Part 25

"I know, Mary," he stammered; "but, you see, this here feller vhat I tol'----"

She laughed again. She thrust her arm through his and turned his face uptown.

"Forget it!" she said. "Don't you worry, Max; I ain't goin' to rake things up, if that's what's souring you. Life's too short. All I want is a talk and a drink."

Half reluctantly, he let her lead him; but she could lead him and that sufficed her.

He lit an American cigarette and puffed it nervously.

"I've just been in there," she said, with a backward jerk of her head in the direction of the police-court.

"There?" Max was not surprised, but he added: "Vhat vas you doin' in there?"

"What do you think?" responded Mary. She herself was thinking rapidly--about other things.

"You vasn't in drouble?"

"I guess you would call it that."

"Pinched?"

"Yes."

He had asked her no questions about her past--but concerning her present he chanced a query.

"Mary," he inquired, "do you mean they god you up fer your beesiness?"

"That's about it," she said.

"But vhy don't you square you'self vith the goppers?"

"I don't know. I--I was broke, Max."

"I vish I gould _help_ you, Mary," he said, his curiosity cooling at the thought of an appeal for assistance.

She saw it, and it amused her.

"Can't you do it?" she asked, dropping her voice into a whine.

He tried to draw away from her, but her linked arm held him affectionately fast.

"I been havin' rotten luck," he declared; "somethin' awful. I ain't got hardly only the money vhat's in my _glothes_."

"Well, then," said Mary, looking at the clothes and knowing well that they somewhere concealed an ample yellow sum, "why don't you take me on your staff?"

"Mary," he cried, trying to spread his hands, and failing dismally with the one that her pinioning arm hampered, "vhat do you think I am? A millionaire? I ain't got no staff."

"Come off!" she bantered.

"I ain't--honest."

"Still in the other line?" she persisted. "I thought you might be trottin' 'em on the street--they say there's more in it. Why do you stick to supplyin' the flats and the houses?"

Her voice was the perfection of good nature, but he writhed under it.

"Mary!" he pleaded.

"Well," she said, disregarding his tone, and keeping his arm fast in her own, "you do supply 'em, don't you? I know one fellow who makes his livin' goin' the rounds, findin' what girls is sore on their madams an' then gettin' a commission by sneakin' 'em out an' changin' 'em to new flats. He lets on he's sellin' kimonas, but one sample's lasted him three years."

"Mary!" repeated Max, more weakly.

"That's the truth," she said, and then: "But can't you start street-work an' take me on your staff?"

Again he looked at her,

"No," he answered.

"Not young enough lookin' now, eh?" She was still smiling.

"Ach," he protested, "you oughtn't nod to be so _hard_ on a feller. If you chust knowed----"

But she had gone far enough, and she would not let him finish. They had reached a saloon near to her new lodging-place, and she paused. There was, and she knew it, no word in his excuse that she would have credited. Nor did she mean, just yet, to let him see her hatred. In order that he might the better see it at a later moment, she wanted now to quiet his naturally ready fears. She had found that she could harass him, and that, for the present, was all that she needed to know.

"Never mind," she said, "I told you I wasn't goin' to rake up nothin', an' I mean to keep my word. Come on in here. This is a quiet place. You're goin' to buy me a drink, anyhow, just to show that we're still friends."

He brightened at this indicated avenue of escape.

"_Sure_ we're still friends," he declared, "an' you can haf all you vant to _drink_, too."

She slipped her hand into his--she could do it, she had learned, without the dumb flesh seeming to shrink from that contact--and pressed it.

They went into the deserted "ladies' room" of the saloon to which she had referred, and sat down there, facing each other under a light turned kindly low.

"Vhiskey?" asked Max.

"Yes," said Mary.

"Two of 'em," ordered Max of the waiter that had answered his ring, "an' don'd make 'em so _stingy_ like most you fellers ofer this vay."

The man brought the liquor, placed it before them, and went away.

"Vell," said Max, raising his glass, smiling his thin smile, and apparently forgetting that he had ever denied whiskey; "here ve are, _ain't_ it?"

If Mary was remembering another night and another drink she did not say so; instead, as Max tilted his sleek head far back between his shoulders and dropped the whiskey down his throat, her hand watched for the instant when his gray eyes were on the ceiling and that instant poured the liquor from her own glass to the floor. When her companion's head came forward her fingers, wrapped about the glass, were just withdrawing it from her lips.

"I can drink that better'n I used to," she said.

Max grinned again. So long as she did not upbraid him for his part in it, so long as she did not go into the details of its earlier stages, he had no objection to hearing of her past, was even languidly curious about it, and was certainly sorry that it had not brought her to more seeming prosperity.

"You sure didn't take that like you vasn't _used_ vith it," he said.

"I'll take another just to show you how," she answered, and pressed the nearest button.

This time his eyes were on her and she had to drink. But she did not scruple: so long as she retained her head and Max lost his, the effect of the alcohol on her system concerned her but little.

They had a third drink, for "old time's sake," as Mary suggested, and this she succeeded in pouring down her dress-front. At the fourth, Max began to show signs of fear that he would have a drunken woman on his hands, but Mary's patent sobriety soon reassured him, and overcame his protests against a fifth by recalling his promise of liberality.

His cold eyes sparkled into a faint light. Little spots of red appeared in the olive of his cheeks. He felt the advance of the enemy in his veins and tried to go; but Mary began an imaginative narrative of her recent experiences and insisted on his listening. When he at last successfully interrupted that, she twitted him with being able to drink less than his pupils, and Max was once more forced to order. He was not drunk, or nearly drunk, but the fine edge of his discretion was dulled: he saw in the woman, who had now moved to his side, nothing that, whatever motives might be at work, could possibly harm him; he found something ludicrous in the situation. Her looks seemed better than they had appeared an hour earlier, and her tentative advances flattered him.

Mary, though she had drunk more than was good for her, had managed to spill enough liquor to retain all the sobriety she needed; but, when they at last rose, she swayed a little unsteadily.

"Now," she said, "you'll just buy me a half-pint for my head in the mornin', an' then you'll walk as far as my door."

Still enjoying the piquancy of the affair, he obeyed her. He even consented to come to her hall-bedroom with her--a room the exact reproduction of that which she had formerly rented farther uptown--and there, forgetful of the provision against the morning, they finished the half-pint.

At last he stood up from the bed on which he had been sitting while she, opposite, used the single chair.

"Vell," he said, grinning; "it's been good to see you again, und maybe I'll gome back some efenin'."

She rose before him. The light was at her back and her face resumed, as she stood there, some furtive traces of its earlier grace. The eyes seemed to soften, the cheeks were a natural pink beneath their coating of rouge, and her russet hair, curling about her face, relieved the harder outlines and cast a gentle shadow around the neck. She spread out her arms.

"Kiss me," she said.

He smiled and leaned condescendingly toward her.

"What's your hurry?" she murmured.

He looked at her, and the weak light and the strong liquor stood her in good stead.

"I ain't in no hurry," he smiled.

She met him smile for smile--and then, in a sudden sense of triumph, she flung back her head and laughed.

It was not until three hours later that he finally left her, but he left hurriedly, for the remorseless gray light of morning was coming in at the window, and it fell upon her as she wrapped a soiled pink kimona around her shivering figure and slipped her feet into a pair of rundown Turkish slippers.

"Good-by," he said, looking away from her.

"Wait a minute," said Mary. "I'll go with you to the door."

She did go. She followed him down the dark stairway, creaking noisily under their shamed feet, and she stood for a moment in the black hall, holding the brass knob of the door, as he passed to the step outside. Mary slipped the dead-latch, ready to bolt the door.

"Max," she said.

He turned quickly, nearly knocking over, as he did so, the milk-bottles that were lined, in a white row, upon the step.

"Yes?" he returned, and grinned sheepishly.

She thrust out her towsled head and looked up and down the gray morning street. The block was empty. She drew her head clear of the door. She was still trembling, but from neither cold nor fear.

"You ain't goin' without kissin' me?" she asked.

But a reaction of disgust had seized him.

"Yes, I am," he said.

Mary's one hand tightened on the knob; the other flattened itself against the nearest panel of the door, ready to push hard.

"All right," she replied, with a sudden change in her voice that, still low, became tense and metallic. "You think I'm--I'm done for, Max. Well--_you're done for, too!_"

The man's jaw dropped. His olive face was ashen. His eyes stared.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Mary's mouth was wreathed in a smile.

"You know," she answered.

Max retreated so suddenly that he nearly fell down the stone steps.

"You've--you've----" he gasped.

"Yes," said Mary.

"It's a lie! You're tryin' to scare me!" His jaw worked spasmodically. "It's a damned lie!" he repeated.

"You don't believe me?" the girl inquired.

If she had looked for heroics, if she had feared melodrama, she was as yet disappointed. The knees of Max shook under him; he was in abject terror.

"It's a lie," he muttered over and over. "It's a damn' lie!"

"Think what you please," said Mary. She was still smiling, still serene. "You believed I'd forgot, didn't you? Well, I didn't forget, Max Grossman, an' now you'll remember. If you don't yet think I'm givin' you a straight story, all you have to do is just one thing: _wait_."

Max uttered an inarticulate cry and threw himself at her, but he only bashed his head against the closed door.

Mary had shut it, and in time. Behind it, in the dark hallway, she lay half fainting.

"It's the last of you, Max," she laughed.

And it was.

XXVIII

HUSKS OF THE SWINE

Mary was too ill to go to work that night, and on the night following she was no better. The shock, the spasm of success, the recoil, not moral but physical, after the satisfaction of a supreme desire--these things were, of themselves, enough to leave her prostrate. But, in addition to these, she had, while standing at that open door, contracted one of those heavy colds to which she was now rendered especially susceptible. Through long hours of the day and the darkness she tossed among the hot sheets of her bed, sometimes with her teeth clicking in a chill, again with her body burning in a fever, but always revolving in her seething brain the details of the vengeance that she had wrought.

Her physical sufferings mattered little to her. There were hours when she was wholly incapable of feeling them. When the inertia of the state of reaction began at last to wear away, it left her with a glow of recollection so great that there seemed no place for lesser sensation. She had accomplished her great work, she had achieved her mission. What she had done had been done solely for her own heart's sake; there had been no delusion of a celestial command, no distorted thought of a social duty; yet, the impulse, however utilitarian, had been supreme, and its end filled her with a sense of triumph that, for want of the proper title, she was sure was happiness.

A wiser head and an unwounded heart would have known enough of life to see that even Max Grossman was not entirely to blame. A better brain could have looked back into the past. It could have seen Max as the type of all his kind, the symbol of every one of the great company of slavers, the inevitable result of a system blind both to its own interests and to the interests of the race. It could have seen the child, one of half a dozen born to a woman that could not, properly, have cared for three. It could have seen that child neglected, dirty, forgotten, locked, by day, in the bedroom where the whole family tried vainly to sleep by night, learning the highest facts of life from the worst of teachers: the cramped childish brain--and going out, at last, upon the street, with passions prematurely developed and perverted. It could have seen the social order shape that child into society's enemy: the starved boy-pickpocket sent to the monstrously misnamed "reformatory"; the same child branded as a criminal, with none to shelter or to trust him, and with a knowledge, gained in the state's own institution, which fitted him to be only a crafty gorilla to harass the state. It could have seen the fatal line of least resistance as clearly in the resultant man as it is seen in the life of him that does no more than wreck a bank or steal a corporation, and, hideous as its course is in the one instance, it would have seen that the line was the same in all.

But Mary never doubted her justice, and never regretted it. One only thought troubled her: she was afraid that, by telling Max, she might have given him a warning sufficiently early to defeat her own ultimate purpose. It was a large part of her plan that he should know whose hand had struck him, and, for a man in his business, the only way in which she could make that knowledge certain was the way that she had followed. Yet what if he were in time to profit by her information? What if, even were he too late, he should guard and doctor himself with proper caution? She turned the questions over and over in her mind, but she had always to end in the faith that the worst had happened.

Sometimes, in the moments of exhaustion from the mad round of these inquiries, she reverted for relief to matters that touched her less nearly, and endeavored to occupy herself with the affairs of others. She thought of Dyker, and without resentment. She knew that he would use her written retraction to regain Marian's confidence, and she hoped that he would be successful. Again she fell to speculating upon the fate of Carrie Berkowicz and to wondering what had become of Katie. But upon her own past and present she did not permit herself to dwell, and always, with the certainty of a machine, her brain recurred to Max and her vengeance on him.

On the third evening, however, her landlady, entering with supper, reminded her, without mincing matters, that the rent was due, and Mary recalled that her little stock of money was exhausted.

"Can you wait till to-morrow morning, Mrs. Foote?" she asked.

Mrs. Foote was an ample woman, with round cheeks and robust frame, whose only dissipations were an over-indulgence in ritualism, babies, and the hospital. She had a high-church cleric to whom she confessed the sins of her neighbors; a wraithlike husband whose sole occupation appeared to be that indispensable to the regular increase of her family--and whom she would otherwise have failed altogether to tolerate--and such a passion for being ill that she could never quite believe in the illnesses of others.

"I can wait just that long, Miss Morton," she said; "but I'm sufferin' so from rheumatism in my fingers that I just know my old gastric trouble is comin' on ag'in, an' that'll mean another of them hospital-bills."

Mary raised her aching head.

"You won't have to wait any longer," she answered.

"I'm glad of it, Miss Morton," responded Mrs. Foote, "for there was a young lady lookin' at this room to-day an' she offered me a dollar more a week for it, an' I wouldn't like to lose you."

"You won't lose me," said Mary, to whom even sustained conversation was physical pain. "I'm goin' out to-night, an' I'll have plenty for you by the mornin'."

"You're sure?" asked the landlady.

"Of course I am. It'd be a pity if I couldn't earn that much."

Mrs. Foote looked at Mary's face and seemed to doubt the foundation for her assurance.

"Well," she sighed, "I certainly hope you can."

For some minutes after the door closed, Mary lay still. She had again been brought face to face with the most poignant of tragedies, the tragedy of living.

An hour earlier, had she questioned herself, she would have said that she was careless of life, that neither this earth nor the quitting of it interested her, that continued existence was a matter of indifference. Then she was in that state of exultation above things mundane which is produced only by great sorrow, great joy, or the great revenges that are both grief and triumph. But now the words of the landlady had brought her back from the indulgence of contemplation to the necessity of action. Mary's insidious, implacable disease had completed what her business had begun, and what her business alone would have completed far more slowly. The few emotions that she was now capable of feeling were the more intense because of their rarity, but their intensity was equaled by their brevity and, when the moment had gone, it left her even more of a moral weakling than it had found her.

She knew Mrs. Foote and her tribe too well to deceive herself as to what must happen should the morning dawn upon an empty stocking. Life held nothing for which Mary greatly cared, but the instant of death contained all of which she was afraid. She did not greatly want to harm others by plying her trade in her present condition, but she could not think of others. Each step would be a separate wound to her tortured body and her throbbing head, but she understood that the landlady had to wring out the rents by the means that conditions had forced upon her; and so the worst of fears, the fear of poverty, which is the fear of death, took this sick woman from her bed, dressed her in her best frock, and sent her out into the street.

Along Sixth Avenue, where fortune had often, theretofore, been kind to her, she met no significant glances. A passing girl or two, having missed her for the last few evenings, proffered a casual sympathy; but that was all. Through the open doors of the Haymarket, she turned in, but there even the women at first disregarded her. Several men that she recognized in the boxes of the gallery around the little hall nodded, but immediately looked away. The one man that she happened to know better than any of the others did not appear at all to remember her, and his neighbor, who had frequently accompanied her, signaled elsewhere.

She was lonely. She approached two women who were circling the floor, arm in arm. She addressed them with the familiarity of the craft.

"Hello," she said.

The one woman smiled, but her companion, a formidable, tailor-made personage, swelled with dignity.

"You better beat it," she declared.

Mary flushed.

"What's eatin' you?" she demanded.

"You don't belong here," the woman answered. She made a lofty survey of Mary's finery, and then added: "Goin'?"

Mary's heart sickened, but she stood her ground.

"No," she said, "I ain't."

The floor-manager was passing. The social arbiter turned to him.

"Will," she asked, and her shrill voice seemed to carry over all the room; "what's this place comin' to? Throw that Fourteenth Street woman out o' here!"

This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard. She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in a great ulster.

"Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?"

The man looked at her and swore.

"You must think I'm blind," he ended.

She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money. She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced; and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal. It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next dark figure that she stopped--she did not look at his face or care what sort of face it was--answered her with sharp laughter.

"A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old girl!"

"A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously.

"I got just a half--an' you ain't worth a cent more."

She took it--what would she not have taken?--and she worked on into the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond the sum due for rent.

During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end, there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but the craven passion for life.

Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest.

Mary twisted her helpless hands.

"How can I afford to take it?" she asked.

"Save your money," said he, patting her thin shoulders, and chuckling prosperously. "You girls never put aside a cent."

"We don't earn enough."

"Poof! That's what you all say. I know--I know. We men aren't such fools as you take us for."