Part 9

For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father's fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to marry her with as little delay as possible.

Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he meant to play his first lead.

He did play it--played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to the mood best suited to his own.

"May I talk now?" he asked ruefully.

She smiled.

"You mean to ask if you may argue," she answered. "No, you may not argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a man of your sort should want to."

"I don't intend to argue," he protested, leaning the merest trifle toward her. "I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite fixed."

She bowed her splendid head.

"Quite fixed," she said.

"So that argument would not shake it?"

"So that no argument could shake it."

"Nor any persuasion?"

His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the change.

"Nor any persuasion," she replied.

"Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but a condition?"

"But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me. You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty."

A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously sweet.

"What I understand," responded Dyker, "is that there is one situation in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that crowds all others from the board."

His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.

"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it--none even for the poor and suffering."

In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.

"Marian"--his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash--"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to answer me!"

He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.

But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.

"I am not unprepared," she answered. "I did know. But I know too that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better emotion."

The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play, and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she was more in love with renunciation.

The man, however, shook his head.

"No," he said, "love is something ultimate. You can't paint the lily; you can't part it and share it; you must either cherish it or kill it. Which do you mean to do?"

The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway's. He could not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her voice as she answered:

"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of."

"But that's folly, Marian!"

He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that youth most resents.

Marian withdrew her hands.

"It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor."

"I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help these people without training----"

"I can get training."

"Without knowing them?"

"The only way to know them is to go to them."

"But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways."

He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience that the settlement would supply her.

"Then you mean," he asked, "that you do care--that you care at least a little?"

He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them.

"I mean," she answered, "that we must wait."

XI

UNDER THE LASH

It was on the day following her eavesdropping upon Rose that Violet was awakened early--as early as eleven o'clock in the morning--by a sudden cry. The sound was one of some pain and more terror, beginning in the high note of horrified amazement and ending in an attenuating moan of despair.

Violet had been living in a highly charged atmosphere: she sat up in bed, sleep immediately banished from her brain. She remained still and listened. She heard Rose's now familiar footstep. She heard a door open and close. She heard that cry frightfully begin again, and then she heard it more frightfully stop in mid-power, cease in abrupt and hideous silence.

There came a discreet tapping at her own door.

"Are you alone, my dear?"

It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.

Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint little red veins that lay close below its white skin.

"My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and that"--she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come--"that's one of them."

She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony.

"What was it?" asked Violet.

"You ought to know. It was another of them."

"You mean----" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's whitening lips.

"Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for company."

"How--how did this happen?"

"How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them, my dear, and one about as narsty as the others."

"But this?"

"Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while their wives cook the dinners--three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma, the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly snake under the apple-tree."

"He brought her here?"

"Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have come along of her own self sometime."

"How could she?"

"How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living in--there isn't room for that--they're just to eat in, when you've got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you have to."

"So this girl had to live outside?"

"On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and down the street when it wasn't."

Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was less, because her surroundings had been better.

"That must have been pretty bad," she said.

"It was bad, but it wasn't so bad as being indoors, my dear. That's what most girls think about it anyway, and that's why they never go home before ten or eleven. How else do the moving-picture shows keep running and how else do the dance-halls make their cakes and ale?"

"The dance-halls?" The word was new to Violet.

"Yes, my dear, I said the dance-halls--where you pay five cents to dance in the dust, with the windows nailed fast to start a thirst, and then buy you bad beer of the kind proprietor. That's where the lodger took this girl, and that's where she learned to drink."

"Too much?"

"Chuck it, dearie, chuck it. Among all the wasters I've known, I've never found one drunkard: they all called themselves moderate drinkers. Well, this girlie played double for a bit, and then met a nice young man that wanted to marry her next day. She woke up here."

"Did they drug her?"

"Did they drug you? They don't have to drug you: you know that. The minute a girl tells me she was drugged, I say to myself: 'You're the kind that walk in and won't take "No" for an answer.' No, you catch flies with syrup; you don't shoot them with machine-guns. Narsty business, no?"

Violet was hearing for the first time how life made the net in which it had taken her. She passed her hand across her burning eyes.

"You seem to have seen a lot," she said.

"Haven't I just? I had my own little flat--to myself, too--once upon a time, and I kept my eyes about me. There was the Dago woman that owned a fruit-stand on my corner. She lived in an alley off Houston Street, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter who worked twelve hours a day rolling cigarettes.--Chuck me another, there's a good girlie. Thanks, awfully.--That girl hated her work--can you blame her?--met a man that told her she wouldn't have to work any more, and good-by."

"She went with him?"

"Parsed out of sight completely, my dear. Mother nearly crazy. Went to the police. Police added the girlie's name to their three columns of other missing girls for that year, and said they couldn't guess where she was. An uncle tried to go on an inspection-tour of his own, and had spent about all the family cash when he got to a flat on West Fortieth Street and had its girls in for the usual drinks. He saw his niece, but the bouncer knocked him down, and when he woke up in the arey, the happy family had moved."

"And that was all?"

"That was all till, some two years later, the girl sent for her mother to come to Bellevue to see her die. As soon as she was used up, they'd turned her out without one of the pennies she had earned for them.--Narsty, eh?"

There was a brief pause.

"I guess," said Violet, "there ain't much chance for you unless you're good."

"My dear," answered the Englishwoman, "if you're good, you haven't a chance at all. It's just a question of whether you have or haven't enough to live on. The best guardian of a man's virtue is the worst enemy of a woman's--and that's an empty pocketbook, my dear."

But Violet was in no mind for generalizations.

"It's a business, then, ain't it?" she asked.

"A regular business," nodded Evelyn,--"fifty cents up--and now that they've smashed the lotteries, policy, and the races, it's more of a business than ever. There are hundreds of young chaps all over the country who make their living by selling girls to places like this--and worse than this; and there are more who make better livings by making one, or two, or even three girls walk the street for them. Just now, in New York, the street's the main thing."

"An' people like Miss Rose----?"

"They buy the girls and pay a percentage on their work, my dear, till the debt's cleared. Sometimes they give their girls nothing but brass checks for every job, but whether we get brass checks or real cash, it's all the same: board and lodging and clothes are so high that we never get out of debt to the madam. Trust her for that!"

She had a thorough knowledge of her subject, and she ran on as if her only interest in it were economic. She talked of Denver, with its two-room houses in which the front seemed one large window where the sole inmate displayed her wares; of Chicago with the curtained doors through which was thrust only a hand to receive the varying price of admission, even a quarter of a dollar occasionally sufficing; of the same city's infamous club maintained by politicians for their own debauches. She told of the proprietresses making a specialty of "sending out" for girls that worked at other and ill-paid tasks by day; of women conducting flats on a partnership basis; of those who rented, for high prices, houses that would otherwise be tenantless because of poor conditions or the opening of some street that must soon be cut through the premises. She said that young girls unsoiled would sometimes fetch their owners fifty dollars for their initial destruction, but that, as a rule, the sums were relatively small.

"And Miss Rose has to pay the police," asked Violet; "don't she?"

"She does just, little innocent. And the police have to pay the officers above them, and the officers above them have to pay the ward-bosses above _them_--and there you are. It's all the worse since the bosses can't make any money from gambling-houses, and it's all the worse since the business got organized and meant votes for the gang at every election.--Oh," Evelyn broke off--"I tell you it's the same in every city the world over, my dear, and you and I haven't even the comfort of being exceptions."

"Don't people know about it?"

"People don't want to know about it. People don't want to feel badly. People say that it isn't true, and that, if it is true, it isn't fit to mention."

"Did you ever go to a dance-hall?"

Forgetting her recent attitude of democracy, Evelyn raised her pointed chin.

"I should say not," she answered. "Only a year ago I had that apartment of my very own. An Africander took me out of the chorus at the 'Gaiety' over home,--and a good job, too--and, when he died and I came here, one of the best doctors in this town took care of me. He said he was going to marry me," she ended with a short laugh, "but when his old wife died, he forgot that, and forgot me, and married a society girl young enough to be his grandchild. Of course he died himself after a few months, but that didn't help me, my dear: I had to strike out, and now, from the best places I've come down as far as this."

Violet was still too young to feel keenly for another while herself in suffering, a fact that must have presented itself to Evelyn, because she turned from her own story with an easy shrug.

"After all," she pursued, "the thing's at least better run now that it has become a men's business. There are no jobs left at the top except the running of the houses: the men get the girls, the rents, and most of the profits."

"Fritzie said they got lots of immigrants."

"Well, rather. Most of the Dago ditch-diggers go home every winter, and any one of them will bring a girl back with him as his wife if you'll pay him a little over the price of the passage money. That's one way, but there are a jolly lot more, not to mention the make-believe employment agencies that catch the girls by regiments. The women are packed over here in the steerage like cattle, my dear, and ticketed like low-class freight. All they own goes into a small handbag and once they get here, they're herded ten in a room till the agency-runners call for them. Around Houston Street you can see streets full of those nifty little agencies: they ship the girls all over the States."

"I never thought such things could happen."

"Of course you didn't. Nobody does, my dear--and that's one reason they do happen. Not that the immigrants are unduly favored. All over the East Side you can see families of the Chosen People going into real mourning for cadet-caught girlies, just as if the poor things were really dead. The other races suffer quite as much, too, though the Yankees are less likely to get into the cheaper joints."

"That's where they give them the brass checks?" asked Violet.

"Yes. The man buys the checks downstairs, on a commutation schedule, just the w'y we used to buy our drink checks in a beer garden. The girls never see real money--except when they make a touch, and then it's not any use--because they cash in their checks to the madam, and she counts them against what her young l'idies owe her. Even at that"--Evelyn nearly sat upright in her animation--"even at that, they do s'y the men try to jew you down as badly as they do here. I've always noticed that the honestest man that ever lived will try to cheat a girl. But you'll learn it all in time, girlie. I'm only sorry that you'll never see the better plices."

Violet missed the innuendo, but she asked:

"Then there are better and worse?"

Evelyn laughed.

"Right-oh!" she said. "The horrid truth is, my dear, that we and Rose are hopelessly middle-class. I wish you could see the better, and as for the worse, wait till you live in a plice where there are sliding panels in the wall, and men are robbed every night."

If there had been any sympathy in the Englishwoman's tone, Violet might have appealed to her for whatever of real assistance she could give, but Evelyn's scarcely interrupted monologue soon made it clear that she had no help to offer.

"It's all rotten," she continued,--"all rotten because it has to be. Do you fancy that, if Rose wasn't sure of us, she wouldn't have her ear at that keyhole now? She can call in Angel half the time, and one cop or another's never far around the corner. Three weeks ago Phil Beekman, one of her best customers, tried to balance a lamp on his nose and broke it, and Riley was there to arrest him for disorderly conduct before the boy could get to his wallet. He had to pay twenty-five dollars--half went to Riley--for that fifteen-dollar lamp that Rose had insured for eighteen. We're all that w'y; we all have to be spies on the rest. I am, you soon will be, and that little Wanda--well, of course, Rose makes too much fuss over her."

"What do you mean?" asked Violet.

But Evelyn only shook her towsled yellow head.

"I mean, my dear," she said, "that there are some things, you know, that even I don't fancy discussing."

"She was an immigrant, wasn't she?"

"Oh, yes," Evelyn acquiesced, with a yawn. Already her restless heart was tiring of the conversation and her insistent thirst was crying for more alcohol. "Wanda came over here to be a housemaid. She landed in Philadelphia and went directly to an employment agency, like a good girlie. They took her money for their commission in getting her a job, and then they sold her right over here to a sailors' joint."

"For housework?"

"Housework? My dear, you overact your part. There's no housework done in those plices; but Wanda's won her w'y up in the world. Here she is at Rose's, if you please, though by what sort of housework I shan't tell you."

"I wish----"

"Not another word, my dear. Talking is a dry game. After all, drinking is the king of indoor sports. Come on down and rig a bit of fizz."

But Violet did not join in this predatory expedition. She forgot the plight of the new captive whose cries she had heard; she forgot even the details of Evelyn's just-related case; she remembered only so much of the general situation, now made clear to her, as bore upon her own position, and she came at last to a pitch of crafty courage that was far more promising of success than any of the hysterical determinations that she had previously experienced. Open revolt was futile; she would employ methods more circuitous, and would use whatever weapons were at hand.

It was, as Evelyn had said, a house of spies and eavesdroppers, and, at the next opportunity--which occurred that night--Violet sought again her secret place of vantage on the back stairs, and listened again to her jailer in conversation with the Italian. Her time, as it chanced, was brief, but she heard enough to know that Wesley Dyker was the subject of the conference, and that betrayal of some sort was its intent.

"Nothin' much," Rose was saying, in apparent answer to some question asked before the spy had taken up her breathless post in the darkened stairway. "I'll get more out of him later on."

"Yas," replied Angel, "but how mooch?"

"He said he thought he'd pull it off, all right, but wasn't sure of O'Malley. Said he'd got a bunch of kind words from up top, but was scared for fear O'Malley would knife him. He's a pretty wise guy for all he's a swell, and he's lookin' out for the double-cross from your crowd."

"He ast you to helpa keepa lookout?"

"Sure he did. Said if O'Malley's man put up a bluff at runnin' independent, I was to tip him off when O'Malley began registering votes here."

"That isa good. More?"

"Some. Said he wanted me to keep my ears wide for any news. Wanted me to pump you."

"He deed?" The voice grew threatening. "Say, now, you tella me why he knaw you knawa me?"

"I guess he has as good ears as most people."

"But how he knawa me an' you----"

"He don't know that, Angel. Keep your hair on. He don't know nothin' about it. If he did, do you think he'd stand for it, an' cough up all these here straight tips to me?"

"Na-aw," the Italian drawlingly admitted, in slow mollification. "Naw, maybe he woulda not."

"He certainly wouldn't. He don't know nothin' about it. What he's afraid of is that somebody might think _he_ stood in too good here."

"He say that?"

"Yep."

"Alla right. Now, you tella him when he comes again, O'Malley means----"