Chapter 3

It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the sun had some quality in its shining. The children and the caged birds at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there above the traffic and the clamor. Turning down a narrow alley, with a gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person. Here an Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as merrily as if it were the grape harvest. A woman opened a lower room door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology, that she didn't like her daughter to dance before strangers. So the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies--as many as five altogether--for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty scene.

But then there were the sweaters' dens, and the private rooms where half a dozen pale-faced tailors stitched and pressed fourteen and sometimes sixteen hours a day, stifling rooms, smelling of the hot goose and steaming cloth, rooms where they worked, where the cooking was done, where they ate, and late at night, when overpowered with weariness, lay down to sleep. Struggle for life everywhere, and perhaps no more discontent and heart-burning and certainly less ennui than in the palaces on the avenues.

The residence of Karl Mulhaus, one of the doctor's patients, was typical of the homes of the better class of poor. The apartment fronted on a small and not too cleanly court, and was in the third story. As Edith mounted the narrow and dark stairways she saw the plan of the house. Four apartments opened upon each landing, in which was the common hydrant and sink. The Mulhaus apartment consisted of a room large enough to contain a bed, a cook-stove, a bureau, a rocking-chair, and two other chairs, and it had two small windows, which would have more freely admitted the southern sun if they had been washed, and a room adjoining, dark, and nearly filled by a big bed. On the walls of the living room were hung highly colored advertising chromos of steamships and palaces of industry, and on the bureau Edith noticed two illustrated newspapers of the last year, a patent-medicine almanac, and a volume of Schiller. The bureau also held Mr. Mulhaus's bottles of medicine, a comb which needed a dentist, and a broken hair-brush. What gave the room, however, a cheerful aspect were some pots of plants on the window-ledges, and half a dozen canary-bird cages hung wherever there was room for them.

None of the family happened to be at home except Mr. Mulhaus, who occupied the rocking-chair, and two children, a girl of four years and a boy of eight, who were on the floor playing “store” with some blocks of wood, a few tacks, some lumps of coal, some scraps of paper, and a tangle of twine. In their prattle they spoke, the English they had learned from their brother who was in a store.

“I feel some better today,” said Mr. Mulhaus, brightening up as the visitors entered, “but the cough hangs on. It's three months since this weather that I haven't been out, but the birds are a good deal of company.” He spoke in German, and with effort. He was very thin and sallow, and his large feverish eyes added to the pitiful look of his refined face. The doctor explained to Edith that he had been getting fair wages in a type-foundry until he had become too weak to go any longer to the shop.

It was rather hard to have to sit there all day, he explained to the doctor, but they were getting along. Mrs. Mulhaus had got a job of cleaning that day; that would be fifty cents. Ally--she was twelve--was learning to sew. That was her afternoon to go to the College Settlement. Jimmy, fourteen, had got a place in a store, and earned two dollars a week.

“And Vicky?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, Vicky,” piped up the eight-year-old boy. “Vicky's up to the 'stution”--the hospital was probably the institution referred to--“ever so long now. I seen her there, me and Jim did. Such a bootifer place! 'Nd chicken!” he added. “Sis got hurt by a cart.”

Vicky was seventeen, and had been in a fancy store.

“Yes,” said Mulhaus, in reply to a question, “it pays pretty well raising canaries, when they turn out singers. I made fifteen dollars last year. I hain't sold much lately. Seems 's if people stopped wanting 'em such weather. I guess it 'll be better in the spring.”

“No doubt it will be better for the poor fellow himself before spring,” said the doctor as they made their way down the dirty stairways. “Now I'll show you one of my favorites.”

They turned into a broader street, one of the busy avenues, and passing under an archway between two tall buildings, entered a court of back buildings. In the third story back lived Aunt Margaret. The room was scarcely as big as a ship's cabin, and its one window gave little light, for it opened upon a narrow well of high brick walls. In the only chair Aunt Margaret was seated close to the window. In front of her was a small work-table, with a kerosene lamp on it, but the side of the room towards which she looked was quite occupied by a narrow couch--ridiculously narrow, for Aunt Margaret was very stout. There was a thin chest of drawers on the other side, and the small coal stove that stood in the centre so nearly filled the remaining space that the two visitors were one too many.

“Oh, come in, come in,” said the old lady, cheerfully, when the door opened. “I'm glad to see you.”

“And how goes it?” asked the doctor.

“First rate. I'm coming on, doctor. Work's been pretty slack for two weeks now, but yesterday I got work for two days. I guess it will be better now.”

The work was finishing pantaloons. It used to be a good business before there was so much cutting in.

“I used to get fifteen cents a pair, then ten; now they don't pay but five. Yes, the shop furnishes the thread.”

“And how many pairs can you finish in a day?” asked Edith.

“Three--three pairs, to do 'em nice--and they are very particular--if I work from six in the morning till twelve at night. I could do more, but my sight ain't what it used to be, and I've broken my specs.”

“So you earn fifteen cents a day?”

“When I've the luck to get work, my lady. Sometimes there isn't any. And things cost so much. The rent is the worst.”

It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month. That must be paid, at any rate. Edith made a little calculation that on a flush average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be small for the month. She usually bought three cents' worth of tea at a time.

“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile. “The worst is, my feet hurt me so I can't stir out. But the neighbors is real kind. The little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and takes 'em back. I can get along if it don't come slack again.”

Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch! How to account for this old soul's Christian resignation and cheerfulness! “For,” said the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society; her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman. What the old lady is doing is fighting for her independence. She has only one fear--the almshouse.”

It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.

V

It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons. It was Jack's doings. “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation came. The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small profit, and Jack felt grateful.

“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old Fairfax sipped their five-o'clock “Manhattan.”

“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then. Do you know his wife?”

“No. Who was she?”

“Why, old Eschelle's daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn't know; that was ten years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”

“How?”

“Some said they'd been good friends before Mrs. Henderson's death.”

“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn't the first?”

“No, but she was an easy second. She's a social climber; bound to get there from the start.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Devilish. She's a little thing. I saw her once at Homburg, on the promenade with her mother.

“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in a duel before he knew where he was.”

“She must be interesting.”

“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and when to propitiate. I'll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good to when the chance offers.”

“Then her influence on him is good?”

“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the... well, look at the lines in his face. I've known Henderson since he came fresh into the Street. He'd rarely knife a friend when his first wife was living. Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it's put on.”

It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his arm led the way to the diningroom. The procession was closed by Mrs. Henderson and Mr. Delancy. The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack's right, but the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name. There was a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he had been at a meeting of the board.

If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations. The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off. It might still be called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and Carmen's idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home. She had made it like herself. There were pictures on the walls that would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson's time; and the prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness. Life, she said, was her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little Greek. Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was simplicity. The dinner was simple. Her dress was exceedingly simple, save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman. She knew herself better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he muttered, “But it needn't be the seamy side.” The reported remark of some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam's comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”

The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as a library. Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or enjoy it. Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness. But Carmen liked the room above all others. She enjoyed her cigarette there, and had a fancy for pouring her five-o'clock tea in its shelter. Books which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one couldn't say in a drawing-room.

Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten years, and puffy under the eyes. There were lines of irritation in his face and lines of weariness. He had not kept the freshness of youth so well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience. To his guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so, and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day's pilgrimage. At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest you, Mrs. Delancy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn't it you?”

“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things--conflict.”

“Yes, I can understand that. There is so much to be done for everybody.”

Henderson looked amused. “You know in the city the gospel is that everybody is to be done.”

“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it all for--this conflict? Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”

“Yes, that's it; the devil is usually the other fellow. But, Mrs. Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don't know what it's all for. I doubt if there is much in it.”

“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”

“The world is generally wrong. Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy? No! Of course you do not. But the interest of the game isn't so much in the cards as in the men.”

“I thought it was the stakes.”

“Perhaps so. But you want to win for the sake of winning. If I gambled it would be a question of nerve. I suppose that which we all enjoy is the exercise of skill in winning.”

“And not for the sake of doing anything--just winning? Don't you get tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.

There was something in Edith's sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson. Perhaps he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success. At any rate, it was with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen in his face before, that he said:

“People get tired of everything. I'm not sure but it would interest me to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.” And then he added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried that some years ago.”

“Wasn't she interested?”

“Oh, very much. For a time. But she said there was too much of it.” And Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.

Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly. Jack was charmed with his hostess. That clever woman had felt her way along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn't to look out for thin ice.

“Were you thinking of going on to the Conventional Club tonight, Mr. Delancy?” she was saying.

“I don't belong,” said Jack. “Mrs. Delancy said she didn't care for it.”

“Oh, I don't care for it, for myself,” replied Carmen.

“I do,” struck in Miss Tavish. “It's awfully nice.”

“Yes, it does seem to fill a want. Why, what do you do with your evenings, Mr. Delancy?”

“Well, here's one of them.”

“Yes, I know, but I mean between twelve o'clock and bedtime.”

“Oh,” said Jack, laughing out loud, “I go to bed--sometimes.”

“Yes, 'there's always that. But you want some place to go to after the theatres and the dinners; after the other places are shut up you want to go somewhere and be amused.”

“Yes,” said Jack, falling in, “it is a fact that there are not many places of amusement for the rich; I understand. After the theatres you want to be amused. This Conventional Club is--”

“I tell you what it is. It's a sort of Midnight Mission for the rich. They never have had anything of the kind in the city.”

“And it's very nice,” said Miss Tavish, demurely.

“The performers are selected. You can see things there that you want to see at other places to which you can't go. And everybody you know is there.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “It's what the Independent Theatre is trying to do, and what all the theatrical people say needs to be done, to elevate the character of the audiences, and then the managers can give better plays.”

“That's just it. We want to elevate the stage,” Carmen explained.

“But,” continued Jack, “it seems to me that now the audience is select and elevated, it wants to see the same sort of things it liked to see before it was elevated.”

“You may laugh, Mr. Delancy,” replied Carmen, throwing an earnest simplicity into her eyes, “but why shouldn't women know what is going on as well as men?”

“And why,” Miss Tavish asked, “will the serpentine dances and the London topical songs do any more harm to women than to men?”

“And besides, Mr. Delancy,” Carmen said, chiming in, “isn't it just as proper that women should see women dance and throw somersaults on the stage as that men should see them? And then, you know, women are such a restraining influence.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Jack. “I thought the Conventional was for the benefit of the audience, not for the salvation of the performers.”

“It's both. It's life. Don't you think women ought to know life? How are they to take their place in the world unless they know life as men know it?”

“I'm sure I don't know whose place they are to take, the serpentine dancer's or mine,” said Jack, as if he were studying a problem. “How does your experiment get on, Miss Tavish?”

Carmen looked up quickly.

“Oh, I haven't any experiment,” said Miss Tavish, shaking her head. “It's just Mr. Delancy's nonsense.”

“I wish I had an experiment. There is so little for women to do. I wish I knew what was right.” And Carmen looked mournfully demure, as if life, after all, were a serious thing with her.

“Whatever Mrs. Henderson does is sure to be right,” said Jack, gallantly.

Carmen shot at him a quick sympathetic glance, tempered by a grateful smile. “There are so many points of view.”

Jack felt the force of the remark as he did the revealing glance. And he had a swift vision of Miss Tavish leading him a serpentine dance, and of Carmen sweetly beckoning him to a pleasant point of view. After all it doesn't much matter. Everything is in the point of view.

After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged a little in duets. The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely, the company was most agreeable. All said that. It had been so somewhere else the night before that, and would be the next night. And the ennui of it all! No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it, and Carmen saw it. That charming hostess had been devoting herself to Edith since dinner. She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work, asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it up again. She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for her kitchen. It was such a beautiful idea. But Edith did not believe in her one bit. She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more for the poor of New York than she does for--”

“Henderson?” suggested Jack.

“Oh, I don't know anything about that. Henderson has only one idea--to get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York. But I should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart. He is better than she is.”

It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was before them. Some one proposed the Conventional. “Yes,” said Carmen; “all come to our box.” The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys; the suggestion was a relief to everybody. Only Mr. Henderson pleaded important papers that must have his attention that night. Edith said that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the party.

“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of disappointment in his face.

“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way. Go, by all means, Jack.”

“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.

“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”

And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the modern world.

The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people to keep it going. At one o'clock in the morning Carmen and our friend Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part. Edith lay awake listening for Jack's return. And in an alley off Rivington Street a young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.

The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos. By the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl of her illusory robes, but any day--such are the whims of fashion--she might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give her a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on the social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she anything but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did the friends of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used to cut out the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson's domestic virtue and his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should Van Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set up, and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not, since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?