Part 6

"All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis dan you maybe t'ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex' Sunday I dake my girl to Coney, und den ve'll dalk sings ofer und ve'll see vhat Katie says."

In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet's face kindled.

"You're good," she said simply, "and I'll trust you."

"Oh, I make nussing," replied the German, smiling once more, "bud chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing."

Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the topmost beercase.

VII

HOLIDAY

That Sunday morning in his single, dark, narrow room, Hermann Hoffmann, the erstwhile driver of a brewery-wagon and the coming Second Avenue barkeeper, arose with the dawn, just as if it had been a workday morning, and set about his elaborate toilet, whistling.

To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman in mortal agony or mortal fear.

Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs.

That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital."

Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs--the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type--the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention; perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light gash in his upper lip.

He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror, cracking the glass across one corner.

"Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!"

And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him through the darkened hallway.

To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets of carnations--one pink and the other white--and boarded a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead.

In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar:

Here In Peace Lies The Body Of WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN, Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann, Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia, Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907. ------ "_Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also._"

The inscription was in English, but when he had finished reading it, the dead woman's son said, under his breath, the Lord's Prayer in the language of Luther, as she had taught it him.

"She liked me to pray," he shamefacedly explained to the circumambient atmosphere, as if prayer in any tongue were a compromise with his principles. "Und vhile I'm aboud it, I mighd as vell use de old langwage. If the Herr Gott listens at all, He'd hear it some besser in de vay She said it."

And then he resumed his hat and his anthem, and returned to town.

Katie Flanagan was waiting for him as he came hurrying up the steps from the subway at Park Place--the piquant, pretty girl of the photograph, in black, because her parents had died not long since, but in black just as elaborate as her slender purse would permit, because she knew the full value of her raven hair and blossoming cheeks and tender eyes of Irish blue.

"Ach," gasped Hermann, "hof I kep' you a long time vaitin'?"

"Only about as long as you mostly do," she answered. Her voice was like her eyes, and she spoke with but the charming hint of a Galway brogue.

The German's cheeks burned with humiliation.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "I god up early to be on dime, bud de train vas lade from the cem't'ry in."

She understood and smiled.

"It's only five minutes I've been here," she confessed.

"Und I brought you a few bosies, Katie. I d'ought maybe----"

"Oh!" she seized the carnations with a laugh of delight, and buried her nose in them. "It's good y'are to think of such things, Hermann--and a bad lad that y'are to spend the money so!"

They were making their way toward the Bridge, the sturdy Hoffmann shouldering a passage through the momentarily swelling Sunday morning crowd.

"Dot liddle makes nussing," he proudly protested. "To-morrow I begin ad my new tshob."

"But that," said Katie, "won't pay you hardly wan dollar a week more'n the brewery did. I dunno, but I think----"

There, however, her protest, for the moment, ended. They were caught, clinging together, in the whirlpool of the entrance; carried nearly off their feet, rushed by the ticket-window with a quick exchange of small coin, and, a few minutes later, were battling their way among the press into a waiting Coney Island train.

In the last charge, Hermann, his lips puckered in the battle-hymn, did heroic service. While Katie hung tightly to one arm, he used manfully the elbow of the other; pushed a guard to the right; shoved two cigarette-smoking youths to the left; wriggled through the already crowded platform and shot into one of the coveted "cross-seats." Much of the park would not be open for a month or more to come, but New York was already clamoring for its playground.

Katie, flushed and triumphant, sank beside him, and busied herself with the task of straightening her big black hat. Hermann watched her in frank admiration as she sat there, her arms raised to her head, in that pose which, of all others, is the most becoming to her sex.

"What are you lookin' at?" she archly wondered, casting a smiling, sidelong, blue glance at him.

But before her the strong man was a timid child.

"Ad de brettiest bicture in a whole vorld," he stammered.

Katie laughed again.

"Och," she said in gratified disapproval, "there sure must be a Castle Blarney somewhere on the Rhine. What favor are you wantin' to ask me now, I wonder."

Once he had started, Hermann was too dogged thus to be retarded.

"It's chust de same old fafor," he pleaded, as, with a great creaking of brakes, the train began to swing upon the Bridge. "Now I god my new tshob, Katie, there gan't for nod hafin' our veddin' be no good reason, gan dere?"

"There's one," she said, still delighting in her coquetry; "there's one reason."

"Vat is 't?"

"Its name is Father Kelly."

"Katie, you von't led dot gount!"

"I will so."

"Und I haf to gome into your church, und--und all dem d'ings?"

"You do that."

Hermann squirmed; but he knew of old that from this point she was neither to be persuaded nor driven. It was a discussion that they had held many a time before, and every time she would give him no answer to his suit until he should surrender in this particular. Now, however, he considered himself about to set foot upon the highroad to prosperity, and the prosperous can ill afford to skimp magnanimity.

"_All_ righd," he at last somewhat ruefully conceded, though with certain mental reservations into which it seemed then unnecessary to enter: "I'm a strong von, und hof stood a lot a'ready, so I t'ink I gan stand dot too. I'll do it."

He took her by surprise.

"Promise?" she asked.

"Sure I bromise."

"No backin' out whatever happens?"

"No packin' oud."

"Well, God bless you then."

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. Into her lonely, hardworking life, this strong, soft-hearted, poor and cheerful German had brought about all the sunshine that she had latterly known, and she could think of nothing better than to give him the answer that he was so honestly anxious to hear. But, though he had become more and more to her from the first evening when he had seized her as she was falling from the platform of a surface-car that had started too quickly on its way, she had seen enough of the warfare with poverty in her own family to resolve that she would not marry until she could contribute her share to the wages of the resulting household, and now she had neither a position nor the immediate likelihood of obtaining one. It was hard, but she was used to hardship, and so, because she must not cry, she smiled.

Hermann tried to grasp her hand, but she easily eluded him.

"Den, vhen do ve say?" he eagerly demanded.

Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer:

"As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us."

"But Katie"--he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it--"you don' mean dot! You said--you dold me--you bromise----"

He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain silent. She faced him once more.

"It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious. "Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for--you said yourself it might end in a café o' your own--an' to get there you'll be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that."

He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down.

"Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine for a quarter if you hold your nose."

The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head.

"But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own. I don' vant a gafé: I vant you."

She smiled again.

"You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an' then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'--when she could get it--an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know it."

While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the story of Violet.

He spoke simply, which is to say forcibly, and he had an understanding, and therefore sympathetic, audience. Katie's face immediately softened.

"The poor child!" she murmured. "An' don't I know what it is? I've seen them go under, here one an' there another, hungry or overworked, every mother's daughter of them. There was Molly Ryan, as good a girl as you'd find in a day's search of the parish, left alone with no one to put clothes on her back; an' pretty Agnes Donovan--out of work for four months--her as died in the City Hospital; an' Giulia Fortuni, whose father kept a fruit-stand by the Grand Street "L" station.--What can we do for her, Hermann-boy?"

"Dot's vat I vanted to ask you, Katie," said Hoffmann. "She has to hof friends und vork first of all."

"Friends she has right here; but work she must have whether or no. I begin me old search for meself in the mornin', an' I'll keep eye an' mouth ready to get a job for her."

Cynically hopeless and city-wise in regard to her own chances, Katie's Celtic soul warmed to something of Hermann's optimism in the cause of a sister. She began planning at once, and when the train drew up outside the tunnel-shed, she had the absent Violet established as a cloak-model in the big Lennox Department-Store, and engaged to marry a floor-walker.

And then Coney--Coney the sweetly reasonable in price and the extravagantly generous in provision--crowded out of her mind, for that day, all thoughts save the thought of itself.

A great many years ago--oh, a very great many years ago!--when you were a little boy, your father took you to the county-fair. You remember it, even yet, as a purple day in the glad calendar of your childhood: the blood cattle, the show of farm implements, the prize pumpkins, the side-shows with their fat ladies and skeleton gentlemen, and the suave individual that put a bean under a cup and then, for a dollar, showed your shrewd parent that it was under another. But above all you remember the crowd. Never before had you seen so many people in one place, never realized that there were so many people in the world; and even now, out of the past, you can hear an awed voice saying:

"There are five thousand persons here."

Well, back home, the county-fair, thank heaven, continues to grow. Cattle are sleeker and pumpkins larger; the fat ladies weigh more and the thin gentlemen less; the shell-game, in one form or another, aids the progress of agriculture by making five dollars grow where only one grew before. But, in the meantime, the ugly, delightful "amusement-park" has brought the county-fair to the city-limit, and nearly three hundred thousand persons go to Coney Island every day.

Early in the season though they were, Katie and Hermann no sooner stepped upon that Surf Avenue which is at once the heart and the aorta of the Island, than they felt, as there they always felt, that they had entered upon the Land of Carnival. The broad, but crowded, way was dancing with the noise of festival, with the clangor of brass bands, the cries of venders, the smell of the circus, the tang of the sea.

Here, from mixed drinks to mixed music, went not the thugs and blacklegs, the pallid men and the painted women that would have filled such a place had it been within the borough of Manhattan. In their stead here drove the cars of generally stolid people of business and leisure, and here, above all, walked the workers of the city, the weaker sex and the stronger, seeking holiday. The full-portion hat on the half-portion girl is as familiar to Surf Avenue as to the Waldorf palm-room; care is erased from the tablets of memory. On Coney there is no To-morrow.

The laughter of the hundreds of children rang out no more freely than did that of the thousands of their elders. Mothers with babies in their arms were young again. Stately blondes and languorous brunettes, gracefully seated on the wooden steeds of the score of merry-go-rounds, rode with a dignity unsurpassed in Hyde Park or the Bois, and never a cowboy at a round-up was more adventurous than the young East-Sider mounting a hired horse upon the Pony Track.

Every nook had something to sell, and Katie had her day's work in keeping Hermann from stopping at each booth. There were miles of scenic railways on all of which he wished to ride; there were scores of panorama that tempted him with pictures of every disaster from the San Francisco fire to the Messina earthquake. There were the familiar canes waiting to be caught with the familiar ring: there were the familiar chutes to be shot, and the familiar "galleries" where the rattle of rifles recalled the battle of the Yalu. Down on the beach an army was shouting in the surf, and on every hand along the jostling, good-natured street were peanuts and popcorn, "crispettes" and "hot dogs." Upon dozens of polished floors dancers were slowly revolving with a marvelous ability to distinguish between the time of their own orchestra and that of the band in the café opposite, and everywhere were picture machines and machines that sang.

Cheap it doubtless was, but cheap also in the sense of small cost. Except in the larger cafés, the ordinary drinks sold at only five cents the glass, and the glasses were not an insult to the drinkers' capacity. Hermann and Katie had their beer at one of the smaller places. They dined for twenty-five cents apiece, without tips, at the "Home-Made-Lunch-Room"; they were twirled and buffeted in a swiftly revolving car down a series of precipitous canvas chasms, paying five cents apiece for the privilege of the shaking-up that, at home, Hermann would have resented with a blow; and they chose the last seat in the last car of a steep gravity railway, where a man must hold himself aboard with one arm and his shrieking sweetheart aboard with the other.

It was all blatant, all tawdry, all the apotheosis of the ridiculous, all essentially America-at-play; but when, at night, in the electric-train shooting through the warm darkness, the pair returned citywards, it was toward their own hard-earned and with difficulty retained places of shelter that they were going, like children after a strenuous holiday of make-believe with school to begin upon the morrow; and if, in most of the seats, as in that occupied by Katie and Hermann, girls slept with their heads resting frankly upon sleeping masculine shoulders, it was but a rest before conventional partings at home-doorways, the play-day ended for the lonely couch, and the work-day soon to begin.

VIII

MR. WESLEY DYKER

In that company of the ignoble army of martyrs over which circumstances had given Rose Légère command, there were five members. Besides Mary, who now was Violet, Celeste, whom ancient conditions had temperamentally predetermined for such service, and Fritzie, who had chosen a partly moral slavery as less onerous than a wholly economic servitude, there was the highly colored Englishwoman Evelyn, who regarded her present station as one of the descending steps inevitable for everyone that set foot upon the way they all were treading, and Wanda, a dark little Russian Jewess, who, as soon as she had landed at the South Ferry from Ellis Island, had fallen into the hands of the slave-traders, and had thenceforward persistently striven upward to the place she now inhabited.

For the maintenance of her authority upon these and their patrons, Rose, unlike some of her fellows, did not have to depend upon the assistance of any man quartered in the house. To the discipline of the inmates her system of charge for clothes, food, and shelter was admirably suited; for the regulation of the visitors the generally nearby person of big Larry Riley, the policeman, amply sufficed. One other outsider seemed, however, to have a regular connection with the establishment, and this person early excited Violet's curiosity.

Dressed in the extreme of fashion, as fashion is known from Fourteenth Street southward, his gray, almost white, suits always fresh from the pressing-iron, and his flowered tie and ever evident gay silk handkerchief always glaringly new, this dapper, dark young man was unmistakably Neapolitan. His glossy black hair clustered tight over his forehead; his brown skin shone as if rubbed with oil; his eyes danced like merry, but sinister, bits of coal, and his too red lips were continuously, loosely, patterned to a smile that was more nearly contemptuous than good-humored.

For at least a part of every evening this Italian, who always entered the house from the rear and without the formality of knocking, sat in the kitchen, drinking his beer with infinite leisure and, in the intervals of her discussions in the parlor, condescended to talk, lazily, with Rose.

"Who is he?" asked Violet, on what was perhaps the fifth of his visits that she had happened to observe.

Celeste, to whom the question had been addressed, shrugged her smooth shoulders.

"He ees Angel," she answered.

"He don't look like one."

"No, not mooch, but hees name, eet ees that: Rafael Angelelli. Eef he had the moostache, he would be almost 'andsome."

"Rose acts like she thought a good deal of him as he is."