Part 14

At this Casey sat suddenly forward in his chair, and the streak of light fell full across his face, swollen with tears and streaked with the grime of three awful days. Despite the grime, however, despite the stubble of reddish beard, the unkempt hair and untidy clothes, there was something singularly pathetic about him, with his great, Irish-blue eyes and youthful, innocent-looking face. He had not been drinking for some weeks, and he wore no air of sottishness, nor of vagrancy, nor of any of his other crimes against self and family and society.

"I dunno what I ever done," he had moaned for three days, rocking back and forth in his misery, the tears raining down his unwashed cheeks and splashing from his stubbly chin, "I dunno what I ever done that this thing should 'a' happened t' me! My gyurl! My Ang'la Ann!"

"She were a good gyurl," he said to the detective, sitting suddenly forward.

"So far 's we know, she were," his wife amended, "but she had no sinse yet, bein' so young, an' th' young niver belaves th' old. I don' see how a gyurl o' mine could go wrong, an' me hatin' it th' way I do. But she have more o' him in her nor o' me, down t' thim same shifty blue eyes thot kin look so swate, an' God knows what divilment's behint thim!"

Casey smiled in wan coquetry at this charge against his fascinations, but reiterated in defense of his daughter:

"She were a good gyurl. I seen a piece o' this world, of'cer, an' I kin till--min like us, we kin till gyurls that's merely flightsome from thim that's gon' t' th' bad. If she's bad, I don' want ye t' find her. Jes' show me th' felly thot lied t' her, an' I'll kill him--but I don' want ye t' find her; I don' niver want t' set eyes on her ag'in, if she've brought disgrace on me."

"Ye won't lit it git in th' paapers, will ye?" Mary Casey pleaded for the twentieth time in her brief communications with the police. "Yell kape thim aff av her, won't ye--fer th' love o' Hiven? I'm after tellin' th' childern I'll kill th' first wan o' thim thot breathes t' a soul we don' know wheer Ang'la Ann is. Ag'in' she be all right an' come home some day, it'd go hard wid her if these Sheenies 'round here knew she was gon'--people do belave th' worst of a gyurl, always. I dunno what t' think o' my Ang'la Ann, but I don' want it to go haard wid her if she don' desarve it."

The detective promised about the papers and went his way. A missing girl, with no probable complications of a horrible murder, excited only the feeblest interest at Maxwell Street, and this visit would comprehend the whole of the police activity expended in the case unless Angela Ann should happen to turn up under their incurious noses.

The facts of the case were these: Angela Ann Casey, a slim, under-sized, pretty young thing just under eighteen, had left home on Monday morning, November 7th, apparently to go to work, and had not been seen since by her family or any one they knew. She was an unskilled worker, a bit of flotsam in the industrial whirlpool so cruel to her kind. In the summer she had worked for a few weeks in a cannery, pasting labels on fruit cans. When the cannery shut down, she answered an "ad" for extra help in the rush season of a cap factory, which laid her off when work slackened. And after a fortnight's idleness she was taken on as a bundle-wrapper in a cheap department store, where she met a girl who told her of a place needing more girls for the manufacture of cheap finery for the "levee" trade. Angela Ann applied, and was given work at a knife-pleating machine, at four dollars and a half a week. She was in this job, to the best of her mother's belief, when she disappeared; but a visit to the place on Tuesday laid bare the startling fact that she had "give notice" on Saturday night.

Angela Ann had few intimates; her associates changed with her changes of occupation, and these were so many that she took root nowhere. A girl on Blue Island Avenue, to whose house Angela Ann sometimes went, called at Henry Street Tuesday evening and was told that Angela was out.

"She's tellin' me she have a gran' fella," said the girl questioningly.

"She have," lied Mary promptly, "did she iver tell ye his name?"

No, she hadn't; so Mary said maybe Angela Ann wouldn't want her to tell it either.

Mary's sister, Maggie O'Connor, who was married to a "will-t'-do" blacksmith and lived but a few blocks away, had also heard of a stylish young man who could not be asked to the back cellar on Henry Street, or even allowed to suspect it. In family council Mrs. O'Connor testified that she had offered her own "parlie" for the courting.

"'Bring him here an' l'ave us have a look at him,' I sez to her. 'Ye kin have th' parlie anny toime ye want it,' I sez, 'an' if yer 'shamed o' yer Uncle Tim's brogue, he kin stay in th' shop, an' I'll talk t' him mesilf,' I sez."

But Angela Ann had not accepted this handsome offer, nor had she confided the name of the young man to Mrs. O'Connor, who only knew that Angela Ann had assured her he was a gentleman beyond a doubt, for he had a gold watch and chain.

Fired by this information, which he considered an important clue, Casey was for carrying it at once to the police so that they might investigate all young men wearing gold watches and thereby in due process find the one who knew Angela Ann. But before he could get away to furnish the detectives with this important information, Mrs. O'Connor had made some further suggestions. The chief of these was touching the advisability of consulting a fortune-teller.

"Thim coppers," she opined, "is no good. Tim's after radin' a lot about thim in th' paapers, an' he sez they niver ketch nothin' 't all. He sint ye a dollar wid me and sez he, 'You till thim t' stop foolin' wid coppers an' go t' th' forchune-teller,' sez he."

"I belave it have more t' do wid what th' forchune-teller know than wid what thim coppers kin foind out," reflected Mary Casey. It was the morning after the detective's visit, and Mrs. O'Connor had come over to ask the news. "Theer's somet'ing I didn't till th' ditictive," Mary confessed, "not knowin' how he'd take it--but the day befoore Ang'la Ann wint, a quare, wan-eyed cat kem here. Ivrywheer I wint thot day she traipsed at me heels, an' all Monday noight whin I was up watchin' fer Ang'la, th' cat was on th' windie-sill, howlin' what sounded joost like Aan-gla, Aan-gla, Aan-gla. Now what d'ye make o' thot?"

Mrs. O'Connor had been fumbling in her plush wrist-bag during this recital. "Say," she said presently, holding out a very dirty card, "th' las' noight Ang'la Ann was t' our house she was after l'avin' th' baby play wid her purse, an' th' baby spilt all th' t'ings out av it. We picked thim up, an' I t'ought we got thim all, but whin I was clanein' yiste'day, I foun' this card. It mus' be hers, fer Tim say he niver see it, an' no more did I."

The card read:

"That's him, I bet ye!" cried Casey excitedly, "that's th' felly wid th' gol' watch an' chain!"

"Wait a minute!" commanded Mrs. O'Connor impatiently, "Tim sez thot have somet'ing t' do wid a theayter."

"Sure," said Mary Casey, "Ang'la Ann wouldn't be so grane as t' ixpict no theayter guy t' marry her! She'd ought t' know thim niver marries; or if they do, they have a woife in ivery town, loike soldiers an' travelin'-min! I niver bin to no theayter in my loife, but I know that mooch!"

Casey, who had lost his job by default, and had sat apathetically by the stove ever since gray morning dawned after the frantic vigil of Monday night, was struggling with the lacings of his shoes preparatory to setting forth to demolish O. Halberg if he proved his guilt by wearing a gold watch and chain.

"Ye kin spend yer dollar on yer wan-eyed cat," he said indulgently, "but as fer me, I got t' foind thot felly thot lied t' me gyurl."

So the inaction of the past three days was over, temporarily at least. Casey was bound for O. Halberg's and Mrs. Casey and Mrs. O'Connor were going to approach some fortune-teller with the dollar and the tale of the cat. But first of all Mary must go to the school and take Johnny out to mind Dewey and the baby in her absence.

"Now you be keerful," she adjured Casey as he made ready to go, "an' don' kill nobody be mistaake. Th' bist way is t' kill nobody at all," she continued cautiously.

In spite of this caution, however, there would have been danger in prospect if Casey had owned a gun or if he had taken a few drinks. As it was, he was not a formidable figure when he presented himself at the number on West Madison Street, a few doors from Halsted.

There was a pawnshop on the first floor, and beside it a narrow door, which opened upon a long flight of wooden stairs rising steeply to a dark hall, where, by the light of a two-foot gas burner, Casey could make out the name "O. Halberg" on one of the dozen doors. The name was painted on a black tin plate tacked to a rear door. Casey knocked.

"Come in," said a guttural voice.

Entering, Casey saw a man sitting with his feet on a battered desk; he was reading the morning paper and smoking a vile cigar. The walls, calcimined a kind of ultramarine blue, but grimed and fouled unspeakably, were hung with theatrical lithographs depicting thrilling scenes from plays on the blood-and-thunder circuit. For the rest, the furnishings were two wooden chairs, a giant cuspidor, and the desk, which looked as if it had never been new.

"Have I," said Casey in his grandest manner, "th' honor t' addriss Mr. O. Halberg?"

O. Halberg grunted that he had. Then Casey advanced a step further into the room and looked about for a sight or trace of Angela Ann. Nothing could have been more damning than O. Halberg's gold chain, but in no likelihood would Angela Ann, by any stretch of courtesy, have called him young; he was probably fifty, and not prepossessing from any possible point of view.

"Me name is Casey," ventured the visitor, "me gyurl is lost, an' I'm lookin' fer her. We found this," proffering the dirty card, "an' we t'ought mebbe you'd know wheer she is."

Casey was proud of the neatness and despatch of his "ditictive" methods, but more than a little disappointed to find so soon that he was on the wrong trail entirely. Mr. Halberg was truly surprised to be approached with any such query. A great many little silly, stage-struck girls flocked to see him, of course, and no doubt some of them got hold of his cards "in the hope of using them to impress managers," but he had no recollection of any girl named Casey--none whatever. And he resumed the reading of his paper.

"I got th' coppers after her," murmured Casey apologetically, as he took his leave, "but thim coppers is no good. Ag'in' ye want ditictive work done, ye better do it yersilf."

O. Halberg did not deign to reply, but when Casey was safely outside he stepped to the door and locked it. In case the "coppers" came around, it would be just as well to be "out"--it would save the coppers some troublesome pretense.

In his descent of the steep stairs Casey met two girls coming up. They were about Angela Ann's age and were giggling nervously. One of them held between thumb and finger a quarter-inch "ad" from a morning paper, offering:

"High-salaried positions in good road companies to young ladies of pleasing appearance. O. Halberg, Dramatic Agent--West Madison Street."

"Ask him if this is the place," said the girl who appeared to be following the other's lead. Casey directed them to O. Halberg's door, then went on his way. A moment later, while he stood on the corner of Halsted Street waiting for a south-bound car, he saw the girls emerge from the door by the pawnshop. They passed him as they went to take an east-bound Madison Street car on the opposite corner.

"Did ye foind him?" Casey asked.

"No, he wasn't in."

"That's quare," he said, startled, "he was there wan minute before."

On his way home Casey dropped in at the Maxwell Street Station in a free-and-easy manner he would not have dreamed possible two days ago. He was so full of his "ditictive" experience that he felt he must have some one, if only a copper, to talk it over with. The detective who had called the night before wasn't in, so Casey related his recent daring exploit to no less a personage than the desk sergeant himself.

It was well poor Casey could not hear the desk sergeant's account of the call after the self-appointed sleuth had gone on his way.

Mrs. Casey was at home when her husband got there. Relating her adventures, after she had listened to his, she said that the fortune-teller, after accepting the dollar, had asked several searching questions about the one-eyed cat.

"'Ag'in' th' cat come back, yer gyurl 'll come home,' she sez t' me."

II

The days dragged by. There seemed to be a complete lapse of the stone-cutting industry, so Casey had nothing to take his mind from his "ditictive" operations, which were interesting and unexhausting, though expensive in car-fare and unproductive of results. Angela Ann's weekly wage, for many years the main dependence of the family, being lost to them, they were closer even than was their wont to starvation and eviction; and winter was beginning to snarl around their warped, ill-fitting doors.

As time wore on, the poignant horror of Angela Ann's absence grew mercifully less for all but Mary Casey. Night after night she wept the long hours through, until Casey complained of the depressing effect of her grief, and she felt constrained to hide it.

"If I could on'y know she were dacintly dead," was her heart's cry, as better hopes died in her, "Ag'in' a bye l'ave home, he kin knock around an' pick up a bite here an' a lodgin' theer, an' be none th' worse fer it. But a gyurl bees diff'runt! Theer's always thim watchin' 'round thot's riddy t' do her harm."

Meanwhile she lied bravely to the neighbors. "Angela Ann bees livin' out an' have th' graandes' plaace," she told them impressively; "th' lady she live wid 's after takin' her to Floridy fer to mind her little bye."

Mary's hope was strong that Christmas would see the wanderer's return, but the holidays passed in unrewarded waiting. Casey had perforce abandoned his search, and worked a day or two now and then. Though the traces of really terrible suffering were still in his weak, winsome face, he had long since forsaken all hope of Angela Ann's "safety with honor," and, when it had come to seem unlikely that she ever would do so, took comfort in vowing that she should never again darken the door of his outraged home.

Mary gave over pleading for her girl, in the interests of family peace, but, more and more like a specter as the weeks wore away, she haunted localities where Angela Ann had been or might be. Sometimes she had the baby in her arms, but oftener she left it with Dewey at their Aunt Maggie's, and roamed the streets unhampered in her never-ending quest.

Evenings she would say, "I'll be goin' t' yer aunt's a bit," and slip away into the engulfing dark, to reappear in the glare of light marking the entrance to some cheap West Side theater or dance hall. Gradually her excursions extended downtown, where she would take up her station at the door of some place of amusement and stand watching the pleasure-seekers pour in, then turn away and wander aimlessly up and down the streets for an hour or so before facing homeward. In some way she heard about stage doors, and took to haunting them. She saw many girls of Angela's type, and wondered sadly if their mothers knew where they were, but her own girl was not among them. In those nights on the flaming streets she learned more about vice than she had ever dreamed of in all her life, and the world came to seem to her a vast trap set by the bestial for the unwary.

Not hunger, nor cold, nor abuse, nor sickness, nor death, as it came to five of her children, had driven Mary Casey to anything like the poignancy of feeling that was hers now. Heretofore she had been patiently dumb under affliction; now her spirit cried out in a passion of pain that called straight upon Almighty God for an answer to its anguished questionings.

With the aid of Casey, who was a "scollard," and could "r'ade 'n' write joost as aisy," she pored over the sensational papers in search of stories about girls in trouble, and never a horror happened to an unidentified girl anywhere but Mary was sure it was Angela Ann.

Once there was an account of an unknown young woman found dead on the prairies near Dunning, the county institution. It was Johnnie who laboriously spelled out this story for her--Casey having gone to that club of congenial spirits, O'Shaughannessy's saloon--and at ten o'clock, when the children were all abed, her anxieties could brook no more delay. Throwing a shawl about her head and shoulders, she stole along the pitchy passageway, up the long flight of steps to the sidewalk, clutching the torn fragment of newspaper in the hand that held the shawl together beneath her chin.

It was Saturday night, and the avenue was still brightly lighted. One or two acquaintances greeted her, but she hurried by with only a nod and a word. At Harrison and Halsted and Blue Island Avenue, where three streams of ceaseless activity converge, there is always a whirlpool rapids of traffic and humanity, and here, in a brilliant drug store, Mary felt far enough from her own haunts and all who knew her and Angela Ann to venture on her errand.

"I want t' tillyphome," she whispered to the clerk, who pointed impatiently to the booth.

"I dunno how," said Mary imploringly. "I want ye t' do it fer me. R'ade that." She thrust the dirty, crumpled fragment of the evening's yellow journal into his hand.

The young man glanced at it, and then curiously at her. "I've read it," he said.

"Down here, somewheers," said Mary, pointing vaguely towards the last paragraph, "it till wheer she be, an' I want ye t' tillyphome that place an' ask thim have she a laarge brown mole on her lift side. If she have, I'm goin' out theer this night, fer 'tis my gyurl I t'ink she be."

This was not as startling an episode to the young man addressed as it might have been to one in a quieter locality. Nevertheless, it smacked of the dramatic sufficiently to interest him, and when Mary proffered her nickel he called up the Dunning morgue.

After what seemed an interminable wait, while the sleepy morgue attendant at the county poor-house was being summoned by repeated rings, and the brief colloquy was in progress, the clerk emerged from the booth.

"The girl has been identified this evening," he said.

Disappointment mingled with relief in Mary's countenance: she had reached that stage where it would have been not altogether unendurable to look at Angela Ann's dead face, even in a morgue.

As she retraced her way home, the chill of the sharp February night struck into her mercilessly. When she set forth, she had scarcely noticed in it her preoccupation; but now that another expectation, however tragic, had proved false, and the situation stretched ahead of her indefinitely dull and despairing again, the abrupt relaxation left her physically as well as mentally "let down," and she shivered violently as she hurried along.

"Mother o' God," she cried, the tears rolling swiftly down her shrunken cheeks, "wheer is my gyurl this noight? If I could on'y know she had a roof over her head an' a fire t' kape her warrm!"

Casey was still out when she got back, and she was thankful, for the sight of her tears made him ugly these days. "She've disgraaced us," he said of Angela Ann, "an' she be dead t' me, an' ought t' be t' you, if ye had proper shame."

Mary could give herself up to the luxury of grief, therefore, and she did, until she fell asleep. The next morning she was up betimes, meaning to go to early mass in the basement of the church before "drissy folks" were abroad in their Sunday finery. For more than one reason Mary avoided the later masses; her rags were small shame to her compared with the more than half-suspicious inquiries of acquaintances as to the whereabouts of Angela Ann.

"'Tis more lies I'm after tellin'," thought poor Mary, "than th' praste kin iver take aft o' me. 'N' ag'in' I do pinance enough t' kape me busy half me time, an' go t' git me holy c'munion, I'm not out o' th' prisence o' th' blissed Sacrament befoore I'm havin' t' lie ag'in t' save that poor, silly gyurl's name!"

This morning, however, in spite of her early rising and her efforts to get to seven o'clock mass, events conspired to thwart her intentions. Mollie woke up with a headache, and Johnnie had to be despatched on a vinegar-borrowing expedition, so that the time-honored application of brown paper soaked in vinegar might be made to the poor little head. The baby cried lustily, with a colicky cry, and Mary had to hasten the boiling of tea, that wee Annie might have a good, hot cup to soothe her. Casey, complaining profanely of broken slumbers, was in no mood to be left home with fretting children while Mary went to mass.

It was nine o'clock before she could get away; the last mass in the basement was at nine o'clock. But the Elevation of the Host had been celebrated before she got there, and she turned disappointedly to the stairs; she would have to wait for half-past nine mass in the main church. It seemed as if Providence were balking her, but on the stairway she learned the reason why.

"Ye mus' be sure t' say a spicial prayer on this mass," said one woman who passed her to another, "'tis the first mass this young praste have iver said, an' a blissin' go wid it t' thim thot prays wid him."

Saul on the Damascus road had no more overwhelming sense of arrest and redirection than Mary Casey had, as, trembling with excitement, she reached the top of the stairway.

"Think o' that now," she told herself, "an' if I had come t' th' airly mass I'd niver 'a' known it!"

Hardly would her knees uphold her until she could sink into an obscure pew, far back under the gallery. And there, at the tense moment when the silver-toned bell proclaimed commemoration of the great lifting-up in suffering, Mary raised her faith-full prayer: "A'mighty God, sind me gyurl back t' me! But if it don' be in yer heart t' do thot mooch, maake her a good gyurl wheeriver she be. Fer th' love av Christ, Amin."

Not often in any lifetime, perhaps, does it come to pass that one prays with such sublime assurance of crying straight into the listening ear of Omnipotence that will inevitably keep faith with poor flesh. For nigh on to forty years Mary Casey had listened to reiterations of the old and new Covenants, but they had fallen on sterile ground in her soul. It was the little chance remark about the new priest's first mass, dropping into harrowed and watered soil, that flowered in immediate faith.

* * * * *

The mass ended and the throngs of worshipers passed out, but Mary sat unheeded and unheeding in her dim corner, her simple mind grappling with the stupendous idea of its Covenant with Heaven.

Before she had any realizing sense of time, the church had filled again for high mass. Then the lighting of the great white altar fascinated her, and she felt an intense desire to live again through such a moment of assurance as she had lately experienced--to hear that bell ring again, to smell the incense, and to believe that in some wonderful, wonderful way it was all a part of that prayer of hers that Heaven was bound to answer.