its place, which at present I don't; and as for these poor devils who are consoling themselves for their hard lot in this world by the expectation of a soft thing in the next, I would not be such a brute as to shake their confidence if I could, and I don't blame them much if in addition to their heaven they set up a hell where, in imagination at least, they can put the folks who have been having a too good time here while they were grunting and sweating under their weary load."

"Then I wonder you have not more sympathy with an organization like the Salvation Army, which is doing its best to lighten the burden of the grunters and sweaters."

"Ah," answered Flint, "I had forgotten the Salvation Army,--it seems so small a branch of a big subject. I am glad you brought me back. But let us go a little further back still, for you know it was not the Army at all that we started to discuss, but only one of its officers, with a slender little figure and a pale face and a big pair of rather mournful dark eyes."

"Oh!" said Brady, taken somewhat off his guard, "but you should see her when she is pleased! They light up just as if a torch had been kindled in them."

"Oh, they do, do they?" said Flint, with genial raillery; "well, you see I never saw her so pleased as that."

"Why, don't you remember on her birthday, when I gave her back the locket?"

"I remember the occasion; but I had precious little chance to see how her eyes looked, for you stood so close to her that nobody else could catch a glimpse. I did see something, though."

"What?"

"I saw _you_, and any one more palpably sentimental I never did see."

"Well, what of it? It isn't a crime, I suppose--"

"That depends," Flint answered dryly.

Brady shook off his hand. "What do you mean by that?" he asked angrily.

"I mean," said Flint, folding his arms and looking at his friend steadily, "that you have come to the cross-roads. You cannot go on as you are. You must either give up hanging about Nora Costello, or you must make up your mind to marry her."

"And why not, pray, if I could induce her to accept me?"

"Great Heavens!" cried Flint; "has it gone so far as that?"

"Yes, it has," answered Brady, as defiantly as though Flint had represented his whole family circle; "and if she will marry me I shall be a proud and happy man."

"And your relatives,--the Bradfords and Standishes and all?"

"Plymouth Rock may fall on them for all I care," exclaimed Brady.

"And how about the tambourines and torches?"

Brady colored a little, but he stood his ground manfully.

"I shall never presume to dictate," he answered. "I will go my way and she shall go hers; and if I can lend a helping hand to any of the poor wretches she is trying to save, I shall do it, if I have to take off my kid gloves and get down into the gutter, as many a better man has done before me."

"Well," answered Flint, "if that is the way you take it I have nothing more to say. But if you don't object I would like to be present when you announce the engagement to Miss Standish."

"Miss Standish be hanged!" cried Brady. "It is a question of Miss Costello, I tell you. My only anxiety lies right there. If you had ever been in love you would know how it feels."

"I can imagine," Flint answered, taking up his pipe and looking scrutinizingly into the bowl; "I have read about it in books. But come! if we are going to the rally we must be about it. It is nearly eight by my watch. How long is the confounded thing--excuse me--I mean the gospel gathering?"

"If you are going to make fun of it, Flint, you would better stay at home," said Brady, stiffly.

"No, no, forgive me, Brady! I meant nothing of the kind; it is my accursed habit of joking when I am in earnest, and being so solemn when I try to be funny that I am never in harmony with the occasion. Go on; I will close the door. I ought not to go, for I half expect Brooke of the Magazine. No matter; I will leave word for him."

As they passed the janitor, Flint said, "I shall be back by ten. If any one comes to see me you have the key of my rooms, and let any visitor come in and wait."

"All right, sir!"

"And see that the fire is kept up."

"Yes, sir."

Flint shivered as he passed out of the warm, heavily carpeted halls into the chilly night of late November.

"To-morrow will be Thanksgiving, won't it?" Brady observed.

"Yes, and judging by the number of turkeys on this avenue there will be no family without one. I heard last year of a poor widow who had _six_ sent her by different charitable institutions. That is what I call a pressure of subsistence on population."

Something in Flint's manner jarred upon his companion. It seemed like a determined opposition to any undue influence of sentiment or emotion. Brady could not have defined the attitude of his friend's mind; but he felt it, and resented it to the extent of keeping silence after they had taken their seats in the car of the elevated road.

There were few other passengers, and the car smelled of lamp-oil. All surrounding influences tended to depress Brady's ordinarily buoyant spirits, and he wished he had stayed at home, or at any rate had left Flint behind. Meanwhile his companion, apparently wholly oblivious of the frigidity of his companion's manner, sat with his hat pulled over his eyes, and his face as undecipherable as the riddle of the Sphinx.

As the cars stopped at a station half-way between the up-town residences and the downtown offices, in the slum belt of the city, Brady buttoned up his overcoat and rose, saying shortly, "We get out here."

"He has been here more than once," was Flint's inward comment; but he made no reply, only followed in Brady's footsteps down the iron stairs, and under the shadow of the elevated track for a block or two, when Brady made a sharp wheel to eastward.

"Is this our street?" asked Flint, speaking for the first time.

"Yes, this is our street. Turn to the right--there where you see the red lantern hanging out from the second story."

"Ah, you know the neighborhood well, I see. Lead on, and I will follow. How dark it is down here!"

"Yes, electric lights are reserved for the quarters where you rich people live."

"_You_ rich people!" Flint smiled to himself. "Pretty soon," he thought, "Brady will be classing me among the greedy capitalists who are battening on the sorrows of the poor." He was almost conscious of a feeling of guilt as he recalled the fresh, pure air of the park and contrasted it with this atmosphere. The name of Berry Hill seemed curiously inappropriate for the level streets lined with tumble-down tenements; and its suggestion of the long-ago days when vine-clad uplands swelled between the narrowing rivers, and little children steeped their fingers in nothing more harmful than the blood of berries, lent an added pathos to the gloom of the contrasting present.

The slum post was a forlorn wooden building which had quite forgotten, if it had ever owned, a coat of paint. The windows of the lower story were guarded by a wire netting, behind which reposed the treasures of the poor under the temporary guardianship of the pawnbroker. On one side lay bits of finery, tawdry rings of plate and silver set with sham diamonds and pearls, which if the product of nature, would have bankrupted a Rothschild. In among them were infants' rattles and spoons marked for life with the impress of baby teeth. Behind the smaller articles hung a row of musical instruments, fifes and fiddles sadly silent, and hinting of moody, mirth-robbed homes. Behind these again, by the dim light within, Flint caught a glimpse of miscellaneous piles of household articles wrung from the reluctant owners who had already parted with vanity and mirth, and now must banish comfort too.

The door on one side of the window stood open, and a rather dim light within showed a bare hall-way with a worn shabby staircase leading to the room above. Flint and Brady toiled up two flights. "The path to heaven is not to be made too easy, is it?" said Flint, pausing to take breath.

"No; did you expect elevators?" his friend asked with some asperity.

Flint's good humor was not to be shaken, however.

"To heaven? Why, yes. Angels' wings I've always understood were to be at our service. Here it seems not."

At the door Brady stopped to drop a quarter into the basket labelled "Silver contribution," held by a buxom and not unpleasing young woman in the Army uniform.

"They understand the first principles of the church, I see," Flint whispered. "They have dropped the communion, but they keep the contribution-box."

Brady did not attend to him. As the two men entered, several turned to look at them. Clearly they were not of the class expected. Brady, however, nodded to one or two, and he and his friend sat down on a bench near the door, in the corner of the hall. Flint wished it were in order to keep his hat on to shield his eyes from the unshaded gas, which struck him full in the face. But he resigned himself to that, as well as to the heat and the odor, and charged it off to the account of a new experience.

The interior was bare and cheerless, colorless save for the torn red shades above the high dormer windows, and the crudely painted mottoes over the platform and around the wall. "_Berry Hill for God!_" sprawled along one side, flanked by "_Remember Your Mother's Prayers!_" and in front the sinner's trembling gaze was met by the depressing suggestion, "_What if you Was to Die To-night?_"

The ceiling was low, and the air already over-heated and over-breathed. Flint was an epicure in the matter of air. He looked longingly at the door, which offered the only method of escape. But he had come for the evening, and he made up his mind to endure to the end.

A Hindoo was speaking as they came in, shaking his white turban with much vehemence, and waving his small delicate hands in the air as he told of "The General's" work in India, and how he had been drawn by the gospel (which he pronounced go-spell) to give up his rank in the Brahmin caste, to wander over the world as an evangel.

"Queer," muttered Flint, "that every converted Hindoo was a Brahmin. Booth seems to have had great luck with the aristocracy."

For a few moments the strangeness of the Hindoo's speech amused Flint; then he grew bored, and finally irritated. He took out his watch, looked at it conspicuously, then closed it with an audible click. If there is a depressing sound on earth it is the click of a watch to the ear of an orator. The speaker felt it, and looked round deprecatingly, reflecting perhaps that however superior in morals, Occidentals have something to learn of the Orientals in manners.

When the high-caste Hindoo sat down, there was much clapping of hands and shaking of tambourines, and then to the tune of Daisy Bell rose a chorus of,--

"Sinner, Sinner, give me your answer, do!"

Flint felt a convulsive twitching at the corner of his mouth, but he had sworn to himself that he would betray no levity. Brady looked so uncomfortable that his friend pitied him. There is much which disturbs us, chiefly through the sensibility of others. At the end of the singing, a man rose to tell of what the Army had done for him in rescuing him from the gutter; but his legs were so unsteady and his speech so frequently interrupted by hiccoughs that an audible titter ran around the room, and there was great propriety in the song following his remarks.

"If at first you don't succeed, Try, try again."

The room grew hotter, the lights more trying, the bench harder. The humor of the situation began to die out in Flint's mind, and gave way to a wave of repulsion and of pity for his friend who was about to condemn himself to these associations for life. His mind, which had wandered from the scene around him, was recalled by the sound of a voice, so different from the preceeding ones that it fell like angelic tones upon a world far beneath.

"My friends," said the voice, which was of course Nora Costello's, "you have listened this night to stories of sin and suffering, of struggle, of victory, and sometimes of defeat."

"Like the tipsy gent's," a man called out with a coarse laugh.

"Yes, like his. Would you jeer and gibe if you saw a man sinking in the waves time after time in spite o' rafts and life-preservers thrown out to him from the ship?"

A shamed silence showed that the question had struck; but the speaker was not satisfied with silence. She went on driving the shaft home. "Would you laugh if you saw a man trying to climb out of a burning building and beaten back time after time by the flames?"

(Cries of "No, no.")

"Then why should you laugh over a poor wretch who is struggling with worse flames and in danger of being dragged down to more terrible fires of endless punishment?"

"Fire! Fire!" cried some one in the hall. For a moment Flint took this to be like the "No, no" of a moment before,--only a running comment on the speaker's words,--but at the same instant his eye caught the curling of a thin blue line of smoke in the corner, and he remembered the furniture and flimsy flummery stored on the lower floor. He measured the distance to the door. There was no one between him and it. He would have little difficulty in escaping if he started on the instant--_but these others!_

"The place will go up like a rocket," he said to Brady, "but a panic is worse. Hold the door with me!"

"Take me, meester; I'm stronger nor him!" said a broad-shouldered coal-heaver, who had overheard their whisper.

With this the three men made a bolt for the door, and formed in line in front of it, with their stout walking-sticks in hand.

"Keep your seats. We will knock down the first man who moves. There's no danger!" Flint shouted. For an instant the crowd wavered. It would have taken only one more impulse to turn it into a mob. Nora Costello saw the danger, and seizing her tambourine she began on a ringing Army chorus. The audience fell in with such energy that it drowned the rattle of the fire engines.

"Don't be alarmed," said a fireman, sticking his head in at the door, "the fire is out, and the danger over. Five minutes more, though," he added in an undertone to Flint, "would have done the business, and then, I reckon, we might have spent a week looking for bodies in the ashes."

"Come, Brady, let us go; I want some fresh air," said Flint, when the excitement had subsided and another convert had begun his sing-song confession and adjuration.

"Go, then," answered his friend; "I shall wait to the end. I am going to walk home with Miss Costello. Yes," he went on, in response to his friend's questioning glance, "it's to-night or never."

"Then I won't wait," said Flint; "only come in to-morrow and tell me how you fared."

It was with a feeling of exultation that Flint found himself again on the street. "How grewsome it would have been," he thought, "to be carried off in a job lot like that! I can imagine nothing worse, except perhaps to be killed in a crush at a bargain-counter."