Part 23

She walked westward, and then northward. She dodged across Fifth Avenue among the automobiles of careless, comfortable people on their ways to one place or another of swift enjoyment. She passed a notorious café at the warm windows of which she saw, seated at laden tables and opposite leering men, the painted faces of softly gowned women, the more successful examples of what she soon must be. And she came to hurrying Broadway through whose crowds she saw silently and cunningly darting, with smiling hate written on their tired, rouged lips, the girls whose dawn was the lighting of the street-lamps and from whom she wanted to ask for instruction in the one means of livelihood that remained to her.

Her soul was as weakened and vitiated as her body, and by much the same forces. Into her escape from Rose's, into her work at Mrs. Turner's, into her appeal to the employment-agency and her tasks at Mrs. Chamberlin's she had put every particle of strength that she could harness, and the result had always been failure. The social system was too mighty. She could not prevail against it. She must do its bidding, and since it was so impractically constituted as to bid her prey upon it, her sole solace must be found in preying fiercely.

She turned into a cross-street, full of refulgent drinking-places that beckoned by swinging doors, behind which were the voices of singers and through which passed, in alone and out with shame-faced men, unending streams of women with white faces and vermillion mouths and sadly encircled eyes. But Mary pressed westward, though she did not clearly know her intention until, having crossed two avenues, she found that the cafés gave place to small shops, and that the shops were giving place to tall, moldy buildings with long stairways before them, houses that had once, plainly, made homes, but that were now, as plainly, barracks for lodgers.

From one of these she saw come a slight girl under a huge hat heavy with two great plumes. Mary waited until this girl drew near, first hesitated when she observed that the girl was scarcely fifteen, then spoke when she noted the bedizened dress and the face of which the childish beauty had been trained to maturity and hardness.

"Can you tell me if I can get a room around here?" she inquired.

The girl's knowing eyes studied her.

"Hello!" she said. "When did you hit the road?"

"To-day. I want to find a room."

"Well, you can't go wrong. The house I live in is full-up; but you can ring 'most any bell along here and get what you want. There ain't no choice. One's as bum as another."

She nodded saucily and went on her way, and Mary climbed the steps of the first house she came to.

Her ring was answered by a woman that appeared, as far as Mary could observe in the faint light, to be about sixty years old. Her hair was gray and severely arranged; her dress was shabby, and she looked very tired. To Mary she did not seem to be at all the type that would conduct the sort of place which the wanderer just then needed.

"Can you rent me a room?" she nevertheless inquired.

"With privileges?" asked the woman.

It was a phrase new to its hearer, but she understood that it described the kind of room she wanted.

"Yes," she almost whispered.

But the woman did not lower her voice. Her descent, as Mary afterwards learned, had been by slow stages, and her complaisance had been enforced through a history that began with the establishment of a respectable boarding-house, when a reform-election had driven her husband from the police-force, passed through a widowhood imposed upon by absconding lodgers and raised house-rents, and ended by the admission of first one and then many patrons that were, though they wanted what she had not always cared to give, at least certain to pay what she had to turn over to the church-corporation that owned the property.

"I got a nice second-floor front, just a step from the bath-room, at eighteen dollars," she said.

"A month?" inquired Mary.

The woman regarded her as if she were somewhat of a curiosity.

"Certainly not: eighteen a week."

"Oh, I--I couldn't afford that."

"It's a nice room."

"Yes, I guess it is, but----"

"I might let it to you for fifteen, to start with."

"I couldn't afford it."

"Well, there's the parlor. It's only twelve, an'll be vacant to-morrow."

"I'm afraid I'll have to get a place for to-night. Haven't you anything cheaper?"

"You don't seem to know nothin' about prices, miss." The landlady appeared to reflect. "But there's the third-floor back hall-room," she added; "I can let you have it for seven, an' better than that you can't do anywheres."

Mary hesitated.

"You can easy make three times that much," the woman urged.

"Do you----" Mary wet her dry lips. "Do you think so?"

"Think so? Why, the lady that had that room for a whole year till last week made as high as twenty dollars a night. She moved out o' here to her own flat. But then, she was good-looking, of course."

Mary had entertained some vague notion of a small gas-stove, and some saving in the matter of meals; but this the landlady could in no wise permit.

"The insurance sharks won't allow it," she said, and concluded in a tone that showed the later fact to be of more importance: "Besides, it so runs up the gas-bills."

Mary said no more. She paid for a week in advance, and was shown at once to the cell she had leased so dearly.

It was a little, gaudily-papered room scarcely fifteen feet long and not much more than two-thirds that in width. A stationary washstand was so placed that the door could not open freely. At the single narrow window stood an unsteady table of no apparent purpose, and along the side a clothes-press and a narrow, pine bureau. The bed, however, was the chief feature of furniture, and that was large and comfortable.

"I'll give you clean sheets every Sunday morning regular," said the landlady; "but any changes you want between you'll have to pay for the washin' of."

She demanded, and received, twenty-five cents for a latch-key, added that she permitted no noise in the rooms, and departed, leaving Mary sitting on the edge of the bed.

The girl's experiences in the house of Rose Légère had prepared her but imperfectly for this adventure. It was a new business, and Mary did not know how to embark upon it. She was as lost as the chorus-girl, unused to the purchase of railway tickets and the engaging of "hotel-accommodations," who finds herself stranded in a small town.

She went to the bureau and looked at herself in its distorting mirror, in an effort to appraise her wares. Her hollow cheeks needed rouge. Her dull eyes needed belladonna. Her clothes were worn. She felt that she should start work immediately, but she was afraid. She went to bed and slept.

By the next evening she had spent all but a dollar and some few cents of the seven dollars and a quarter that had remained to her. With her bundles under her aching arm, she was returning to her lodging-house to prepare for work, when she stopped at the "Ladies' Entrance" of the corner-saloon and, going into a bare apartment for a drink of whiskey, found, seated at a table, as the only other customer, the girl of whom she had asked her questions on the night before.

The child smiled as pleasantly as her hardened face would permit.

"Hello, kid," she said. "How's tricks?"

"Hello," replied Mary.

"Sit down here," said the girl.

Mary accepted her invitation, and gave the grinning waiter her order.

"Got settled?" asked the girl, when the waiter had come and gone again.

"Yes," replied Mary, "I got a room."

"Where?"

"The fifth door from here."

The girl whistled. She was proud of her knowledge.

"That old cat Charlotte Michaels!" she commented. "I bet she stuck you."

"She charges me seven dollars a week for a third-floor back hall-bedroom."

"Hell, that's a steal. Come next door to where I am, next week. There'll be a better room there, then, for a dollar less."

Mary looked at the child. It seemed strange that she should be about to ask of one perhaps two years her junior for directions in the ways of the street; but she saw that the childishness before her was childishness without innocence, was even lined and scarred by wisdom. She wondered about her own face.

"I'm goin' to start out to-night," she said.

In the etiquette of this trade the workers ask no questions of one another and offer few biographies save those fictitious ones, the threadbare, unimaginative lies, which they reserve for their inquisitive purchasers. Mary's entertainer, therefore, put forward no inquiries save one:

"New in this town?" she asked.

"I'm new in the business," said Mary.

The child eyed her doubtingly.

"Come off," she good-naturedly replied.

"Yes, I am. I was in a house onc't, but I'm new to this, an' I ain't just sure how to go about it."

"Oh," said the child, "it's dead easy to learn the curves, but it's the hardest job in the world. Can't your fellow put you wise?"

"My fellow?"

"Sure, your fellow, your friend, your sweetheart. Honest, now; ain't you workin' for nobody?"

"No."

"Well, you ought to be. Most all the girls is. You can't get along right without one. Who's goin' to go your bail when you're pinched?"

"Will I be pinched?"

"About as often as onc't a month, kid--unless you let the cop call onc't a week."

"I guess I can stand him," said Mary. She was past the stage of objections.

"You'll have to pay him anyhow, you know."

"I thought I might have to."

"Then you thought dead right. Why don't you get a fellow? They's lots of them. They got political pulls. Of course, they don't leave you much money for yourself, but they certainly can fix things up for you."

"Have you a fellow?" asked Mary.

"I sure have," said the child, grandly. "My girl friend an' I have had one between us ever since we left school last June."

"Does he treat you right?"

"As good as any. He beats us up once in a while when we don't earn enough, or when he's more than usual lit up. But he keeps the cops away, an' he gets us good trade, an' he's true to the two of us. He'd ought to be; we make good money for him."

Mary listened in a kind of awe.

"You like him?" she asked.

"I love him," the child emphatically declared. "Lots of the girls hates their fellows, but daren't leave 'em because their fellows'd have 'em pinched right off--but I love mine. You ought to get one. I'll put you next."

"No," said Mary, "I think I'll wait; but I wish I knew the curves."

"Oh, hell; it's dead easy, I tell you." The child gulped her whiskey and went on: "You just put on your glad rags at eight o'clock an' walk Broadway from Twenty-third to Forty-second. If you can hustle, you can land half a dozen before one o'clock. When they give you the glad eye, take it, an' when they don't, just you walk by 'em sort of hummin' under your breath. Stop an' look in the store-windows, an' they'll come like flies. But always be sure to get your money first. Ask 'em two dollars if they look that strong, or one if they're cheap guys--but don't ever take a cent less'n fifty cents. I always gets the two-plunk myself, unless a piker stands out for a dark corner or hallway and tries the quarter game: then I go through his clothes for all he's got."

Mary rose, with averted eyes.

"Thank you," she said.

"Oh, that's all right," said the child. "You just take my tip, an' you'll make good."

And, if by managing, by the most detestible sort of work, to keep clothes upon her back, food in her stomach and a roof over her head, was making good, Mary did it. Everything fell out as the little girl had described. That night the adventurer, with no alternative, sank the last of her scruples, and, when her room-rent next fell due, she paid it and had a margin of several dollars to place in her stocking.

There was not, she found, very much to be saved, for the whole world seemed to mark her as legitimate prey.

First, the policemen were quick to see that she was an unprotected newcomer, and, one by one, to stop her and threaten her with arrest. In the beginning, she was afraid to slip them their tithes, and did it timidly and awkwardly; but, when she saw how jauntily and graciously they accepted payment, she had the bills always ready at the time when they were expected and, with the bills, the caresses that, not infrequently, had to accompany them.

Other expenses were proportionate. Rent gained upon the advance of prosperity. Showy clothes, if not the best, were a necessity, and the second-hand shops raised their prices on the suspicion of her profession. Rainy nights came, when there was almost no business to be done. The work was of a character that required sturdy food, and this must be bought in restaurants tacitly conducted for her class and charging accordingly. The men, she soon discovered, were as loath to buy her a supper as they were ready to buy her drinks, a condition the sole consolation of which was the fact that alcohol dulled whatever remained of the fine edge of sensibility.

Some of her cursory Antonies, regarding their transactions as they regarded their other business affairs, were honest, but most were honest only when they had to be, and to them Mary and her kind were beasts of burden not worthy of the stipulated hire. There were the lechers that wanted only to waste the busy minutes in unremunerative talk; there were the seekers that endeavored to secure through hideous formulæ of affection what they were too mean frankly to purchase; there were the hypocritical male animals that, above suspicion in their daylight life, considered the women of the night as fair game for cheating, and then there were the careful toads, who prided themselves upon their shrewdness, and who bargained and haggled as a man would be ashamed to bargain and haggle for a dog.

It was a trade of hard hours, hard walking, and hard drinking, and, in the glaring cafés where she often sat with her fellow-workers waiting to be smiled at by the hunters, Mary, though she met many girls that fared worse than herself, met few that, when truthful, told of faring better. The woman that quitted her landlady's care for "a flat of her own" represented the ideal toward which this whole army was hoping, but was an ideal mythical.

Nearly all were working in health and out, and saving nothing. Nearly all were in bondage to taskmasters that slunk along after them through the streets, saw them strike a bargain, waited in the shadows of a nearby house until the wage was paid, and then came forward, before the customer had turned the corner, to exact their tribute. Born, through the effects of a wasteful industrial system, in cellars upon beds of rags, herded as children in attics where a family of ten slept in a space too small for five, bred in poverty, always underfed and never properly protected from the weather, some of them were used to hardship that no decent social justice would ever have permitted. Others had been lured from comfortable homes. Still others were the faster fettered because they had gone from homes too respectable to allow of any return. But almost everyone, through fear of exposure, dread of jail and reformatory, and awe of their owners' political influences, was the chattel of a slavery as thorough as that of which Max Grossman was a minor instrument.

The majority of these toilers were ready to receive, or had long since received, the seeds of tuberculosis; few could continue their work for five years, and ninety-five per cent., as a drunken young college undergraduate one evening cheerfully informed Mary, were suffering from one or other, and sometimes from all three, of the trio of diseases common to their business. Out from those stuffy bedrooms and those smoke-clouded, song-filled cafés, men carried the scourging social illnesses to innocent wives and to unborn children destined to dwarfed or sightless lives. The sufferer might believe himself cured and bear infection years later.

"Now, take yourself, for instance," the lad had resumed, his cheeks still rosy with youth, but his eyes aflame with liquor. "I know something about these things; but I couldn't tell whether you were free or not. You might be sick a long time before even you could tell, and then you wouldn't risk starvation by telling about it. You might be sick right now for all I know. But look out for the worst of all!"

Mary heard him with as little heed as she had heard most men. She had learned all that he said from women who knew more of it than, she hoped, this boy would ever know, and she had been well assured that it was a danger that no preventive could wholly defy and no care be certain to escape.

After all, she used to reflect, nothing much mattered. She had nothing pleasant to look forward to and, therefore, she wisely refrained, save for one advancing idea, from looking forward. She had no past that did not have its pain for her vision, and, therefore, with this sole exception, she resolutely kept her eyes upon the present day.

Yet gradually one great passion was growing within her. That process of thought which had begun in her encounter with Philip Beekman, when she left his mother's employment, had been hastened in its growth by what Marian Lennox had said and failed to do, and the shock of the girl's embarkation upon her new profession had only momentarily retarded it. She was not large enough--few of us are--to see the conditions behind the individual, nor yet greatly to concern herself with individuals that did not directly concern her; but she saw clearly her own plight, and now saw, or thought she saw, that this plight was due entirely to the machinations of the man who had taken her from her home and brought her to New York. She could have loved him, and so she hated him; she could still feel a tenderness for what he might have been, so she permitted herself to feel only animosity for what he had proved himself to be. To him she traced directly all that had befallen her, and as she could not go beyond him, so from him, she slowly and finally resolved, she would exact payment. That thought waxed in her tired mind; it was fed with every throe of her pained body until it dominated her circumscribed outlook upon the world. It even saved her from suffering, because it so possessed her that it armored her against all lesser things. She had found, at last, a purpose in life.

It was almost coincident with her realization of this that Mary realized something else. She went immediately to a physician.

Dr. Helwig, a man with an enormous paunch and a round face and triple chin, was one of the many excellent practitioners that depend for their living--and it is a good one--upon the class to which Mary belonged. He treated the matter for what it was: a commonplace in his day's work. At the end of a week he confirmed her fears.

For a moment she reeled under the blow. The bookcases with their ponderous volumes in dark bindings, the shelves burdened with phials, the glass medicine-case, the convertible table for minor operations, the crowded desk, and even the fat physician before it, seemed to whirl in a mad saraband.

"Come, come!" she heard the doctor say, as he thrust an uncorked bottle of smelling-salts under her nose.

"How long will it last?" she panted.

"We must keep up our treatment for six months or a year," he answered. "Meantime, diet and quiet. No liquor. If you were a millionaire, I'd prescribe a long sea-voyage or a trip to Hot Springs."

Out of the chaos of her brain a sudden idea was shaping.

"What," she inquired, "about other people catching this?"

He knew her business perfectly, and he knew that what he had to say on this point would weigh but little in the scale against want. Nevertheless, he made the common answer.

After that she listened to all the instructions that he gave her. More than ever now she had her purpose in life.

XXVI

"THE LEAST OF THESE"

A week later, in a lamp-lighted street, Mary and Carrie met. Each girl was too conscious of her own business to remark that it was the business of her acquaintance, and each tried to avoid the other; but before recognition was complete they were face to face. Silence was confession. Mary spoke.

"Hello," she said, "it's a long time since I seen you. How are you, anyways?"

Carrie, though still a homely girl, wore a close-fitting coat that made the best of her figure. Her hat was wide and new and, as she answered, she turned from the light.

"Pretty well," she said, and paused short.

"I guess," said Mary, "you thought it was queer, my never comin' to see you; but I haven't had a single chance. I'll come soon, honest I will. How's Katie?"

"I don't know," Carrie slowly answered, "I'm not living with her any more."

"You ain't? Since when ain't you?"

"Oh, I don't know--a couple of weeks."

"You two didn't scrap?"

"No. I had to go away." And then, to divert the fire, Carrie added: "Are you still working at that place the Settlement-people got for you?"

"No, I left that long ago. Have you gone back to the shirtwaist-factory?"

"I couldn't: the strike was never settled, and, anyhow, they wouldn't have taken me back if I'd been willing to go."

Mary looked at the long coat and the gray hat.

"But, say," she began, "you don't look----"

Her eyes dropped to Carrie's and, suddenly, she knew. Her voice softened.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I had to do it, too."

Silently they touched hands. The Lithuanian's breast rose and fell quickly.

"I couldn't do anything else," said Carrie, but only in explanation, not in extenuation or excuse. "There was no other work I could do."

"I know," said Mary.

"And everywhere I went," continued Carrie, "he followed me. He was always just behind me when I walked, always just around the corner when I stood still. When I was dizzy and hungry, he always looked well fed and always had the money in his hand. He waited, waited, waited."

"You mean your fellow?" Mary asked.

Carrie assented. "If you can call him that," she said. "He has two or three others working for him, or he'd be across the street now. I'm different from them--freer. I'm not afraid of him, and so he is a little afraid of me."

Mary took the girl's arm.

"They won't let us stop this way on the pavement," she said. "Come in here and have a drink."

They went into the women's room of one of the quieter saloons. Mary, mindful of the doctor's directions, took only carbonated water, but Carrie ordered whiskey.

Mary, with her stomach crying out for the alcohol, and, in that wrenching desire, nearly seizing her companion's liquor, sipped the water.

"I've quit it," she averred. "It don't pay."

"Most of the men make you take it," said Carrie.

"Yes," Mary admitted, "but you can chuck it on the floor if you're fly." She took another sip of the water, and then asked: "Why don't you shake this man if you're not scared of him. You can come with me, you know."

"It wouldn't be good business," Carrie declared. "I need somebody with influence to look after me in case I'm arrested."

Mary was silent for a minute, thinking.

"Perhaps you're right," she granted; "there's one of 'em I'd like to find."

"Who is it?"

"I'll tell you sometime.--Look here: I don't feel like workin' Broadway to-night, an' I've got some money. Let's do a dance-hall."