Chapter 3

Rose-Marie, having no answer, turned expectantly toward the door. If this Jim had passed his sister on the stairs, she couldn't be very far away. As if in reply to her supposition, the door swung open again and a tall, dark-eyed girl came into the room. Rose-Marie saw with her first swift glance that the red upon the girl's cheeks was too high to be quite natural--that the scarlet of her lips was over-vivid. And yet, despite the patently artificial colouring, she realized that the girl was beautiful with a high strung, almost thoroughbred beauty. She wondered how this beauty had been born of the dim woman who seemed so colourless and the sodden brute who lay snoring in the comer.

Her train of thought was broken, suddenly. For the young man was speaking. Rose-Marie disliked, somehow, the very tone of his voice.

"Here's a girl t' see you, Ella," he said. "She's from th' Settlement House--she says! Maybe she wants," sarcastically, "that you should join a Bible Class!"

The girl's eyes were flashing with a dangerously hard light. She turned angrily to Rose-Marie. But before she could say anything, the child, Bennie, had interposed.

"She didn't come t' see _you_" he told his older sister--"she don't want t' see you--like those other wimmen did. She come t' see _Lily_--"

He paused and Rose-Marie, who had gathered that social service workers were not welcome visitors, went on breathlessly, from where he left off.

"I _am_ from the Settlement House," she told Ella, "and I'd like awfully to have you join our classes. But that wasn't why I came here. Bennie told me that he had a dear little sister. And I came to see her."

A change swept miraculously over Ella's cold face. Rose-Marie could see, all at once, that she and her young brother were strikingly alike--that Jim was the different one in this family.

"I'll get Lily," Ella said simply, and there was a warmth, a tenderness in her dark eyes that had been so hard. "I didn't understand," she added, as she went quickly past Rose-Marie and into the small inner room that Bennie had said his sisters shared. In a moment she came out leading a small girl by the hand.

"This is Lily!" she said softly.

Even in that dingy place--perhaps accentuated by the very dinginess of it--Lily's blond loveliness struck Rose-Marie with a sense of shock. The child might have been a flower--the very flower whose name she bore--growing upon an ash heap. Her beauty made the rest of the room fade into dim outlines--made Jim and Ella and Bennie seem heavy, and somehow overfed. Even Pa, snoring lustily, became almost a shadow. Rose-Marie stepped toward the child impulsively, with outflung arms.

"Oh, you dear!" she said shakily, "you dear!"

Nobody spoke. Only Ella, with gentle hands, pushed her little sister forward. The child's great blue eyes looked past Rose-Marie, and a vague smile quivered on her lips.

"Oh, you dear!" Rose-Marie exclaimed again, and went down on her knees on the dirty floor--real women will always kneel before a beautiful child.

Lily might have been four years old. Her hair, drawn back from her white little face, was the colour of pale gold, and her lips were faintly coral. But it was her deep eyes, with their vague expression, that clutched, somehow, at Rose-Marie's heart.

"Tell me that you're going to like me, Lily!" she almost implored. "I love little girls."

The child did not answer--indeed, she did not seem to hear. But one thin little hand, creeping out, touched Rose-Marie's face with a gesture that was singularly appealing, singularly full of affection. When the fingers touched her cheek, Rose-Marie felt a sudden suspicion, a sudden dread. She noticed, all at once, that no one was speaking--that the room was quite still, except for the beastial grunts of the sleeping Pa.

"Why," she asked, quite without meaning to, "why doesn't she answer me? She isn't afraid of me, is she? Why doesn't she say something?"

It was, curiously enough, Mrs. Volsky who answered. Even her voice--that was usually so dull and monotonous--held a certain tremor.

"Lily," she said slowly, "can't spick--'r hear.... An' she's--blind!"

VII

A LILY IN THE SLUMS

Rose-Marie started back from the child with a sickening sense of shock. All at once she realized the reason why Bennie's eyes grew tender at the mention of his little sister--why Ella forgot anger and suspicion when Lily came into the room. She understood why Mrs. Volsky's dull voice held love and sorrow. And yet, as she looked at the small girl, it seemed almost incredible that she should be so afflicted. Deaf and dumb and blind! Never to hear the voices of those who loved her, never to see the beautiful things of life, never--even--to speak! Rose-Marie choked back a sob, and glanced across the child's cloud of pale golden hair at Ella. As their eyes met she knew that they were, in some strange way, friends.

With a sudden, overwhelming pity, her arms reached out again to Lily. As she gathered the child close she was surprised at the slenderness of the tiny figure, at the neatness of the faded gingham frock that blended in tone with the great, sightless eyes. All at once she remembered what Bennie had said to her, the day before, in the park.

"I love Lily," he had told her, "I wouldn't let nobody hurt Lily! If any one--even Pa, so much as spoke mean to her--I'd kill him...."

Glancing about the room, at the faces of the others, she sensed a silent echo of Bennie's words. Mrs. Volsky, who would keep neither her flat nor herself neat, quite evidently saw to it that Lily's little dress was spotless. Ella, whose temper would flare up at the slightest word, cared for the child with the tender efficiency of a professional nurse; Bennie's face, as he looked at his tiny sister, had taken on a cherubic softness. And Jim ... Rose-Marie glanced at Jim and was startled out of her reflections. For Jim was not looking at Lily. His gaze was fixed upon her own face with an intensity that frightened her. With a sudden impulse she spoke directly to him.

"You must be very kind to this little sister of yours," she told him. "She needs every bit of love and affection and consideration that her family can give her!"

Jim, his gaze still upon her face, shrugged his shoulders. But before he could answer Ella had come a step closer to Rose-Marie. Her eyes were flashing.

"Jim," she said, "ain't got any love or kindness or consideration in him! Jim thinks that Lily ain't got any more feelin's than a puppy dog--'cause she can't answer back. Oh," in response to the question in Rose-Marie's face, "oh, he'd never put a finger on her--not that! But he don't speak kind to her, like we do. It's enough fer him that she can't hear th' words he lays his tongue to. Even Pa--"

Suddenly, as if in answer to his spoken name, there came a scuffling sound from the corner where Pa was sleeping. All at once the empty bottle dropped from the unclenched hand, the mouth fell open in a prodigious yawn, the eyes became wide, burned-out wells of drunkenness. And as she watched, Rose-Marie saw the room cleared in an amazing fashion. She heard Mrs. Volsky's terrified whisper, "He's wakin' up!" She heard Jim's harsh laugh; she saw Ella, with a fiercely maternal sweep of her strong arms, gather the little Lily close to her breast and dart toward the inner room. And then, as she stood dazedly watching the mountain of sodden flesh that was Pa rear itself to a sitting posture, and then to a standing one, she felt a hot little hand touch her own.

"We better clear out," said the voice of Bennie. "We better clear out pretty quick! Pa's awful bad, sometimes, when he's just wakin' up!"

With a quickness not unlike the bump at the end of a falling-through-space dream, Rose-Marie felt herself drawn from the room--heard the door close with a slam behind her. And then she was hurrying after the shadowy form of Bennie, down the five rickety flights of stairs--past the same varied odours and the same appalling sounds that she had noticed on the way up!

VIII

ANOTHER QUARREL

When Rose-Marie came out into the sunlight of the street she glanced at her watch and saw, with an almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty, and--she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes--a menace that she did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had stayed a few moments longer, she would have seen downright brutality. Her hand, reaching out, clutched Bennie's hand.

"Dear," she said--and realized, from the startled expression of his eyes, that he had not often been called "Dear,"--"is it always like that, in your home?"

Bennie looked up into her eyes. He seemed, somehow, younger than he had appeared the day before, younger and softer.

"Yes, Miss," he told her, "it's always like that, except when it's worse!"

"And," Rose-Marie was still asking questions, "do your older sister and brother just drift in, at any time, like that? And is your father home in the middle of the day? Don't any of them work?"

Bennie's barriers of shyness had been burned away by the warmth of her friendship. He was in a mood to tell anything.

"Pa, he works sometimes," he said. "An' Ella--she uster work till she had a fight with her boss last week. An' now she says she ain't gotta work no more 'cause there's a feller as will give her everythin' she wants, if she says th' word! An' Jim--I ain't never seen him do nothin', but he always has a awful lot o' money. He must do his workin' at night--after I'm asleep!"

Rose-Marie, her mind working rapidly, realized that Bennie had given revelations of which he did not even dream. Pa--his condition was what she had supposed it to be--but Ella was drifting toward danger-shoals that she had never imagined! Well she knew the conditions under which a girl of Ella's financial status stops working--she had heard many such cases discussed, with an amazing frankness, during her short stay at the Settlement House. And Jim--Jim with his sleek, patent-leather hair, and his rat-like face--Jim did his work at night! Rose-Marie could not suppress the shudder that ran over her. Quickly she changed the subject to the one bright spot in the Volsky family--to Lily.

"Your little sister," she asked Bennie, "has she always been as she is now? Wasn't there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?"

Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered. Rose-Marie, who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him better for the tears. "Yes, Miss," he told her, "she was born all healthy, Ma says. But she had a sickness--when she was a baby. An' she ain't been right since!"

They walked the rest of the way in silence--a silence of untold depth. But it was that silent walk, Rose-Marie felt afterward, that cemented the strange affection that had sprung suddenly into flower between them. As they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child and a grown-up. And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of course, to come to some of their boys' clubs he assented in a manner as casual as her own.

* * * * *

As she sat down to dinner, that night, Rose-Marie was beaming with happiness and the pride of achievement. The Superintendent, tired after the day's work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic smile--the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a quarrel lay, starkly, between them.

Rose-Marie, herself, could scarcely have told why she was so bubbling over with gladness. When she left the tenement home of the Volskys she had been exceedingly depressed, when she parted from Bennie at the Settlement House steps she had been ready to cry. But the hours between that parting and dinnertime had brought her a sort of assurance, a sort of joyous bravery. She felt that at last she had found her true vocation, her real place in the sun. The Volsky family presented to her a very genuine challenge.

She glanced, covertly, at the Young Doctor. He was eating soup, and no man is at his best while eating soup. And yet as she watched him, she considered very seriously whether she should tell him of her adventure. His skill might, perhaps, find some way out for Lily, who had not been born a mute, who had come into the world with seeing eyes. Bennie had told her that the child's condition was the result of an illness. Perhaps the Young Doctor might be able to effect at least a partial cure. Perhaps it was selfish of her--utterly, absurdly selfish, to keep the situation to herself.

The Superintendent's voice broke, sharply, into her reverie. It was a pleasant voice, and yet Rose-Marie found herself resenting its questioning tone.

"Did you have a pleasant afternoon, dear?" the Superintendent was asking. "I noticed that you were out for a long while, alone!"

"Why, yes," Rose-Marie faltered, as she spoke, and, to her annoyance, she could feel the red wave of a blush creeping up over her face (Rose-Marie had never learned to control her blushes). "Why, yes, I had a very delightful afternoon!"

The Young Doctor, glancing up from his soup, felt a sudden desire to tease. Rose-Marie, with her cheeks all flushed, made a startlingly colourful, extremely young picture.

"You're blushing!" he told her accusingly. "You're blushing!"

Rose-Marie, feeling the blushes creep still higher, knew a rude impulse to slap the Young Doctor. All of her desire to confide in him died away, as suddenly as it had been born. He was the man who had said that the people who lived in poverty are soulless. He would scoff at the Volskys, and at her desire to help them. Worse than that--he might keep her from seeing the Volskys again. And, in keeping her from seeing them, he would also keep her from making Bennie into a real, wholesome boy--he would keep her from showing Ella the dangers of the precipice that she was skirting. Of course, he might help Lily. But, Rose-Marie told herself that perhaps even Lily--golden-haired, angelic little Lily--might seem soulless to him.

"I'm not blushing, Dr. Blanchard," she said shortly, and could have bitten her tongue for saying it.

The Young Doctor laughed with a boyish vigour.

"I thought," he said annoyingly, "that you were a Christian, Miss Rose-Marie Thompson!"

Rose-Marie felt a tide of quite definite anger rising in her heart.

"I am a Christian!" she retorted.

"Then," the Young Doctor was still laughing, "then you must never, never tell untruths. You are blushing!"

The Superintendent interrupted. It had been her role, lately, to interrupt quarrels between the two who sat on either side of her table.

"Don't tease, Billy Blanchard!" she said, sternly. "If Rose-Marie went anywhere this afternoon, she certainly had a right to. And she also has a right to blush. I'm glad, in these sophisticated days, to see a girl who can blush!"

The Young Doctor was leaning back in his chair, surveying the pair of them with unconcealed amusement.

"How you women do stick together!" he said. "Talk about men being clannish! I believe," he chuckled, "from the way Miss Thompson is blushing, that she's got a very best beau! I believe that she was out with him, this afternoon!"

Rose-Marie, who had always been taught that deceit is wicked, felt a sudden, unexplainable urge to be wicked! She told herself that she hated Dr. Blanchard--she told herself that he was the most unsympathetic of men! His eyes, fixed mirthfully upon her, brought words--that she scarcely meant to say--to her lips.

"Well," she answered slowly and distinctly, "what if I was?"

There was silence for a moment. And then--with something of an effort--the Superintendent spoke.

"I told you," she said, "not to bother Rose-Marie, Doctor. If Rose-Marie was out with a young man I'm sure that she had every right to be. Rose-Marie"--was it possible that her eyes were fixed a shade inquiringly upon the blushing girl--"would have nothing to do with any one who had not been approved by her aunts. And she realizes that she is, in a way, under my care--that I am more or less responsible for her safety and welfare. Rose-Marie is trustworthy, absolutely trustworthy. And she is old enough to take care of herself. You must not bother her, Billy Blanchard!"

It was a long speech for the Superintendent, and it was a kindly one. It was also a speech to invite confidences. But--strangely enough--Rose-Marie could not help feeling that there was a question half concealed in the kindliness of it. She could not help feeling that the Superintendent was just a trifle worried over the prospect of an unknown young man.

It was her time, then, to admit that there was nobody, really--that she had gone out on an adventure by herself, that there had been no "beau." But the consciousness of the Young Doctor's eyes, fixed upon her face, prohibited all speech. She could not tell him about the Volskys--neither could she admit that no young man was interested in her. Every girl wants to seem popular in the eyes of some member of the opposite sex--even though that member may be an unpleasant person--whom she dislikes. And so, with a feeling of utter meanness in her soul--with a real weight of deceit upon her heart--she smiled into the Superintendent's anxious face.

"I do appreciate the way you feel about me," she said softly, "I do, indeed! You may be sure that I won't do anything that either you, or my aunts, would disapprove of!"

After all, she assured herself a trifle uncomfortably, she had in no way told a direct falsehood. They had assumed too much and she had not corrected their assumptions. She said fiercely, in her heart, that she was not to blame if they insisted upon taking things for granted!

IX

AND ANOTHER

As the days crept into weeks, Rose-Marie no longer felt the dull unrest of inaction. She was busy at the Settlement House--her clubs for mothers and young girls, her kindergarten for the little tots, had grown amazingly popular. And at the times when she was not busy at the Settlement House, she had the Volsky family and their many problems to occupy her.

The Volsky family--and their many problems! Rose-Marie would have found it hard to tell which problem was the most important! Of course Lily came first--her infirmities and her sweetness made her the central figure. But the problem of Ella was a more vital one to watch--it was, somehow, more immediate. Rose-Marie had found it hard to reach Ella--except when Lily was the topic of conversation; except when Lily's welfare was to be considered, she stayed silently in the background. But the flashings of her great dark eyes, the quiverings of her too scarlet mouth, were ominous. Rose-Marie could see that the untidiness of the flat, the drunken mutterings of Pa, and her mother's carelessness and dirt had strained Ella's resistance to the breaking point. Some day there would be a crash and, upon that day Ella would disappear like a gorgeous butterfly that drifts across the road, and out of sight. Rose-Marie was hoping to push that day into the background--to make it only a dim uncertainty rather than the sword of Damocles that it was. But she could only hope.

Bennie, too, was a problem. But it was Bennie who cheered Rose-Marie when she felt that her efforts in behalf of Ella were failing. For Bennie's brain was the fertile ground in which she could plant ideals, and dreams. Bennie was young enough to change, and easily. He got into the way of waiting for her, after his school had been dismissed, in the little park. And there, seated close together on an iron bench, they would talk; and Rose-Marie would tell endless stories. Most of the stories were about knights who rode upon gallant quests, and about old-time courtesy, and about wonderful animals. But sometimes she told him of her home in the country--of apple trees in bloom, and frail arbutus hiding under the snow. She told him of coasting parties, and bonfires, and trees to climb. And he listened, star-eyed and adoring. They made a pretty picture together--the slim, rosy-cheeked girl and the ragged little boy, with the pale, city sunshine falling, like a mist, all about them.

Lily and Ella and Bennie--Rose-Marie loved them, all three. But Jim Volsky was the unsolvable problem--the one that she tried to push to the back of her mind, to avoid. Mrs. Volsky and Pa she gave up as nearly hopeless--she kept, as much as possible, out of Pa's way, and Mrs. Volsky could only be helped in the attaining of creature comforts--her spirit seemed dead! But Jim insisted upon intruding upon her moments in the flat; he monopolized conversations, and asked impertinent questions, and stared. More than once he had offered to "walk her home" as she was leaving; more than once he had thrust himself menacingly across her path. But she had managed, neatly, to avoid him.

Rose-Marie was afraid of Jim. She admitted it to herself--she even admitted, at times, that the Young Doctor might be of assistance if any emergency should arise out of Jim's sleek persistence. She had noticed, from the first, that the doctor was an impressive man among men--she had seen the encouraging swell of muscles through the warm tweed of his coat sleeve. But to have asked his help in the controlling of Jim would have been an admission of deceit, of weakness, of failure! To prove her own theory that the people were real, underneath--to prove that they had some sort of a code, and worth-while impulses--she had to make the reformation of the Volsky family her own, individual task.

Yes--Rose-Marie was busy. Almost she hated to give up moments of her time to the letters she had to write home--to the sewing that she had to do. She made few friends among the teachers and visitors who thronged the Settlement House by day--she was far too tired, when night came, to meet with the Young Doctor and the Superintendent in the cosy little living-room. But often when her activities lasted well along into the evening, often when her clubs gave sociables or entertainments, she was forced to welcome the Young Doctor (the Superintendent was always welcome); to make room for him beside her own place.

It was during one of these entertainments--her Girls' Sewing Society was giving a party--that she and the Young Doctor had their first real talk. Before the quarrel at the luncheon table they had had little time together; since the quarrel the Young Doctor had seldom been able to corner Rose-Marie. But at the entertainment they were placed, by the hand of circumstance, upon a wooden settee in the back of the room. And there, for the better part of two hours--while Katie Syrop declaimed poetry and Helen Merskovsky played upon the piano, and others recited long and monotonous dialogues--they were forced to stay.

The Young Doctor was in a chastened mood. He applauded heartily whenever a part of the program came to a close; the comments that he made behind his hand were neither sarcastic nor condescending. He praised the work that Rose-Marie had done and then, while she was glowing--almost against her will--from the warmth of that praise, he ventured a remark that had nothing to do with the work.