Part 4

I held her arm. I knew what was the matter. She was too proud to ask for help. I knew another thing, too. There was a story in her, the story of what happens to the penniless girl in New York; and I could get it from her and write it and put the matter on a business basis that would mean as much to her as to me. Then I would have my story, the story I had not got to-day, and she would have a room and shelter, for of course I would give her some money in advance. My mind worked like lightning. I saw exactly how the thing could be done.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Forgive me--but you're hungry, aren't you?"

She stared at me again with that queer look of hers. Then she answered with simple truth. "You bet I am," she muttered.

"Very well," I said, and I put all the will-power I had in my voice. "Come with me and get something to eat. Then tell me what has happened to you. Perhaps I can make a newspaper story of it. If I can, we'll divide the space rates."

The girl in gray hung back. I could see that she wanted to go with me, but that for some reason she was afraid.

"Say," she said at last, "you're kidding ain't you? You don't look like a reporter nor act like one. Honest, you got me guessin'."

I did not like that very much, but I could not blame her. I knew it required more than three weeks to make one look like a real newspaper woman. I opened my hand-bag and took out one of the new cards I had had engraved, with _The New York Searchlight_ down in the left-hand corner. It looked beautiful. I could see that at last the girl in gray was impressed. She stood with the card in her hand, staring down at it and thinking. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and clapped me on the back with a force that hurt me.

"Al-l-l _right_!" she said, drawling out the first word and shooting the second at me like a bullet from a pistol. "I got the goods. I'm just out of Bellevue. I'll give you a spiel about the way those guys treated me. I'll tell you about the House of Detention, too, and the judges and the police. Oh, I got a story, all right, all right. I'll give it to you straight."

She was pulling me along the street as she talked. She seemed to be in a great hurry all of a sudden, and in good spirits, but I realized how weak she was when I saw that even to walk half a block made her breath come in little gasps.

"It's the eats first, ain't it?" she asked; and I told her it certainly was. Then I asked her where we were going, for it was clear that she was headed for some definite place.

"Owl-wagon," she told me, and saved her breath for the walk. I said we would take a car, but she pointed to the "owl-wagon" standing against the curb only a square away. The sight of it seemed to give her fresh strength. She made for it like a carrier-pigeon going home. When we reached it she sat down on the curbstone and nodded affably to the man inside the wagon. He nodded back at her and then came through the door and down the wagon steps to stare at me.

"Hello," he said to the girl in gray. "Heard you was sick. Glad to see you round again. What'll you eat?"

She did not waste breath on him, but made a gesture toward me. For a moment I think she could not speak.

"Give her a large glass of milk first," I told the man--"not too cold." When I handed it to her I advised her to drink it slowly, but she did not. It vanished in one long gulp. While the man was filling another glass for her I asked her what she wanted for supper. Eating at the "owl" was a new experience to me. I began to enjoy it, and to examine the different kinds of food that stood on the little shelves around the sides of the wagon. The girl in gray looked at me over the rim of her glass.

"What'll you stand for?" she asked.

I laughed and told her to choose for herself; she could have everything in the wagon if she wanted it. Before the words were past my lips she was on the top step, selecting sandwiches and pie and ordering the man around as if she owned the outfit. She took three sandwiches, one of every kind he had, and two pieces of pie, and some doughnuts. When she had all she wanted she got down from the wagon and backed carefully to the curb, balancing the food in her hands. Then she sat down again and smiled at me for the first time. Something about that smile made me want to cry; but she seemed almost happy.

"Ain't this a bit of all right?" she asked, with her mouth full. She told the proprietor that his pies had less sawdust in them than last year and that he must have put some real lemon in one of them by mistake. While they talked I continued to inspect the inside of the wagon, but I heard the owl-man ask her a question in a whisper that must have reached across the street. "Say, Mollie, who's your friend?" he wanted to know.

The girl in gray told him it was none of his business. Her speech sounded strangely like that of Mr. Hurd. There were several of his favorite words in it. I sighed. She was a dreadfully disappointing girl, but she had been starving, and I had only to look at her face and her poor torn shoes to feel sympathy surge up in me again. When she was finishing her last piece of pie she beckoned to me to come and sit beside her on the curb.

"Now for the spiel," she said, and her husky voice sounded actually gay. "You got the key. Wind me up. I'll run 's long's I can."

I looked around. The street was deserted except for two men who stood beside the owl-wagon munching sandwiches. They stared hard at us, but did not come near us. There was a light in the wagon, too, by which I might have made some notes. But I did not want to get my story at one o'clock in the morning out on a public avenue. I wanted a room and a reading-lamp and chairs and a table. Six months later I could write any story on the side of a steam-engine while the engine was in motion, but this was not then. Besides, while the girl was eating I had had an inspiration. I asked her if she had really meant what she said about having no place to go but the park; and when she answered that she had, I asked her where she would have gone that night if I had not come along. She looked at me, hesitated a moment, and then turned sulky.

"Aw, what's the use?" she said. "Get busy. Do I give you the story, or don't I?"

I told her she did. Then I produced my inspiration. "Aren't there homes for the friendless," I asked her, "where girls are taken in for a night when they have no money?"

The girl in gray said there were, and sat eyeing me with her lower jaw lax and a weary, discouraged air.

"All right," I said, briskly; "let's go to one."

It took her a long time to understand what I meant. I had to explain over and over that I wanted to go with her and see exactly how girls were received and treated in such places and what sort of rooms and food they got, and that I must play the part of a penniless and friendless girl myself to get the facts; for of course if the people in the "refuge" knew I was a reporter everything would be colored for me. At last my companion seemed to grasp my meaning. She got up, wabbling a little on her weak knees, and started toward Twenty-third Street.

"Come on, then," she muttered, and added something about a "funeral" and some one being "crazy." She said the place we were going to was on First Avenue, not very far away, but I stopped a car and made her get into it. As we rode across town she told me the little she knew about the refuge. She said girls who went there paid a few cents for their rooms if they had money, but if not they were sometimes taken in without charge. She said breakfast was five cents and dinner ten or more, according to what one ate. The house closed at midnight, and she was afraid we could not get in; but she had been there twice before, and the matron knew she was sick, so perhaps she would admit us. I was to be Kittie Smith, a friend of hers from Denver.

I did not like the appearance of the place very much when we finally reached it. It was like a prison, I thought, and its black windows seemed to glower at us menacingly as we looked at them. We climbed the worn steps that led to the front door; there were only a few of them, but I had to help the girl in gray. When we reached the last one, she rang the bell labeled "Night bell." Beside it a brass sign that needed polishing told us the institution was a "Home for Friendless Girls." We could hear the bell jangling feebly far inside the house, as if it hung at the end of a loose wire, but for a long time no one answered it. The girl in gray sat down on the top step while I rang the bell again. Then at last steps came along the hall, the door opened an inch, and an old woman peered out at us. We could see nothing of her but her eyes and a bit of white hair. The eyes looked very cross, and the old woman's voice matched them when she spoke to us. She asked what we wanted and explained in the same breath that the house was closed and that it was too late to get in. The girl in gray leaned back against the door so the old woman could not close it, and said in a faint voice that she was sick.

"You remember me, Mrs. Catlin," she added, coaxingly. "Sure you do. I'm Mollie Clark. I been here before."

Mrs. Catlin opened the door another inch, grudgingly, and surveyed Mollie Clark.

"Humph!" she said. "It's you again, is it?"

She hesitated a moment and again looked Mollie Clark over. Then she flung the door wide without a word and let us into a long hall with a bare floor, whitewashed walls, and a flight of stairs at the end of it. A gas-light, turned very low, burned at the rear, and the whole house smelled of carbolic acid. It seemed to me that no girl's situation anywhere could be as forlorn as that place looked. The old woman picked up a candle which stood on a table near the door and lit it at the solitary gas-jet. Then she motioned to us to follow her and started rheumatically up-stairs, grumbling under her breath all the way. She said it was against the rules to let us in at that hour, and she didn't know what the superintendent would say in the morning, and that there was only one room empty, anyhow, and we would have to be content with it. She led us up three flights of stairs and into a little hall-room at the front of the house. It had one window, which was open. Its furniture was a small bed, a wash-stand with a white bowl and pitcher, one towel, a table, and two chairs. My eyes must have lit up when they saw the table. That was what I wanted, and I did not care much about anything else.

Mrs. Catlin set the candle down on the table, whispered something about taking our "records" in the morning, warned us not to talk and disturb others, and went away without saying good night. The minute the door closed behind her I sat down at the table and got out my pencil and a fat note-book. I did not even stop to take off my hat, but Mollie Clark removed hers and threw it in a corner. Her hair, as I had suspected, was very pretty--soft and brown and wavy. She came and sat down opposite me at the table and waited for me to begin.

At first when we got into the room I had felt rather queer--almost nervous. But the minute I had my pencil in my hand and saw my note-book open before me I forgot the place we were in and was comfortable and happy. I smiled at Mollie Clark and told her to tell me all about herself--the whole story of her life, so that I could use as much or as little of it as I wanted to. Of course, she did not know how to begin. People never do. She rested her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, which seemed to be her favorite attitude, and sat quite still, thinking. To help her I asked a few questions. That started her, and at last she grew interested and more at ease and began to talk.

I will admit right here that before fifteen minutes had passed I was in an abyss of black despair. Someway I simply could not get hold of that story, and when I did begin to get hold of it I was frightened. It was not because she used so much slang. I understood that, or most of it. But some of the things she said I did not understand at all, and when I showed I did not, or asked her what they meant, she was not able to explain them. She put them in a different way, but I did not get them that way, either; and she looked so surprised at first, and so discouraged herself toward the end, that at last I stopped asking her questions and simply wrote down what she told me, whether I knew what it meant or not. After a time I began to feel as if some one in a strange world was talking to me in an unknown tongue--which little by little I began to comprehend. It seemed a horrible sort of world, and the words suggested unspeakable things. Once or twice I felt sick and giddy--as if something awful was coming toward me in a dark room and would soon take hold of me. Occasionally the girl leaned across the table to look at my notes and see what I was putting down, and I kept pushing my chair farther and farther away from her. I hoped it would not hurt her feelings, but I could not endure her near me.

For five minutes the story went beautifully. She had run away from home when she was only sixteen--three years before; and the home had been a farm, just as it is in books. She had gone to Denver--the farm was thirty miles from Denver, but not large enough to be a ranch--and she had worked for a while in a big shop and afterward in an office. She had never learned typewriting or shorthand or expert filing, nor anything of that kind, so she folded circulars and addressed envelopes, and got five dollars a week for doing it. She said it was impossible to live on five dollars a week, and that this was the beginning of all her trouble.

After that she talked about her life in Chicago and Detroit and Buffalo and Boston and New York, and about men who had helped her and women who had robbed her, and police graft, and a great many things I had never even heard of.

For a long time I wrote as fast as my hand could write. My head seemed to be spinning round on my shoulders. I felt queerer and queerer, and more and more certain I was in a nightmare; the worst part of the nightmare was the steady husky whisper of the girl's voice--for of course she had to whisper. At moments it seemed like the hissing of a snake, and the girl looked like a snake, too, with her set straight mouth and her strange, brilliant eyes. At last, after a long time, I stopped writing and leaned back in my chair and looked at her. At the same time she stopped talking and looked back at me, and for a minute neither of us spoke. Then she bunched forward in her chair and sat staring at the floor, exactly the way she had done in the park.

"It's no go," she said, in a queer, flat voice. "You ain't gettin' it, are you?"

For a moment I did not answer her. It seemed someway that I could not. I saw by her face how she felt--sick with disappointment. She muttered some words to herself. They sounded like unpleasant words; I was glad I did not hear them clearly. She had counted on her share of the space rates for my story. She sat still for quite a long time. Once or twice she looked at me as if she did not understand why I was allowed to encumber the earth when I was so stupid. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and finally she smiled at me in a sick kind of way. I suppose she remembered that, after all, I had given her a supper. At last she rose and picked up her hat and put it on.

"I'll blow out of here," she said. "Sorry you're out a meal for nothin'."

She turned to go, and I felt more emotions in that moment than I had ever felt before. There were dozens of them, but confusion and horror and pity seemed to be the principal ones. I asked her to wait a minute, and I went to my hand-bag and took out my purse. There was not very much in it. I had been paid on Saturday, and this was Friday, so of course I had spent most of my money. But there were six dollars left, and I gave her five of them.

"What for?" she asked, and stared at me as she had done in the park.

"For the story," I said. "On account. I'll give you the rest when it's printed."

She took the bill and stood still, looking down at it as it lay in her hand. Then suddenly she threw it on the floor.

"Aw, say," she muttered, "what's the use? It's like takin' candy from a kid. You'll need that money," she added, touching the bill with the toe of her ragged shoe as she spoke. "You'll sure need it to get back where you come from. You didn't get that story. You didn't get a word of it."

The look of the ragged shoe as she put it out and pushed the money away, and the look on her face as she spoke, made my heart turn over with pity for her. I picked up my note-book and held it toward her.

"Didn't I get it?" I asked. "Look at this."

She took the note-book and turned the pages, at first slowly and without hope, then with interest. Finally, without raising her eyes, she sat down by the flickering candle and read them all. While she read I watched her, and as I looked I realized that there was another Watcher in the little room with us--one who stood close beside her, waiting, and who would wait only a few weeks. I knew now what her cough meant, and her husky voice, and the stain in the park, and the red spots that came and went on her thin cheeks.

When she had finished reading the notes she laid down the book and smiled at me. "Kiddin' me again, wasn't you?" she said, quietly. "You got it all here, ain't you?"

"Yes," I said. "I've got the story."

"Sure you have," she corroborated. "That Bellevue stuff's great. And take it from me, your editor will eat up the story about Holohan, with the names _an'_ the dates _an'_ the places. Here's six girls will swear to what I told you. And Miss Bates, the probation officer, she'll stand for it, too. I'd have give it to a paper long ago if I'd known who to go to."

An attack of coughing stopped her words. After it she leaned against the table for a moment, exhausted. Then she bent and picked up the bill from the floor. Last of all she took my pencil out of my hand, wrote a name and address in my note-book, and laid the book back on the table.

"Me for the outer darkness," she said. "That's where I'll be. I'll stay in till four to-morrow afternoon, if your editor wants anything else."

She hesitated a moment, as if struggling with words that wouldn't come. "Thanks for the banquet," she got out, at last. "So-long."

I looked straight into her strange eyes. There were many things I wanted to say to her, but I didn't know how. I felt younger than I had ever felt before, and ignorant and tongue-tied.

"You stay here," I said. "I'll go home."

The girl's eyes looked big and round as she stared at me. She held up the five-dollar bill in her hand.

"Stay here," she gasped, "when I got money to go somewhere else? D'ye think I'm crazy? _You_ got to stay an' get the rest of yer story. _I_ ain't! See?"

I saw.

"You'll go right to that address," I asked, "and rest?"

"Sure I will," she told me, cheerfully.

"I'll bring your half of the money to you as soon as I get it," I ended. "Probably in two or three days. And I'm going to send a doctor to see you to-morrow."

She was on her way to the door as I spoke, but she stopped and looked back at me. "Say, kid," she said, "take my advice. Don't bring the money. _Send_ it. Get me?"

I nodded. The door closed very softly behind her. I heard the old stairs creak once or twice as she crept down them. Then I went to the open window and leaned out. She was leaving the house, and I watched her until she turned into a side street. She walked very slowly, looking to the right and to the left and behind her, as if she felt afraid.

Two mornings later when I entered the city room of the _Searchlight_ Mr. Gibson rose and bowed low before me. Then he backed away, still bowing, and beckoning to me at the same time. His actions were mysterious, but I followed him across the room, and several reporters rose from their desks and followed us both. Near the city editor's desk Mr. Gibson stopped, made another salaam, and pointed impressively to the wall. Tacked on it very conspicuously was a "model story" of the day--the sort of thing the city editor occasionally clipped from the _Searchlight_ or some other newspaper and hung there as "an inspiration to the staff." We were always interested in his "model stories," for they were always good; I had read some of them till I knew them by heart. But this particular morning it was _my_ story which was tacked there--my story of the girl in gray!

For a full minute I could not speak. I merely stood and stared while the reporters congratulated me and joked around me. While I was still trying to take in the stupendous fact that the "model story of the day" was really mine the city editor, Mr. Farrell, came and stood beside me. He was a fat man, with a face like a sad full moon, but he was smiling now.

"Nice story," he said, kindly. "But don't get a swelled head over it. You'll probably write a rotten one to-morrow."

I nodded. Full well I knew I probably would.

"Besides," continued Mr. Farrell, "the best thing in your story was the tip it gave us for Gibson's big beat. That was a cub reporter's luck. Thanks to it, we've got Holohan with the goods on. If you listen you'll hear him squeal. And oh, by the way," he added, as he was turning back to his desk, "we have a dozen messages already from people who want to give care and nursing and country homes to your 'girl in gray.'"

I was glad of that. Also I was interested in something else, and I mentioned it to Mr. Farrell. I told him I had felt sure my story was spoiled because I had left so much out of it. The city editor looked at me, and then jerked his head toward the story on the wall.

"It's what you left out of it," he said, "that makes that a model story."

IV

IN GAY BOHEMIA

The office door opened with a rush and shut with a bang. In the little whirlwind caused by the draught it made, the papers on our desks rose, swirled in the air, and played tag upon the floor. Everybody but me stopped work and glanced up to nod or frown at the woman who had come in. I did not stop. I knew too well who it was. There was only one person on the _Searchlight_ whose entrance caused that sort of commotion. Besides, I had heard the whisper of silk petticoats, and smelled the strong odor of _peau d'Espagne_ which always preceded Miss Mollie Merk to her desk.

Mollie Merk was Mr. Hurd's most sensational woman reporter--the one who went up in air-ships and described her sensations, or purposely fell in front of trolley-cars to prove that the fenders would not work. She was what she herself called a "breezy writer," but her breeziness did not exhaust itself in her literature. She was a breezy person generally--small and thin and dark, and so full of vitality that she always arrived anywhere as if she had been projected by some violent mechanical force. She spoke very rapidly, in short explosive sentences. She openly despised the young and made epigrams about them to show her scorn. Before I had been on the _Searchlight_ a week she announced that I would be endurable if I had a redeeming vice; and our fellow-reporters went around quoting that remark and grinning over it. After I had written a few "big stories" her manner changed to one of open wonder, and she began to call me "the convent kid" and give me advice, addressing me as if I were an infant class. When she was in the same room with me I felt that she was mentally patting my head. I appreciated her kind heart and her value to the _Searchlight_; but I did not really like Mollie Merk.