Part 26

But Mary, as each evening she made up before her little mirror, noted the gradual depreciation of her wares; each week she found it harder to pay rent and retain enough money for food. Mrs. Foote seemed to come every day, instead of every seventh, and yet each night business grew more difficult. Whenever Mary missed a few evenings, or whenever she changed her hunting-grounds, the police needed fresh payments. She surrendered one uptown cross-street after another. At last she deserted Broadway and patrolled only that Fourteenth Street which the woman at the Haymarket had so scornfully referred to and which had so wonderfully burst upon Mary's sight when she first stepped from the Hudson Tunnel upon the surface of Manhattan.

Spring, summer, and autumn passed, and a lean winter followed them. Mary caught another cold and was ill for a week. She went to work too soon and had to go back to bed for several days and remain idle for several nights. At last, with the ancient fear of the white race--the fear of that poverty which is death--gnawing at her vitals, she struggled to her feet and tramped once more along Fourteenth Street from Sixth Avenue to Third.

But now the sword descended. Even the Fourteenth Street saloon best known for her purposes gave no fish to her net, and Eighth Street was little better. She was too tired to go farther; she had, the next morning, to offer Mrs. Foote only a third of what was due.

The landlady, whose bulk seemed to crowd the hall-bedroom, leaned heavily against its frail door. Mary thought the woman's slow, brown eyes more than commonly suspicious and her round face implacably hard. The tenant, with all explanation frozen upon her lips, handed over the clinking bits of money. They fell into the big, extended palm as a few drops of water might fall into a basin. Mrs. Foote began slowly to count the coins.

Mary watched, in fascinated silence, the counting of those few pieces of silver, each one of which seemed stained with her blood. She saw the landlady's expression change to one of incredulity. She saw the counting repeated.

Mrs. Foote again thrust out her grimy fingers.

"What's this?" she demanded.

"It's----" Mary looked at the floor. "It's the rent," she concluded, in a whisper.

"_What's_ the rent?"

"That's all I have--just now. I thought--I thought, considerin' how long I've been here, you might wait a day for the rest, Mrs. Foote."

The landlady opened her hand, and Mary's little store of coin dropped to the bed.

"I can't take this," she said.

"You mean," asked Mary, with a quick gasp of hope, "that you'll let me keep it till I get the rest?"

"No, I don't mean nothin' of the sort," said Mrs. Foote. "I mean I've got to have the whole bill--right now."

Mary's heart sank.

"That's all I have," she said.

She had sunk to a seat on the tumbled bed, beside her scattered coins. Her thin hands were locked across her knees; the dirty pink kimona slipped lower from her shoulders at every frequent cough, and her eyes sought those of Mrs. Foote in dumb appeal. Her russet hair fell dully disordered about her hollow cheeks, and the rouge on her lips was purple.

"I'm sorry," pursued Mrs. Foote, who was too used to such incidents greatly to concern herself; "but I've got to make my living like anybody else does."

"I was expectin' some money this evenin'," said Mary.

"Hump!" sniffed the landlady.

"You don't believe that?"

"I don't care, Miss Morton; I can't care."

"But I"--Mary's fingers knotted tighter about her knees--"I was promised it," she lied, "an' I'm dead sure to get it then."

"I've heard that so many times," said Mrs. Foote, "that I knowed it by heart three year' ago."

"I could pawn somethin'," suggested Mary.

The landlady swept the bare room with a critical glance.

"What?" she asked.

There was no adequate answer to be made. Mary had tried to pledge her coat a few days before, and had been offered only an inadequate twenty-five cents for it.

"Then you won't--you can't wait?"

"No, I can't. I'm a sick woman myself; my rent's due, Miss Mary, an' the honest truth is that there's such a lot of women wantin' rooms that I'd only be doin' a injustice to my children not to take in a lady that could pay prompt--for a while."

Mary said nothing more. She packed her few belongings into her trunk, left it in the hall to be called for, and, as the chill evening fell, went away from the house with no idea where she was to find a lodging for the night. For an hour, though she was still weak, and the time was as yet so early, she walked up Broadway and, in the Forties, turned eastward for a few blocks, and so south again. Not far from the Grand Central Station she saw a little crowd gathered at a corner, and she stopped, rather for the luxury of standing still than from any curiosity.

The place was a church. Colored lights streamed from its rich stained-glass windows. Through its swinging doors there stole the scent of flowers and the sound of delicate music. A long row of carriages, the coachmen walking up and down to keep warm, stretched far around the corner.

Mary, shivering, worked her way quietly through the group of men and women on the sidewalk. In order to avoid a particularly entangled portion of the press, she started to walk along the steps by the tower-entrance, and then, seeing a side-door open, she listlessly turned toward it and looked in.

Far away up the vaulted nave the altar stood, white with damask and yellow with candles. The chancel was a garden, the whole building heavy with scent. Acolytes in scarlet were grouped about the robed priests. The choir had risen and, preceded by a lad that bore aloft a great brass cross, were forming into a singing procession, which slowly filed down the center aisle.

With a subdued scuffle and swish, the congregation also rose as the double line of choristers moved between them. Women craned their necks and men, pretending to look stolidly ahead of them, looked really out of the corners of their eyes. The choir, at the main door, divided and stood still. High overhead a deep-toned organ was playing the wedding-march from Lohengrin, and through the respectful line of white-clad boys there moved a man of regular features with lowered lids that hid his eyes, and a crisp brown mustache, which concealed his lips, and, on his arm, in the costume of a bride, a tall, graceful, pure woman, whose face was like a Greek cameo and in whose hand was a huge bunch of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley.

The fingers of a policeman touched Mary's arm.

"You'll have to get back," he said. "The people'll be comin' out in a minute."

But Mary did not wish to move.

"I've got a right here," she answered.

"You?" The policeman looked at her, and then laughed. "What right?" he asked.

"Isn't that Miss Lennox?"

"It was."

"And Judge Dyker?"

"Sure."

"Well, I gave him his marriage-license."

The policeman's good-nature was amused, but he forced her back to the street.

"No use," he said.

"An' I guess," said Mary bitterly--"I guess I paid for the bride's bouquet."

He did not reply, nor would she have heard him had he spoken, for in the stream of lesser guests now flowing from the rear of the church, which had been assigned to them, she was met by Katie Flanagan.

Not the piquant Katie of that photograph which used to adorn the bureau in the shabby tenement of bachelor Hermann Hoffmann, or the saucy girl of the second-hand clothing-store, or yet the frightened clerk that had at first evaded and at last defied the whiskered Mr. Porter. Those days were patently passed; Katie, like many another strong soul, had faced temptation and conquered it; and in the stead of the old days had come new days that brought a maturity and a dignity with which Katie was consciously satisfied. Her blue eyes were as glad as Mary remembered them, but their happiness was calm; her black hair was gathered in a formal knot, and her gown, though a better gown than that she used to wear, was of a simplicity almost severe.

Nevertheless, when she saw Mary, who sought evasion, Katie came frankly forward with outstretched hand. She recognized with regret, the change in her former acquaintance, but, knowing, as she must have known, its cause, she decided to ask no questions concerning it, and, if she offered no assistance, she at least proffered no advice.

"I just come to see the last o' Miss Marian," she explained. "Near the half of old Rivington Street's been tucked in here among th' swells to give the good word to her--Jews an' Irish--an' if the rabbis won't mind for the sheenies to come to such a heathen church, I thought Father Kelly might manage to forgive me."

Mary's brain was just then too dull to make any but a commonplace answer.

"You're lookin' well," she said.

"I ought to be, though there's a youngster expected. I tell Hermann--we was married a few weeks after last election--I don't know how we'll keep a family; but he just whistles an' says we'll make out some way, an' I guess we will."

"I'm glad," said Mary, "that you're married."

"Well, so am I--most of the time. Of course, the man has some queer ideas, but I'm doin' me best, with Father Kelly's help, to get 'em out of the head of him, an' nowadays, when he goes to one of them Socialist meetin's by night, I make him make up by goin' with me to early mass next mornin'."

She paused and surveyed again the pale woman before her. Essentially Katie had not changed. She had still, and would always have, the big, kind heart and the ready hand of her earlier days. But her condition had altered, and Mary's had evidently again fallen; she looked through an alien atmosphere, and her gaze was distant: the responsibilities and adjustment of young married life shackled her, and must continue to shackle her until they were no longer new. She did not know how to suggest any assistance, did not even believe that it was desired; but, though she still felt that she must refrain from intimate inquiry, one effort she tried to make.

"An' you," she asked--"how're you gettin' on, Mary?"

Mary bit her lip.

"Fine," she answered, huskily.

"Are you----? There ain't----?" Katie floundered in a maze that she would, a few months previously or a few months in the future, have cut her way through with a strong directness. "There ain't nothin' I could----?"

Mary's head shook, almost mechanically. It was not entirely that she felt unable to accept assistance from her former protector; it was rather that she felt only that she must run away.

"Oh, no," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm doin' grand."

The gala crowd was sweeping about them. It jostled both girls and threatened momentarily to separate them. After all, there was nothing more to be said.

"I--I got to go," murmured Mary. "I got an appointment----"

"But you'll come to see us sometime, won't you Mary?" asked Katie, and she gave her address. "We'll have a fine party at the christening an' I'll want you to see the baby."

"Oh, yes," said Mary; "yes, of course."

But Katie was hesitant.

"You're sure I can't do nothin'?" she asked.

"No, no. I----" Mary caught and pressed with what warmth there was left in her fingers, the Irish girl's hand. "Good-by," she concluded, and then, in order to keep up the farce of an appointment, she got upon a passing car.

Even if panic had not possessed her, she could not have accepted anything that Katie might offer. The most that could have been given her would have been but temporary, and what she must have was a means of earning a living.

She rode well downtown, and then walked farther southward. She slipped along the broad, yellow-lighted Bowery, gathering one or two quarters on her way, and wandered into the narrow, serpentine, fevered alleys of Chinatown. When an ugly rain began to fall, the open door of a mission attracted her, and she went in to rest.

It was the typical mission-room, very different from the uptown church where she had seen the wedding. This new place was mean; it had a low ceiling and was none too clean. The lights were flaring and the dull walls were enlivened by boldly lettered Bible texts. The air was close; on the platform, at the front of the place, a well-fed man was pleading, in sweat and tears, the cause of his religion; nearby, his double was making ready the reed-organ. Crowded into the unsteady benches were pimpled boys with lolling mouths and preternaturally knowing eyes; youths already old in disease and drink and crime; full-grown men, frog-eyed or blear-eyed, who needed only the faculty of firmness and the chance to cultivate it; old men, who had lost their hold upon work in a country still too barbarous to pension its aged; and, though there were no young girls, here and there Mary saw a few women, bedraggled, sodden, hideous, because men had at some time thought them _chic_, dainty, beautiful.

One of the "workers" attached to the place--a bland, prosperous man, with a pleasant smile--approached Mary and shook her hand as if he were an old acquaintance. He had fat red cheeks, firm teeth, and kindly eyes.

"I'm glad to see you, sister," he said. "Are you saved?"

Mary's childhood had heard some of the phraseology of evangelicalism. She understood, but she had come to receive worldly, not spiritual, warmth.

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

The "worker," however, was accustomed to that reply. He patted her shoulder.

"Don't you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked.

"Well," said Mary, "I never thought much about Him."

She looked at the floor. She was cold and hungry and afraid.

"Then," responded the man, with genuine earnestness, "you ought to begin to think. No man knoweth the hour of His comin'. He is ready with the Free Gift. Don't you want to come to Him?"

Mary's life had been one in which there had been small time for the cultivation of religious emotion, and no time at all for the cultivation of religious thought. At her home she had learned as much by rote as she had had to learn, but what she got she held only as so many tasks performed. The words were lessons to be mastered; if they had any relation to facts, those facts were things not to be faced until an age of discretion, and, pending the arrival of that age, the lessons had been stored away with a bland, childish practicality. What followed later had driven out all that preceded it. The shock of her capture; the wild, new order of existence; the endeavor to escape; the battle of service among new conditions; and, at last, the dulling of all the finer sensibilities and the final fight for a mere chance to continue alive--these were circumstances neither propitious to theology nor favorable to faith.

She glanced at the mission-worker, and then glanced away.

"I dunno," she said. "I guess I ain't the kind of woman religion can do much for."

"Don't say that," protested the man. His eyes shone with zeal and his voice was tender. "His grace is free for all who come. His mercy is from everlastin' to everlastin'. I've been a sinner myself"--the speaker's voice swelled with a real pride--"a terrible sinner, an' I know what I say, praise the Lord. The meaner an' viler we are, the more Jesus needs us. Just open your heart. Just accept Him, an' you'll never know no more trouble in this world nor the next."

"Would I get a job?" asked Mary.

The man shook his head, sadly.

"That ain't no way to think about salvation," he declared. "What's freely given ought to be freely received. Now is the appointed time."

"But I gotta make a livin'."

"I know it, I know it. We've all got to do that, but ain't it better to make one an' be saved than to make one an' be sent to hell-fire?"

She assented. "Only," she added, "I don't want to starve, even if I am saved."

It was his old difficulty.

"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about religion."

She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over a saloon--a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up occasional blasts of heat from the basement.

The rapidity with which one may descend from bad to worse is to be believed only by those who have been penniless and friendless in the larger cities. During the nights that followed, when Mary's clothes grew speedily ragged, dirty, and odorous, and when she earned just enough money to postpone starvation, she became a familiar of Chinatown, learned something of its blind paths and the tangled passages of its fetid tenements. The almond-eyed Orientals tolerantly received her. She came to know the heavy odors of the opium, to chat with clay-white American girls, morphine-eaters, and cocaine and chloral victims, whose Chinese lovers were kind to them, and who never wanted to breathe the open air. She was borne with, but the market was over-supplied there, and she found no regular keeper. She came to envy the drug-enslaved women who had first sought the Mott Street district as missionaries, even the little Mongolian girls over whose slavery, so much lighter than her own, the city, from time to time, grew ludicrously excited. Her illness progressed, but, thanks to her hardy birth and the exercise of what care was at all possible, it progressed with a step so tardy as to give no indication of reaching its tragic end, other things being equal, for two years or more. She did not again go to see the doctor; she did not have to. The only things that he could have advised were the things that she was in no position to do. Beyond a certain limited amount of routine care, she was helpless.

One night, wet and exhausted, she met a sailor in Chatham Square, and drank long with him.

"Where you goin' to sleep to-night?" he asked, as they were about to part.

He was a short, black-browed man, who walked with a bow-legged roll. The short sleeves of his jacket displayed sinewy, bronze wrists with anchors tattooed upon them. His neck rose out of his low-cut mariner's shirt like the neck of a brown, fighting bull, and his black eyes, set deep under bushy, frowning brows, were red, like those of a bull that is dangerous. He had been taken with a drunken passion for her, and though, when he kissed her, his upper lip scraped her face like a file, though his incessant grip of her hands hurt her, and though his heavy foot, seeking hers beneath the saloon-table, nearly crushed her own, she had to answer him with the professional smile.

"I dunno where I'll sleep," she said. "I guess Lee Hung's Letty'll put me up."

The sailor chucked her pointed chin so roughly that she thought her neck would crack.

"Why don't you come along o' me?" he inquired.

"Where's that?"

"To one o' our places. I know a beauty, an' I'll take good care o' you, an' afterward you can stay on."

"One of your places? What's those?"

"Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a daisy--Big Lou's keepin' it--an' they needs a new gal there, for I stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday."

Mary shuddered.

"Is it all right?" she asked.

"All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"--his black eyes leaped into a sudden threat--"I'm takin' you to-night. No philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal."

She looked away.

"Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an' the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a steady job there."

She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver. After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure of food to eat and a roof to cover her--and so she came to Summerton's.

XXIX

THE DOORS OF THE SHADOW

It is a winding and tortuous way across Greenwich Village to Summerton's. The mazed course runs through streets that squirm like worms between a fisherman's fingers; it skirts cobbled courts that are in twilight at midday and damp in the longest drought; it turns and doubles up passages that seem blind, dodges through the very bones of tumble-down warehouses, storehouses, houses so ramshackle that the imagination can conjure no possible use for them, and it comes out at last into a foul thoroughfare that appears to be no better than a stinking alley, so close to the water's edge that the masts of the river's cluttered craft look as if they grew upon the dirty, sagging roofs opposite, and so near to the wharves that the green walls of the buildings are wet and odorous as if from a continuous application of bilge-water.

By day, when its residents are asleep, this street is loud with straining Norman horses, and clattering vans, and whip-cracking carters from the docks; but by night--and the nights are very dark down there--it becomes the haunt of sailors and longshoremen, drunk and shouting, or still and drugged. Then the blue electric lamps snap hysterically at distant corners; the uneven pavement mounts steeply upward, or dashes precipitately downward, with no warning; laughter and curses and the crash of breaking glass or spluttering oaths issue now and again from the blackness at one's elbow, where, hidden among the warehouses, stand the houses for the storing of another sort of wares: the slave-houses maintained for mariners. Grotesque men, could you see them, stagger into dim entrances; terrible caricatures of women, if the light would show them, steal out and dart upon gutter-couched drunkards to paw their pockets. The night is alive with shadows, and the whole street a hungry, quivering quicksand.

Only by urging her eyes to their utmost could Mary make out anything of the house before which she and her unsteady companion came to pause. Even then all of which she could be sure was that, cowering under the shadow of some huge brick building, and skulking beneath its own rotting eaves, it was a half-sunken, old, narrow house, long since abandoned as unfit for legitimate purposes, and leaning rakishly to one side, like an ancient libertine that knows his evil and grins at it.

The sailor knocked lightly at an almost unseen door. A panel of it slid open and threw a ray of light on his face.

"Who's there?" asked a voice that was like the rasping of a file.

"It's Billy," said the sailor.

"Billy who?"

"Billy Stevens. Le'me in, Lou."

A pair of swollen eyes came to the open panel and looked, down the shaft of light, into the sinister face of Bill.

"Who's that with you?" croaked the voice.

"A gal I got for you."

"Is she all right?"

"O' course she is, Lou; else what in hell'd she be doin' with me? Come on; le'me in."

The swollen eyes disappeared, and the panel was shut. There was a sound of the withdrawal of several bolts. Then the door swung open, was closed and relocked behind the newcomers, and Mary found herself in an unfurnished hall, not more than fifteen feet square, lighted by a dim lamp standing on the lowest step of a steep flight of stairs, and guarded by the owner of the swollen eyes.