CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH
As You Like It, i. 2.
The afternoon was already darkening into dusk one day late in January
when Philip Ashe stood in the hallway of a squalid tenement house,
looking out into a dingy court. The place was surrounded by tall
buildings which cut off the light and made day shorter than nature had
intended, an effect which was not lessened by the clothes drying
smokily on lines above. In one corner of the court yawned like the
entrance to a cave the mouth of the passageway by which it was entered.
In another stood a dilapidated handcart in which some dweller there was
accustomed to carry abroad his rubbishy wares. The windows were for the
most part curtainless, rising row above row with an aspect of
wretchedness which gave Ashe a sense of discomfort so strong as almost
to be physical. Here and there rags and old hats did duty instead of
glass; some windows were open, framing slatternly women.
These women were stupidly quiet. Ashe wondered if they would have
talked to each other across the court if he had not been in sight, or
if the gathering dusk silenced them. One of them was smoking a short
black pipe, and once let fall a spark upon the head of another idler a
couple of floors below. The injured woman poured forth a volley of
oaths, and Ashe expected a war of words. Nothing of the sort occurred.
The figure above was so indifferent as hardly to glance down where the
offended harridan was steaming with a fume of curses.
Philip began to be uneasy. He looked up at the darkening sky, and
backward to the gloom of the stairway behind him. No gas had been
lighted in the building, and he wondered if any ever were. It was
certainly too late for Mrs. Fenton to be poking about in these
dangerous places. They had been doing charity visiting together, and
she had insisted on coming to this one house more before going home. He
had remonstrated, but she had laughed at his fears.
"I don't believe any of these places are really dangerous," she had
declared. "I've been coming here for years, and nobody ever troubled
me."
"By daylight it is all very well," he had answered, "but it's a
different thing after dark. I have been here once or twice to see some
sick person in the evening, and it is a rough place."
"But it isn't after dark," she had persisted, "and it won't be for an
hour."
She had had her way, but Ashe reflected uneasily that if harm came to
her it would be his fault. He should have insisted upon her going home.
The light was fading fast, and the locality was one of the worst in
town. He wondered why the mere absence of daylight gave wickedness so
much boldness. Men who by day were the veriest cowards seemed to spring
into appalling fearlessness as soon as darkness gave its uncertain
promise of concealment. The thought made him turn, and begin slowly to
walk up the stairs.
He was not sure what floor she meant to visit. She was going, he knew,
to see a woman whose husband got drunk and beat her. She had told him
about the poor creature as they came along. She was sure Mrs. Murphy
must have known a decent life. She set her down as having been a
housekeeper or upper servant who had foolishly married a rascal. The
woman, Mrs. Fenton had added, was evidently ashamed of her present
condition, and afraid that those who had known her in her better days
should discover her.
"It is pitiful," Mrs. Fenton had said musingly, "to see how she clings
to her husband. She pulls down her sleeves to cover the bruises, and
tells how good he was to her when they were first married. She says he
doesn't mean to hurt her, but that he's the strongest man in the court,
and doesn't realize what he is doing. She's even proud of his strength."
"Strength is apt to impress women," Ashe had answered, not without a
secret sense of humiliation to lack this quality.
As he walked gropingly up the dark stairway, a man came clumsily after,
and presently stumbled past him. A strong smell of liquor enveloped the
newcomer, and he lurched heavily against Ashe without apology. Philip
heard his uneven steps mounting in the gloom, and followed almost
mechanically. He paused in one of the hallways to listen to a babble of
words in one of the rooms. It was chiefly profanity, but it hardly
seemed to be ill-natured. It was simply a family cursing each other
with well-accustomed vehemence. He grew every instant more and more
uneasy, and thought of knocking at every door until he found his
friend. What right had philanthropy to demand that a beautiful, noble
woman should be exposed to the chances of a nest of ruffianism and
vice? He was indignant at the committee for not delegating such work to
men. Then he remembered that Mrs. Fenton was herself on the committee,
and that it was by her own insistence that she was here.
"She is capable of any sacrifice to what she believes to be right," he
said to himself; "but she is too good for such work; she is too
delicate, too"--
Suddenly a noise arose on the floor above him. A man's voice, thick
with anger or drink, was pouring out a stream of words, half oaths; a
woman was shrilly entreating. Ashe sprang quickly upstairs, and as he
did so he heard Mrs. Fenton scream. The sound was behind a door, and
without stopping to deliberate he tried to open it. The latch yielded,
but he could not open.
"Let me in!" he cried fiercely. "What is the matter?"
The voice of a man who was evidently against the door answered him with
blasphemies. A woman within cried to the man to stop, while Mrs. Fenton
called to Ashe for help. Philip set his shoulder against the door and
strained with all his might to force it. He remembered then what Mrs.
Fenton had said about the strength of the husband of her pensioner.
"Go to the window, and call the police," he shouted.
"He's holding me!" Mrs. Fenton cried back pantingly.
Philip strained more desperately, and as he did so he heard the window
within flung open, and the voice of a woman yelling for the police. The
man inside sprang forward with an oath, the door yielded, and Philip
plunged headlong into the room.
As Philip fell upon his knees, he saw a man seize the woman who from
the window was calling for help, and fling her to the floor. The sound
of her fall, with her wild shriek beaten into a choking gasp by the
force with which she struck, turned his heart sick; but his fear for
Mrs. Fenton kept him up. He scrambled to his feet, and as he did so she
ran toward him.
"Your cassock is all dust!" she cried hysterically. "Oh, come away!"
The absurdity of the words made him burst into nervous laughter; yet he
saw that the drunken man was coming, and he instinctively put her
behind him and took some sort of a posture of defense.
"Save yourself," he cried hastily. "He's killed the woman."
All this passed with the quickness of thought. There seemed to Philip
hardly the time of a breath between the opening of the door and the
blow which now fell upon the side of his face. Fortunately he partly
evaded it, but he reeled and staggered, feeling the earth shake and the
air full of stinging points of fire. He saw the figure of his assailant
towering between him and the light; he had a glimpse of Mrs. Fenton
rushing to the window to call again for help; he realized with a
horrible shrinking that that hammer-like fist was again striking out
for his face; he was conscious of a sickening impulse to run, a
humiliating and overwhelming sense of his inability to cope with this
brute and of even his ignorance how to try; yet most of all he felt the
determination to defend Edith or to die in the attempt. In a wild and
futile fashion he dashed against his assailant, striking blindly and
furiously, crying with rage and weakness, but throwing all his force
into the fight. He felt crushing blows on his head and chest. Once he
was struck on the side of the throat so that he gasped for breath with
the sensation that he was drowning. Now and then he felt his own fist
strike flesh, and the sensation was to him horrible. He fought blindly,
doggedly, inwardly weeping for the shame and the pity of it, wondering
if there would never be any end, and what would happen to Mrs. Fenton
if he were beaten helpless. Surely if aid were coming it must have
arrived long ago. He had been fighting for hours. He kept striking on,
but he felt his strength failing, and he could have laughed wildly at
the pitiful feebleness of his blows. He was knocked down, and scrambled
up again, amazed that he was not killed or disabled. His one hope lay
in the fact that the man was evidently much the worse for drink, and
often struck as blindly as himself. If he could but occupy the brute's
attention until help came, Mrs. Fenton would be saved.
Suddenly he was aware that the roaring in his ears was not all from the
ringing in his head, but that heavy steps were sounding from the
stairway. In a moment more screaming women were swarming in, and the
din become intolerable as they scuttled about him, calling out to his
opponent to stop and not to do murder. Men followed, and a couple of
policemen came in their wake. Ashe saw through heavy eyelids the shine
of brass buttons, and felt that the wearers of the uniforms to which
these belonged had seized upon his assailant. He staggered against the
wall, sick, faint, and dizzy. The two policemen were having a severe
struggle to subdue their prisoner, and it seemed to Philip that all the
inhabitants of the neighborhood were crowding in at the narrow door.
The wife lay where she had been dashed to the floor, and Mrs. Fenton
bent over her.
"Oh, Mr. Ashe," the latter said, coming to him, "you must be terribly
hurt! I think Mrs. Murphy's killed."
He tried to smile, but his face was swollen and unmanageable.
"It's no matter about me," he managed with difficulty to say, "if you
are not hurt."
The realities of life came back. The whirling rush of the swift moments
of the fight seemed already far off. The crowd examined him with frank
curiosity, commenting on him as "the dude that's been scrappin' with
Mike Murphy." He saw some of the women busy over the prostrate form of
Mrs. Murphy, lifting her from the floor to the bed.
"Well, Mike," one of the policemen said, "I guess this job'll be your
last. You've done it this time."
The prisoner seemed to have become sober all at once, now that he was
in the hands of the law. He went over to the bed, between his captors,
and examined the injured woman with the air of one accustomed to such
occurrences.
"Oh, the old woman'll pull round all right," he growled. "She ain't no
flannel-mouth charity chump."
Without a word Ashe put his hand upon the arm of Mrs. Fenton, and led
her toward the door. The insult cut him more than all that had gone
before. What had passed belonged to a drunken and irrational mood. This
taunt came evidently from deliberate contempt and ingratitude. Philip
had a bewildered sense of being outside of all conditions which he
could understand. This shameless effrontery and brutality seemed to him
rather the distorted fantasy of an evil dream than anything which could
be real. His one thought now was to get his companion away before she
was exposed to fresh insult.
They were detained a little by the police; but after giving their
addresses were allowed to go. Ashe felt shaky and exhausted, but the
hand of Mrs. Fenton was on his arm, and the need of sustaining her gave
him strength. They got with some difficulty through the crowd and out
of the court, and after walking a block or two were fortunate enough to
find a carriage.
"Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Fenton said, as they drove up Hanover Street, "I'm
afraid you're terribly hurt; and it is all my fault."
"No, no," he replied with swollen lips. "The fault was mine. I
shouldn't have let you go into that place."
"But you did try to stop me; only I was obstinate. Oh, I don't know how
to thank you for coming as you did."
"But what happened before I came?"
Mrs. Fenton shuddered.
"Oh, I don't think I know very clearly. That great drunken man came in,
and asked me for money. Of course I didn't give it to him; and his wife
tried to get him to let me go. Then he struck her on the mouth!"
"The brute!" Ashe involuntarily cried, clenching his bruised fists.
"Then he caught me by the waist, and I screamed; and in another minute
I heard you at the door."
"But it was the woman that called the police."
"Yes; and when she did that I was fearfully frightened. I knew that if
she called the police against her own husband she must think that he'd
really hurt me."
Philip leaned back in the carriage, dizzy with the overwhelming sense
of the peril that had beset her,--her! Then, mastered by an
overpowering impulse, he threw himself forward and caught her hands,
covering them with kisses.
"Oh, my darling!" he gasped. "Oh, thank God you are safe!"
She dragged her hands away from him, and shrank back.
"Mr. Ashe!" she cried. "What is the matter with you? What are you
doing?"
He did not attempt to retain his hold, but drew himself back into the
darkness of his corner of the carriage. A strange calmness followed his
outbreak; a sort of joyous uplifting which made him master of himself
completely.
"I am sinning," he answered with a riotous sense of delight. "I am
laying up remorse for all my future. I am telling you I love you; that
I love you: I love you! I love you and I have saved you; and I shall
brood over that, and do penance, and brood over it again, and do
penance again, all my life long!"
"Oh, you are confused, excited, hurt," she cried. "You don't know what
you are saying!"
"I know only too well what I am saying. I am saying that I"--
"Oh, for pity's sake, don't!" she moaned, putting out her hand.
He caught her wrist, and again kissed her hand passionately.
"Yes, I know that I ought not to say this now when you have had to bear
so much already; that I ought never to say it; but it is said! It is
said! You'll forget it, but I shall remember it all my life. I shall
remember that you heard me say that I love you!"
He threw himself back into his corner, and she shrank into hers, while
the carriage went rattling over the pavement. Aching and sore, Philip
yet knew a wild exhilaration, a certain divine madness which was so
intense a delight that it almost made him weep. It was like a religious
ecstasy, recalling to his mind moments in which he had seemed to be
lifted almost to trance-like communion with holy spirits.
"I ought to ask you to forgive me, Mrs. Fenton," he said as they drew
near her house, "but I cannot. I did not mean to do this; but I can't
regret it. I am sorry for you; I am sorry--I shall be sorry, that
is--for the sin of it; but the sin is sweet."
He wondered at his own voice, so even yet so high in pitch.
"Oh, what shall I do?" Mrs. Fenton cried sobbingly. "Is it my fault
that this happened?"
"Oh, nothing can be your fault. It is all mine! But you must love me, I
love you so!"
"No, no," she exclaimed vehemently. "I don't love you! I cannot love
you! For pity's sake don't say such things!"
She buried her face in her hands and burst into sobs. Philip set his
lips together, smiling bitterly at the pain it gave him. He controlled
his voice as well as he was able.
"I beg you will forgive me," said he. "I have been out of my head.
Forget my impertinence, and"--
He could not finish, but the stopping of the carriage at her door saved
him the need of farther effort.
He assisted her to alight, rang the bell, and said goodnight in a voice
which he was sure did not betray him to the coachman.