Part 12

"The man you asked her about. To Rafael Angelelli."

"Well, but I told her to talk to him."

"An' she did it. But the first time I heard her was just before you told her to."

"That same night?"

"He was in the kitchen with her when you came in. Why, he's here all the time! I don't care what she pretends to you, she's stuck on him, an' every girl in the house knows it."

Rapidly, but as fully as she had sketched the dialogue between Rose and Dyker, she now described the first conversation that she had overheard between her mistress and the Italian.

"I'd come down to graft a drink," she said, "an' I heard them from the stairs. That's how, after he'd left, I came to listen to you too."

Dyker had quailed under the revelation, thus made to him, of political danger. He now quivered in anger at the comments upon himself, somewhat colored, that Violet had placed in the mouths of Rose and Angel.

"I'll find out about this!" he said, struggling against the desperate arms flung swiftly around him to keep him on the sofa. "Let me go! By God, I'll have that drunken cat down here and squeeze the truth out of her throat!"

All the caution, all the craft, all that she had counted upon as the real Wesley Dyker seemed to have escaped him. His voice was still low, but in every other respect he was a raging beast.

She fought with him, mentally and physically.

"You can't get anything out of her that way," Violet urged, as the man twisted under her strong hands. "Of course she'll say it's all lies. And you'd only be warning her. You don't want her to know that you know; you want a chance to block her game."

Partly convinced by this argument and partly subdued by the physical restraint that accompanied it, Dyker ceased his struggles.

"But I want to be sure," he muttered sullenly.

"You can't be sure by goin' to Miss Rose."

"Well, I ought to tell her." The high tide of his anger was slowly subsiding, and the rocky Dyker that she had built on was beginning to show its crest above the still hissing waves. "Look here, Violet," he said, "I'm sorry I behaved like such a fool. I beg your pardon, but you must see that I have got to put this thing up to Rose."

"You forget your promise."

"No, I don't, but I must make sure."

Violet thought rapidly.

"Listen," she said; "I told you I wanted you to do something for me an' you gave your word you'd do it.--Will you?"

"Of course I will, only I'm thinking a little about myself."

"This will help you, too."

"What do you want?"

Violet drew a long breath.

"I want you to go over to the avenue right away," she said, "and buy me a long cloak and a hat and bring them back, and then take me out of here without a word to anybody. You needn't walk more'n three squares with me, an' then I won't bother you no more."

Dyker drew away and whistled softly. His face grew quite composed again. The heavy lids fell over his eyes.

"So that's it, is it?" he asked.

"I want to get away," said Violet.

"And so you've cooked up this little mess of lies to make me the goat, eh?"

Violet felt the sands slipping beneath her feet. She laced her fingers together till the knuckles bruised her flesh.

"Don't do that," she pleaded; "don't take it that way; it's true, what I told you, every word of it. I only want you to keep your promise to me."

She stopped with a sob, and waited.

Wesley reached calmly for a glass of wine, drank it, put down the glass, thrust his hands deep into his trousers' pockets, and, stretching out his long legs, regarded, humming, the toes of his shining pumps.

"I don't believe you," he said at last.

"But, Mr. Dyker----"

"It's too thin."

"Even if it was a lie," Violet despairingly persisted, "you ought to help me. Do you know who I am?"

"That's the point."

"Do you know how I was brought here?"

"I can guess."

"I was tricked. The man said he wanted to marry me. I didn't know. I believed him. An' they beat me an' starved me and did things I couldn't think about an' couldn't help thinkin' about. An' all I want is just for you to do me this one little favor. I won't bother you. I won't blow on you----"

"What's that?"

"Oh, you know I wouldn't blow on you! I couldn't. I want to forget the whole thing. I've got friends to go to who'll get me work. I only want you to get me out of the door and safe away."

Like most men of his sort Dyker, although ready enough to make a living out of the results of cruelty, hated the sight of cruelty's self. The girl's words touched, though lightly, his selfish heart.

"But I can't afford to help you," he protested. "You see how I'm tied up here. I can't have Rose jump on me now."

"You know she's jumping on you already. You know she's knifing you in the back. The only way you can stop her is by using what I've told you."

"Of course," said Dyker in the tone of a man thinking aloud, "if she really was playing both ends against the middle, I could pull her teeth by going straight to O'Malley and telling him so."

Violet did not wholly understand this, but she agreed immediately.

"Of course you could," she said.

"And I suppose I could have her pinched then, if you'd testify against her. Would you do that? Would you go into court?"

Violet's fingers closed spasmodically.

"Just give me the chanc't," she said fervently.

"And of course there are other girls who've been in the same scrape here?"

"There's a new one upstairs this minute."

"There is? Um. That's good." He rattled the money in his pocket. "Only, look here," he persisted, "if you have been telling the truth, it will probably make me solid with O'Malley, but if you haven't, I'll go clean to smash."

Violet saw the turn of affairs and, with hope's revival, her mind cleared immediately.

"I haven't told you all," she said, "and I guess the rest will make you sure enough."

"There's more then?"

"A lot."

"What is it?"

"Will you help me out of here?"

"If you convince me.--Let's see; the shops around here are still open.--Yes, if you convince me, you'll be out of here in half an hour."

It was her only chance. She did not hesitate. She told him the whole of what she had heard of the later assuring interview between Rose and Angelelli.

This time he listened quietly, his face inscrutable.

"That all?" he asked when she had ended.

"That's all," she said.

"It's the truth?"

"Ain't I sayin' it proof that it's true? How could I make it up? I don't know all that it means."

"You knew enough to pass it on to me."

"Lucky for you I did, too; but I don't know all it means--how could I?--and you do know, an' that ought to be proof enough that it's God's truth, Mr. Dyker."

She stopped. Her case was with the jury.

Dyker rose.

"Cassie!" he called.

Violet leaped to her feet and laid her hands on his arm.

"What are you goin' to do?" she whispered.

He silenced her with a gesture.

"What you want," he said.

Cassie put her black head in at the door.

"Cassie," he continued, flipping the maid another dollar, "I'm a little off my feed. I'm going to the drugstore on the corner and get fixed up."

"Thank you, Miste' Dyker.--Ah kin go fer you, Miste' Dyker," said the negress. "Thank you, sah."

"No, thanks, Cassie, I can go myself; I want the air. But you can do something else for me. You can just not let this girl run away from me. I know she would run if she could, but I like her too well to let her, so if anybody wants her, just you say she's in here and engaged for the evening by me. I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

He left one door as the willingly assenting Cassie closed the other, and Violet flung herself on the sofa and buried her face in the cushions, now fearful that the servant, notwithstanding their precautions, had overheard her, now afraid that Dyker would change his purpose and fail to return, and again dreading that he might betray her to Rose. Since the night she had waited for Max to telephone in the café, since the terrible morning that had followed, it was the longest quarter of an hour that she had known, but it at last dragged its quivering length away. The doorbell rang. Cassie passed through the room to find Violet sitting suddenly upright, and at once returned with Dyker, his summer raincoat tossed across his arm.

As the servant left them, he lifted the coat. Below it, not wrapped in the paper usual to a new purchase, was a dark cloak. He unrolled it, uncovered a beaver hat, and handed them both to the panting Violet.

"Here you are," he said quietly.

She seized them and began to put them on.

"No," he cautioned, "on second thought, I guess I'd better carry them. The parlor door's open, and Evelyn and Fritzie are in there with a couple of men. I'll go ahead and open the vestibule door and the front door. Then you come by as if you were going upstairs."

"Evelyn'll come out to see if I have any money."

"She'll never learn that, though here, by the way, is a ten-dollar bill that will come in handy.--The doors will be open and I'll be on the pavement. Keep only a yard behind me. Riley's at the other end of his beat, and I have a cab at the curb. Ready?"

She could not speak, but she nodded her russet head.

He passed before her up the rosy twilight of the hall.

Violet, following, her lips tight, her breathing suspended, her heart pounding against her breast, was dimly aware of her own soft footfalls sounding hideously loud, of the blast of light and laughter from the parlor.

Dyker flung wide the vestibule door.

"Good-night!" he called to Evelyn.

"Going? Good-night!" Violet heard the Englishwoman answer.

She heard Evelyn rise. She heard the front door open. She saw Wesley raise his arm.

She hurried by the parlor door, and then, instead of turning to the stairs, gathered up her red kimona and ran through the vestibule, through a patch of soft, fresh darkness, and was tossed precipitately into a cab into which Dyker followed her just as the horse, under a quick blow, dashed madly up the street.

At the open cab-window the night air beat upon her fevered face. She drank it deep into her thirsting lungs. It was the wine of freedom.

XIV

RIVINGTON STREET

The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it never sleeps.

The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army of the workers begins to scurry westward.

First come the market-laborers, with shoulders bowed and muscles cramped from the bearing of many burdens. Upon their heels march the pale conscripts of the sweatshops, their hands shaking, their cheeks sunken, their eyes hot from loss of sleep. Follow the sad-lipped factory-girls, women before their time, old women before their youth, and then the long line of predestined shop-clerks, most of them still in short skirts and all of them, befittingly, in mourning-black. Swiftly they go, the whole corps of them, the whole corps strangely silent.

The street is not emptied of them before it is filled again, now by solemn children on their way to school, children whose gaze is fixed, whose mouths are maturely set, and whose voices, when they are heard at all, are high, strident, nervous. As these go by, the shops begin to do business: the cheap food-shops, the old-clothes shops, the shops that sell second-hand five-cent novels for a copper, and the pawnbrokers'. The shawl-hooded housewives clutter in and out, selling first that they may buy afterward, and continuing like ants swarming about an ant-hill until noon strikes and the children parade stolidly away from school for luncheon, and back again.

At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves, but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours, selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts.

The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more.

Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze.

But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.

Into this street--into its noisiest quarter at its noisiest time--the cab that bore Violet on her way to liberty at last turned and proceeded as far under the flaring gasoline torches as the evening crowd of workers, buyers, and sellers, would permit. The girl, through the dark thoroughfares that had preceded it, had answered a score of questions, which Dyker had asked her, the fever of escape beating high in her breast and tossing ready replies to her heated lips; but now, in the roar and brilliance of Rivington Street's nocturnal traffic, there had come upon her a terror almost equal to that which had assailed her when, with Max for her guide, the lighted length of East Fourteenth Street had first unrolled itself before her. The city was again an inimical monster awaiting her descent from the cab, and the newly acquired habit of seclusion, the habit of the prisoner, recoiled upon her. Freedom was strange; it became awesome, and when the horse was stopped and Violet knew that she must soon fare alone, she cowered in a corner, breathing hard.

"Can't go no furder, boss," said the cabby, leaning far around from his seat. "Where to now?"

"Nowhere right away," answered Dyker. "Just stand where you are for a minute."

Then he turned to Violet.

"Now," he said, not unkindly, "I'm afraid I'll have to drop you here. It wouldn't do for me to figure publicly as an active agent in this case, you know. But you needn't worry. Just get out and walk to the next corner. Turn to your right, take the next cross-street to your left, go up the first narrow street you come to, and your friend's house ought to be about the third in the row. It will be a little dark, but you won't have any trouble finding it."

Violet hesitated.

"I hope I won't," she said.

"Surely not. If you have, just ask the way of the first policeman you see."

"Not a policeman, Mr. Dyker!"

"Of course, a policeman. He won't hurt you as long as you keep your cloak tight. Now, you're sure you've given me the right address?"

"I gave you the one the man gave me."

"Yes, but I mean you're not lying to me?"

Violet's wide eyes should have been sufficient denial.

"Why would I do that?" she asked.

"That's so; only I thought--well, I beg your pardon, Violet. You have my office-address on that card. I'll send for you in a day or two--be sure to be home every afternoon--and then we'll fix Madame Rose with the District-Attorney.--Good-by. Sure you're not afraid?"

Her gratitude would not permit her to acknowledge fear.

"Not afraid," she smiled, rather grimly.

"Then remember: the first street to your right, the next to your left, and then to your right again--third or fourth house in the row."

He opened the cab-door and alighted, holding out his hand.

She straightened her beaver hat, drew the folds of her dark cloak tightly over the betraying crimson of her kimona, and, helped by his grasp, followed him to the swarming curb.

"I--I don't know how to thank you," she said.

"Then don't try," returned Dyker, laughing easily. "You can make it all right with me when you testify against Rose."

She kept his hand a moment longer, partly in fear of the human multitude about her and partly in genuine gratitude.

"But I do thank you," she said.

Dyker, not too well liking the white light of publicity in which this little scene was being enacted, pressed her hand and dropped it.

"That's all right," he responded. "Just don't forget your promise." He stepped back into the cab. "Good-by, and good luck," he said.

"Good-by," he heard her answer, and then, with his head out of the cab-window, he saw her pause bewilderedly. "To your right," he cautioned.

He watched her turn. He saw her plunge into the crowd. He saw the crowd swallow her up.

"Take me over to my office," he ordered the driver, and added his address.

Once there, he dismissed the cab, climbed the steps of what seemed an old and modest little house, and, opening the door and turning into the front room, lit a gas-jet the flame of which revealed an apartment surprisingly new and arrogant. The walls were lined with new bookcases holding rows of new law-books, and surrounded by rows of new chairs. The flat-top desk in the center, at which his stenographer sat by daylight, was a new desk, with new wire-baskets upon it, and a new telephone, to which Dyker now immediately proceeded and called a number.

"Hello," he said into the transmitter, adopting the low tone that he always used in his wired conversations. "Is that Schleger's?--It is?--That you, Ludwig?--This is Dyker.--Yes, good-evening, Ludwig.--Yes, pretty good, thank you. How are you, and how's business?--That's good. Mrs. Schleger and the babies all right?--I'll bet that boy's gained three pounds!--He has? I'm glad to hear it. You're a wonder.--Yes.--That's what I said. And, say, Ludwig, is O'Malley anywhere around?--He isn't?--Hasn't been in this evening?--Oh! Well, I wonder where I can find him.--You don't? Perhaps he's at Dugan's place.--No, it's not anything important: I just wanted to take a drink with him, that's all. He's sure to be at Dugan's or Venturio's, but I guess I won't bother. Ever so much obliged, Ludwig.--Good-by."

In spite of his word, Dyker did, however, bother. He called three other numbers in his quest of the political boss, and when he found him, the underling made a pressing appointment for an important conference on the next morning, though what it was that he wanted then to discuss he carefully neglected to mention over a telephone-wire.

He hung up the receiver in a glow of satisfaction.

"And now," he said, "I think I'll get away for the night. I don't care to have any arguments with Rose for a day or two."

Yet, even as he said it, the telephone-bell uttered its staccato summons. He stood uncertainly beside the desk.

"She wouldn't have the nerve to use the wire," he argued. "Perhaps it's O'Malley with more to say."

Again the bell rang, and his curiosity overcame his caution. He took up the receiver.

"Hello!" he said sharply, and then his tone mellowed, for the voice that came to him across the hurrying New York night was the voice of Marian Lennox.

"Is that Mr. Dyker's office?" it asked.

"It is the head of the firm himself," he answered, "and mighty glad to hear from you."

"I am glad you're glad," the voice pursued, "because I want to ask a favor."

"It is as good as performed. What is it?"

"I have been down town, and remained longer than I intended, and I want you, please, to take me home."

"I thought you were asking a favor, not bestowing one. Where are you?"

"At the settlement."

"In Rivington Street?" Wesley set his teeth as he asked it.

"Yes."

"Very well, I'll be over right away."

He rang off and left the office. He was sorry that he had dismissed the cab, for he expected to need it when he reached the first stage of his journey; but the way was not long to the place that Marian had named, and, even had it been twice as far to the settlement, Dyker, who walked thither with the feet of chagrin, would not have remarked the distance.

In the midst of Rivington Street, in a house that used, long ago, to be a Methodist parsonage, a little group of devoted women are doing their best to redeem, by social activities, the people of the neighborhood from the benighted condition in which the people's lot is cast. This best has now been done for more years than a few, and the people, still considering it necessary to remain alive, and still knowing that to remain alive they must submit to the economic system imposed upon them, continue discouragingly unredeemed. But the devoted women, though they neglect the disease for its symptoms, persist as only feminine natures can persist.