Chapter 2

Always, when she had gone out alone, she had sought a small park not far from her new home. It was a comfortingly green little oasis in the desert of stone and brick--a little oasis that reminded one of the country. She turned toward it now, quite blindly, for the streets confused her--they always did. As the crowds closed around her she hurried vaguely, as a swimmer hurries just before he loses his head and goes down. She caught her breath as she went, for the crowds always made her feel submerged--quite as the swimmer feels just before the final plunge. She entered the park--it was scarcely more than a square of grass--with a very definite feeling of relief, almost of rescue.

As usual, the park was crowded. But park crowds are different from street crowds--they are crowds at rest, rather than hurrying, restless throngs. Rose-Marie sank upon an iron bench and with wide, childishly distended eyes surveyed the people that surged in upon her.

There was a woman with a hideous black wig--the badge of revered Jewish motherhood--pressed down over the front of her silvered hair. Rose-Marie, a short time ago, would have guessed her age at seventy--now she told herself that the woman was probably forty. There was a slim, cigarette-smoking youth with pale, shifty eyes. There was an old, old man--white-bearded like one of the patriarchs--and there was a dark-browed girl who held a drowsy baby to her breast. All of these and many more--Italians, Slavs, Russians, Hungarians and an occasional Chinaman--passed her by. It seemed to the girl that this section was a veritable melting pot of the races--and that every example of every race was true to type. She had seen any number of young men with shifty eyes--she had seen many old men with white beards. She knew that other black-wigged women lived in every tenement; that other dark-browed girls were, at that same moment, rocking other babies. She fell to wondering, whimsically, whether God had fashioned the people of the slums after some half-dozen set patterns--almost as the cutter, in many an alley sweatshop, fashions the frocks of a season.

A sharp cry broke in upon her wonderings. It was the cry of an animal in utter pain--in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet at the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes distended she whirled about to face a small boy who knelt upon the ground behind her bench.

To Rose-Marie the details of the small boy's appearance came back, later, with an amazing clarity. Later she could have described his dark, sullen eyes, his mouth with its curiously grim quirk at one corner, his shock of black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the ability to see only one thing--the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had tied to the iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was torturing with a cold, relentless cruelty.

It shrieked again--with an almost human cry--as she started around the bench toward it. And the wild throbbing of her heart told her that she was witnessing, for the first time, a phase of human nature of which she had never dreamed.

V

ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE

Rose-Marie's hand upon the small boy's coat collar was not gentle. With surprising strength, for she was small and slight, she jerked him aside.

"You wicked child!" she exclaimed, and the Young Doctor would have chuckled to hear her tone. "You wicked child, what are you doing?"

Without waiting for an answer she knelt beside the pitiful little animal that was tied to the bench, and with trembling fingers unloosed the cord that held it, noting as she did so how its bones showed, even through its coat of fur. When it was at liberty she gathered it close to her breast and turned to face the boy.

He had not tried to run away. Even with the anger surging through her, Rose-Marie admitted that the child was not--in one sense--a coward. He had waited, brazenly perhaps, to hear what she had to say. With blazing eyes she said it:

"Why," she questioned, and the anger that made her eyes blaze also put a tremor into her voice, "why were you deliberately hurting this kitten? Don't you know that kittens can feel pain just as much as you can feel pain? Don't you know that it is wicked to make anything suffer? Why were you so wicked?"

The boy looked up at her with sullen, dark eyes. The grim twist at one corner of his mouth became more pronounced.

"Aw," he said gruffly, "why don't yer mind yer own business?"

If Rose-Marie's hands had been free, she would have taken the boy suddenly and firmly by both shoulders. She felt an overwhelming desire to shake him--to shake him until his teeth chattered. But both of her hands were busy, soothing the gray kitten that shivered against her breast.

"I am minding my own business," she told the boy. "It's my business to give help where it's needed, and this kitten," she cuddled it closer, "certainly needed help! Haven't you ever been told that you should be kind? Like," she faltered, "like Jesus was kind? He wouldn't have hurt anything. He loved animals--and He loved boys, too. Why don't you try to be the sort of a boy He could love? Why do you try to be bad--to do wrong things?"

The eyes of the child were even more sullen--the twist of his mouth was even more grim as he listened to Rose-Marie. But when she had finished speaking, he answered her--and still he did not try to run away.

"Wot," he questioned, almost in the words of the Young Doctor, "wot do you know about things that's right an' things that's wrong? It ain't bad t' hurt animals--not if they're little enough so as they ain't able t' hurt you!"

Rose-Marie sat down, very suddenly, upon the bench. In all of her life--her sheltered, glad life--she had never heard such a brutal creed spoken, and from the lips of a child! Her eyes, searching his face, saw that he was not trying to be funny, or saucy, or smart. Curiously enough she noted that he was quite sincere--that, to him, the torturing of a kitten was only a part of the day with its various struggles and amusements. When she spoke again her tone was gentle--as gentle as the tone with which the other slum children, who came to the Settlement House, were familiar.

"Whoever told you," she questioned, "that it's not wrong to hurt an animal, so long as it can't fight back?"

The boy eyed her strangely. Rose-Marie could almost detect a gleam of latent interest in his dark eyes. And then, as if he had gained a sort of confidence in her, he answered.

"Nobody never told me," he said gruffly. "But I _know_."

The kitten against Rose-Marie's breast cried piteously. Perhaps it was the hopelessness of the cry that made her want so desperately to make the boy understand. Conquering the loathing she had felt toward him she managed the ghost of a smile.

"I wish," she said, and the smile became firmer, brighter, as she said it, "I wish that you'd sit down, here, beside me. I want to tell you about the animals that I've had for pets--and about how they loved me. I had a white dog once; his name was Dick. He used to go to the store for me, he used to carry my bundles home in his mouth--and he did tricks--"

The boy had seated himself, gingerly, on the bench. He interrupted her, and his voice was eager.

"Did yer have t' beat him," he questioned, "t' make him do the tricks? Did he bleed when yer beat him?"

Again Rose-Marie gasped. She leaned forward until her face was on a level with the boy's face.

"Why," she asked him, "do you think that the only way to teach an animal is to teach him by cruelty? I taught my dog tricks by being kind and sweet to him. Why do you talk of beatings--I couldn't hurt anything, even if I disliked it, until it _bled_!"

The small boy drew back from Rose-Marie. His expression was vaguely puzzled--it seemed almost as if he did not comprehend what her words meant.

"My pa beats me," he said suddenly, "always he beats me--when he's drunk! An' sometimes he beats me when he ain't. He beats Ma, too, an' he uster beat Jim, 'n' Ella. He don't dare beat Jim now, though"--this proudly--"Jim's as big as he is now, an' Ella--nobody'd dast lay a hand on Ella ..." almost as suddenly as he had started to talk, the boy stopped.

For the moment the episode of the kitten was a forgotten thing. There was only pity, only a blank sort of horror, on Rose-Marie's face.

"Doesn't your father love you--any of you?" she asked.

"Naw." The boy's mouth was a straight line--a straight and very bitter line, for such a young mouth. "Naw, he only loves his booze. He hits me all th' time--an' he's four times as big as me! An' so I hit whoever's smaller'n I am. An' even if they cry I don't care. I hate things that's little--that can't take care o' themselves. Everything had oughter be able t' take care of itself!"

"Haven't you"--again Rose-Marie asked a question--"haven't you ever loved anything that was smaller than you are? Haven't you ever had a pet? Haven't you ever felt that you must protect and take care of some one--or something? Haven't you?"

All at once the boy was smiling, and the smile lit up his small, dark face as a candle, slowly flickering, brings cheer and brightness to a dull, lonely room.

"I love Lily," he told her. "I wouldn't let nobody touch Lily! If Pa so much as spoke mean to her--I'd kill him. I'd kill him with a knife!"

Rose-Marie shuddered inwardly at the thought. But her voice was very even as she spoke.

"Who is Lily?" she asked.

The boy had slid down along the bench. He was so close to her that his shabby coat sleeve touched her blue one.

"Lily's my kid sister," he said, and, miracle of miracles, his voice held a note of tenderness. "Say--Miss, I'm sorry I hurt th' cat."

With a sudden feeling of warmth Rose-Marie moved just a fraction of an inch closer to the boy. She knew, somehow, that his small, curiously abject apology was in a way related to the "kid sister"; she knew, almost instinctively, that this Lily who could make a smile come to the dark little face, who could make a tenderness dwell in those hard young eyes, was the only avenue by which she could reach this strange child. She spoke to him suddenly, impulsively.

"I'd like to see your Lily; I'd like to see her, awfully," she told him. "Will you bring her some time to call on me? I live at the Settlement House."

A subtle change had come over the child's face. He slid, hurriedly, from the bench.

"Oh," he said, "yer one o' them! You sing hymns 'n' pray 'n' tell folks t' take baths. I know. Well, I can't bring Lily t' see you--not ever!"

Rose-Marie had also risen to her feet.

"Then," she said eagerly, "let me come and see Lily. Where do you live?"

The boy's eyes had fallen. It was plain that he did not want to answer--that he was experiencing the almost inarticulate embarrassment of childhood.

"We live," he told her at last, "in that house over there." His pointing finger indicated the largest and grimiest of the tenements that loomed, dark and high, above the squalor of a side street. "But you wouldn't wanter come--there!"

Rose-Marie caught her breath sharply. She was remembering how the Superintendent had forbidden her to do visiting, how the Young Doctor had laughed at her desire to be of service. She knew what they would say if she told them that she was going into a tenement to see a strange child named Lily. Perhaps that was why her voice had an excited ring as she answered.

"Yes, I would come there!" she told the boy. "Tell me what floor you live on, and what your name is, and when it would be best for me to come?"

"My name's Bennie Volsky," the boy said slowly. "We're up five flights, in th' back. D'yer really mean that you'll come--an' see Lily?"

Rose-Marie nodded soberly. How could the child know that her heart was all athrob with the call of a great adventure?

"Yes, I mean it," she told him. "When shall I come?"

The boy's grubby hand shot out and rested upon her sleeve.

"Come to-morrow afternoon," he told her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured city chameleon.

Rose-Marie, standing by the bench, watched the place where he had disappeared. And then, all at once, she turned swiftly--just as swiftly as the boy had--and started back across the park toward the Settlement House.

"I won't tell them!" she was saying over and over in her heart, as she went, "I won't tell them! They wouldn't let me go, if I did.... I won't tell them!"

The kitten was still held tight in her arms. It rested, quite contentedly, against her blue coat. Perhaps it knew that there was a warm, friendly place--even for little frightened animals--in the Settlement House.

VI

"THERE'S NO PLACE--"

When Rose-Marie paused in front of the tenement, at three o'clock on the following afternoon, she felt like a naughty little girl who is playing truant from school. When she remembered the way that she had avoided the Superintendent's almost direct questions, she blushed with an inward sense of shame. But when she thought of the Young Doctor's offer to go with her--"wherever she was going"--she threw back her head with a defiant little gesture. She knew well that the Young Doctor was sorry for yesterday's quarrel--she knew that a night beside the dying Mrs. Celleni, and the wails of the Cohen baby, had temporarily softened his viewpoint upon life. And yet--he had said that they were soulless--these people that she had come to help! He would have condemned Bennie Volsky from the first--but she had detected the glimmerings of something fine in the child! No--despite his more tolerant attitude--she knew that, underneath, his convictions were unchanged. She was glad that she had gone out upon her adventure alone.

With a heart that throbbed in quick staccato beats, she mounted the steps of the tenement. Little dark-eyed children moved away from her, apparently on every side, but somehow she scarcely noticed them. The doorway yawned, like an open mouth, in front of her--and she could think of nothing else. As she went over the dark threshold she remembered stories that she had read about people who go in at tenement doorways and are never seen again. Every one has read such stories in the daily newspapers--and perhaps some of them are true!

A faint light flickered in through the doorway. It made the ascent of the first flight of creaking stairs quite easy. At least Rose-Marie could step aside from the piles of rubbish and avoid the rickety places. She wondered, as she went up, her fingers gingerly touching the dirty hand-rail, how people could exist under such wretched conditions.

The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow doorway was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have been gas jets upon every landing--Rose-Marie supposed that there were--but it was mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She groped her way up the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully along each step with her foot before she put her weight upon it.

On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But she realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far as she could tell--all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage, and fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy dishes.

But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours--poignant though they were--took second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she imagined that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same place at one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little children, the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the crashes of breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and--worst of all--bursts of appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the darkness of the fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected to hear--phrases of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she started up the fifth flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the Volsky flat, she experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she would be shut off, in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds--at least, in a moment, she would be in a _home_.

To most of us--particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such as had always sheltered Rose-Marie--the very sound of the word "home" brings a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for shelter and protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be it ever so humble ..."

And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word--to be ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her conception of the word. She expected it to be a home because a family lived there together--a mother, and a father, and children.

In answer to her knock the door swung open--a little way. The glow of a dingy lamp fell about her, through the opening--she felt suddenly as if she had been swept, willy-nilly, before the footlights of some hostile stage. For a moment she stood blinking. And as she stood there, quite unable to see, she heard the voice of Bennie Volsky, speaking in a hoarse whisper.

"It's you, Miss!" said the voice, and it was as full of intense wonderment as a voice could be. "I never thought that you'd come--I didn't think you was on th' level. So many folks say they'll do things--" he broke off, and then--"Walk in, quiet," he told her slowly. "Don't make any noise, if yer can help it! Pa's come home, all lit up. An' he's asleep, in th' corner! There'll be--" he broke off--"There'll be th' dickens t' pay, if Pa wakes up! But walk in, still-like. An' yer can see Ma an' all, an'--_Lily_!"

Rose-Marie, whose eyes had now become accustomed to the dim light, stepped past the boy and into the room. Her hand, in passing, touched his arm lightly, for she knew that he was labouring under intense excitement. She stepped into the room, on mousy-quiet feet--and then, with a quick gasp, drew back again.

Never, in her wildest dreams of poverty, had Rose-Marie supposed that squalor, such as she saw in the Volsky home, could exist. Never had she supposed that a family could live in such cramped, airless quarters. Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream--a dream in which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture of a home was vanishing--vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap bubble vanishes, if pricked by a pin.

"Why--why, Bennie!" she began. But the child was not listening. He had darted from her side and was dragging forward, by one listless, work-coarsened hand, a pallid, drooping woman.

"Dis is my ma," he told Rose-Marie. "She didn't know yer was comin'. I didn't tell her!"

It seemed to Rose-Marie that there was a scared sort of appeal in the woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was not even appeal in the tone of her voice--it was all a drab, colourless monotone.

"Whatcha come here fer?" she questioned. "Pa, he's home. If he should ter wake up--" She left the sentence unfinished.

Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothing in that figure to hold her gaze--it was so vague, so like a shadow of something that had been. She saw the few broken chairs, the half-filled wash tub, the dish-pan with its freight of soiled cups and plates. She saw the gas stove, with its battered coffee-pot, and a mattress or two piled high with dingy bedding. And, in one corner, she saw--with a new sense of horror--the reclining figure of Pa.

Pa was sleeping. Sleeping heavily, with his mouth open and his tousled head slipping to one side. One great hairy hand was clenched about an empty bottle--one huge foot, stockingless and half out of its shoe, was dragging limply off the heap of blankets that was his bed. A stubble of beard made his already dark face even more sinister, his tousled hair looked as if it had never known the refining influences of a comb or brush. As Rose-Marie stared at him, half fascinated, he turned--with a spasmodic, drunken movement--and flung one heavy arm above his head.

The room was not a large one. But, at that moment, it seemed appallingly spacious to Rose-Marie. She turned, almost with a feeling of affection, toward Bennie. At least she had seen him before. And, as if he interpreted her feeling, Bennie spoke.

"We got two other rooms," he told her, "one that Ella an' Lily sleep in, an' one that Jim pays fer, his own self. Ma an' Pa an' me--we sleep _here_! Say, don't you be too scared o' Pa--he'll stay asleep fer a long time, now. He won't wake up unless he's shook. Will he, Ma?"

Mrs. Volsky nodded her head with a worn out, apathetic movement. Noiselessly, but with the appearance of a certain terrible effort under the shell of quiet, she moved away across the room toward the stove.

"She's goin' t' warm up th' coffee," Bennie said. "She'll give you some, in a minute, if yer want it!"

Rose-Marie was about to speak, about to assure Bennie that she didn't want any of the coffee, when steps sounded on the stairs. They were hurried steps; steps suggesting to the listener that five flights were nothing, after all! Rose-Marie found herself turning as a hand fell heavily upon a door-knob, and the door swung in.

A young man stood jauntily upon the threshold. Rose-Marie's first impression of him was one of extreme, almost offensive neatness--of sleek hair, that looked like patent leather, and of highly polished brown shoes. She saw that his blue and white striped collar was speckless, that his blue tie was obviously new, that his trousers were creased to an almost dangerous edge. But it was the face of the young man from which Rose-Marie shrank back--a clever, sharp face with narrow, horribly speculative eyes and a thin-lipped red mouth. It was a handsome face, yes, but--

The voice of Bennie broke, suddenly, across her speculations. "Jim," he said.

Still jauntily--Rose-Marie realized that jauntiness was his keynote--the young man entered the room. His sharp eyes travelled with lightning-like rapidity over the place, resting a moment on the sleeping figure of Pa before they hurried past him to Rose-Marie. He surveyed her coolly, taking in every feature, every fold of her garments, with a studied boldness that was somehow offensive.

"Who's she?" he questioned abruptly, of any one who cared to answer, and one manicured finger pointed in her direction. "Where'd she come from?"

Bennie was the one who spoke. Rather gallantly he stepped in front of Rose-Marie.

"She's a friend of mine," he said; "she lives by th' Settlement House. She come up here t' see me, 'n' Ma, 'n' Lily. You leave her be--y' understand?"

The young man laughed, and his laugh was curiously hard and dry.

"Oh, sure!" he told Bennie. "I'll leave her be! What," he turned to Rose-Marie with an insolent smile, "what's yer name?"

Rose-Marie met his insolent gaze with a calm expression. No one would have guessed that she was trembling inwardly.

"My name," she told him, "is Rose-Marie Thompson. I live in the Settlement House, and I came to see your sister."

"Well," the young man's insolent gaze was still studying Rose-Marie, "well, she'll be up soon. I passed 'er on th' stairs. But," he laughed again, "why didn't yer come t' see me--huh?"