How Life was Gray and Everything was Horrid; how Carlisle
went to Little Africa with Hen; how the Man spoke to her
again, just the same, and what happened then; further,
reporting a Confidential Talk with a Best Girl-Friend.
Hearing the whir of a slowing motor behind her, and her name called
besides, Henrietta Cooney checked her practised pedestrian's stride and
looked back over her shoulder. The Heth car, with Carlisle alone in it,
rolled abreast of her at the curb.
"What on earth are _you_ doing, Hen," asked her cousin, but hardly as if
the matter interested her much--"up here at this time!"
"Servant chasing!" cried Hen, gaily. "My favorite outdoor sport.
Hortense's left us. I got out early on purpose. You're looking mighty
well, Cally."
Cally made a weary little face, which seemed to say that such matters as
looks were very far from being of interest to her. It happened to be the
fact, indeed, that she had never felt more depressed and bereft in her
life: witness her hailing Hen Cooney, whom she had never cared much for,
and less than ever after the way Hen had shown her real nature about the
Works. Time's chances had brought her to this, that she preferred Hen's
society above the company of her own thoughts. Gray and empty had been
Cally's days since a New Year's moment in the library....
"But you'll not find any servants up here, my dear!--unless you expect
to throw bags over their heads and kidnap them?"
"I'd like to," laughed Hen, friendly elbows on the car door. "And then
give them the bastinado every hour on the hour. Think of Hortense's
doing us so when we've all been perfect mothers to her for a year. But
I've come up here just to get an address, from Mrs. J.T. Carney, and
now I'm off to Little Africa, pleasant but determined."
"Jackson Ward?"
"No," said Hen, producing and consulting a scrap of paper, "it's South
Africa this time--106A Dunbar Street. You know--down along the Canal."
"Hop in," said Cally, listlessly. "I'll drive you down there." "Perish
the thought!" ejaculated Hen, in some surprise. "You don't want to go
exploring the slum districts, finding out how the other half lives. I'll
like the walk--"
But Carlisle insisted, being out only because she was bored with being
in, and Hen hopped in, not altogether reluctantly. By request she
repeated the Ethiopian address to the chauffeur, himself of that tongue
and nation; and off the cousins bowled.
"Bored? How's this, Cally? I hear on all sides that it's the gayest
winter in ten years. You're not tired of parties, at your age?"
"Oh, I'm crazy about them," said Cally, indifferently, yet drawing
comfort from the sound of her own voice. "But one can't have parties
every hour of the day, you know. There are always chinks to be filled
up, and that is where one's background comes in. My background has a
violent attack of indigestion just now. Everything's horrid.--_Ohh_! Why
_will_ a dog take chances like that?..."
"How's Uncle Thornton?" said Hen, holding her hat on with a hand that
looked hard-worked. "I don't believe I've seen him since that day we all
came to dinner--"
"Oh, he's well, I suppose, but he's out of spirits a good deal of the
time, which I _will_ say is unusual for papa. I think he's probably
worried about business or ... Who was that old man that stared at me so?
He looked as if I ought to know him."
"Where?" said Hen, glancing back. "Oh!--there under the tree? Why,
that's Colonel Dalhousie. You know--"
"Oh!" said Cally, immediately regretting having spoken. To relieve the
baldness of her exclamation, she added: "I thought he was a rather
younger man than that."
"He's broken dreadfully in the last few months--that's probably why you
didn't recognize him," said Hen, cheeringly. "They say the poor old
man's grieving himself to death."
Through Cally quivered an angry wonder why it was that only disagreeable
things happened nowadays. Why, why, when everything else was just as
abominable as possible, need that old man go prowling around the
streets, stopping on corners to stare at her?...
She went on quickly with a tinge of light bitterness in her voice:
"I'm sure it must be business, for there's a hard-times atmosphere
hanging over the house, all of a sudden, and mamma is constantly
remarking that there's a limit to my extravagance, etc., etc. She and I
happen to be on dreadfully formal terms just at present, which is
another of the joys of home. And to cap the climax," she added, with a
burst of confidence only half mocking, "I'm in an absolutely suitorless
condition--not a blessed swain to my name! I was never so destitute and
forlorn in my life!"
Hen, struck from the beginning with the unusual note in her brilliant
cousin's manner, laughed. She perceived that Cally wished to talk about
herself, and talk complainingly, and Hen didn't mind.
"First time I ever heard such a complaint in this quarter. Is J.
Forsythe Avery dead without my knowledge?"
"J. Forsythe is in New York. Robert's in the sulks. James Bogue, 2d, is
in bed--measles, if you please ... Do you ever have the horrible
nobody-loves-you feeling? Rather odious, isn't it?"
"Ghastly," said Hen.
"I'll be awfully glad to get away next month," continued Cally....
Interested by the hiatus in Cally's list of missing swains, Hen desired
that this conversation should go on. Like most people, the Cooneys had
of course heard of, and gossiped about, the open breach between their
cousin and Mr. Canning a month ago, promptly followed by the great young
man's departure from town. Through the masculine half of the local
world, it was generally assumed that Miss Heth had actually rejected
Mr. Canning. It was a rare tribute to the girl's attractions that not a
few women also believed this, even though Cally's best girl-friends,
like Mattie Allen, were perfectly _sure_ nothing of the sort had
happened....
Hen, a Cooney, had had a special reason for wondering if this
interesting affair might not be "on" again. However, Cally, skipping the
conversation along, was talking now of the visit she had in prospect to
her friend, Mrs. Willing, Florence Stone that was, in New York. Florrie,
she informed Hen, wanted her particularly for the Lenten weeks,
promising that they would spend the sober penitential season in a
hilarious round of theatres, restaurants, and shops. It appeared that
this promising invitation had come only that morning, and Cally
described it as a direct answer to prayer.
"Goodness, Cally! You talk as if you lived in a special kind of
purgatory," said Hen. "I don't know anybody that has a better time
than you."
"Is an everlasting round of gaieties, all exactly alike, your idea of a
perfect time? What is the point or meaning of it all?" demanded Cally,
the philosopher. "The whole trouble with me," she added, explanatorily,
"is that I haven't budged from home in three months, and I'm simply
bored deaf and dumb."
Hen might have replied that she hadn't budged for three years, but what
was the use? She said instead: "When're you going to sail for
Europe. May?"
"It remains to be seen whether we sail at all or not," answered
Carlisle, with a sudden mocking little laugh. "Mamma talks several times
a day of cancelling our passage and shipping me off to Aunt Helen's farm
for the summer. She's been tremendously droll with me of late...."
Droll, of course, was only the girl's derisive euphemism. The truth was
that mamma's attitude, since hearing of the extraordinary
rupture,--which her daughter refused either to explain or amend
instantly,--had been nothing short of violent. Jangling scenes recurred
daily.... Perhaps, indeed, it was mamma's relentless pressure that had
brought about the gradual shifting, amounting to a total revolution, in
Cally's own attitude. More probably, though, it was only the inevitable
resurgence of her own sane fundamental purposes, temporarily swept away
by purblind passion.
It is one thing to kick out your symbol of happiness in a burst of
senseless rage. It is quite another to learn to live day by day without
it.... Why, indeed, should she not yield obedience to poor mamma--at the
least greet Canning's return with some mark of forgiveness, a tiny
olive-branch?...
Henrietta Cooney's voice spoke, singularly apropos:
"You don't seem to be the only one who's been bored lately, Cally--that
ought to comfort you! Chas and I saw Mr. Canning yesterday, and he
looked bluer than indigo. Mad, too!"
Surprise betrayed Carlisle into a naked display of interest. Turning
with a little jump, she stared at Hen with a kind of breathless
rigidity.
"You saw _Mr. Canning yesterday!_... Where?"
"Why, out on the old Plattsburg Turnpike," said Hen, certain now that
the affair was not on again--"near the Three Winds Road. We happened to
be taking a walk out there, and he dashed by on that beautiful big bay
mare of Mr. Payne's, going like a runaway. He didn't look happy a
bit ... You knew he was here, I suppose?"
By a very special effort, Carlisle had recaptured her poise: it was not
her habit to confide her troubles to anybody, least of all to a Cooney.
"Oh, no!" she answered in a voice of careless frankness. "I don't know
the first thing about his movements any more."
"Well, it seems he only came for over Sunday. A friend of Mr. Payne's
told Chas he was here, on Saturday. He went off again on the noon
train to-day."
"Oh!... Did he?"
"Looloo saw him at the station. She happened to be there, meeting a
friend of hers."
Gone!--He had come, not seen her, and gone!... A wave of bitterness
swept through Cally, impelling her to hit out at somebody.
"Of course. Isn't it _funny_ how your family always sees and hears
everything?"
But Hen answered, entirely unmoved, in fact with an air of modesty: "Any
family can do it who keep their eyes and ears open. For instance, good
old Looloo heard where he checked his baggage to: Palm Beach, if it's of
any interest to you."
"I don't believe it is, my dear. He'll be checking it back this way
again very soon, I've no doubt. Are we going the right way for
Dunbar Street?"
Hen shot at her a look of unconscious admiration. Her pretty cousin's
indifferent air seemed to support the theory that she had actually
rejected the prince of partis, which, in fact, was exactly what it was
meant to do. Hen had never really thought that Cally had it in her. She
threw her alert eye around to see where they were. The car had turned
south at Twelfth Street, had crossed Centre, and was now rolling into a
quarter of the town very different-looking, indeed, from Washington
Street. Hen said they were all right for Dunbar Street and told Cally to
cheer up. Much worse was coming, Hen said.
There was nothing personal in Hen's admonition, but the truth was that
Cally, gazing fixedly at the passing sights, felt anything but cheerful
at this moment. The Cooneys' tidings were staggering in their way.
What was the meaning of Mr. Canning's mysterious flying visit? That it
had to do with her she did not question; and, tensely meditating, she
presently found a hypothesis not unsatisfying after its kind. He had
come with the hope that she would at last make some generous overture
toward a reconciliation. More direct advances, after her three galling
rebuffs of him, he naturally could not bring himself to make. Yet he had
taken a long journey merely to put himself in her way--perhaps counting
on a chance meeting, more probably expecting that she, hearing of his
presence, would this time extend the sweet olive. The wormwood in it was
that she would have been perfectly willing to extend the olive if she
had only known....
The car, pushing through a mean and shabby neighborhood, offensive to
refined eyes, ears, and nostrils, now turned into a narrow street brisk
with the din of business, but by no means lovely to look upon. Recalling
the Cooney presence, Cally suddenly stirred with the deadly
self-protective instinct of her sex, and directed Hen to cease instantly
all thinking about her and Mr. Canning. She did it, needless to say,
scientifically, by saying with just the plausible degree of interest:
"I meant to ask you--what on _earth_ was the trouble with Hortense, Hen?
I supposed she was a perfect _fixture_ with you, an institution!"
"What's the trouble with all the servants in this town?" cried Hen. "I
tell you, Cally, I don't know what's going to become of us. Why ..."
She launched with zest upon the somewhat unoriginal thesis, and Cally
relapsed into her own thoughts, which were full of rebellion at the
bitter untowardness of her fate....
Much water had flowed under the bridge of sighs since the parting in the
library. Passed long since, it seemed, was that uprush of burning
humiliation; subdued was the betraying flare-up (mamma's favorite word
nowadays)--vanished to thin air like a midsummer madness, delirium's
delusion, hardly possible to understand, much less recapture, now. A day
had hardly passed, after the second rejection of Mr. Canning at her
door, before the thought of whistling him back again flashed luringly
across Carlisle's mind. She repelled the thought, but it recurred, and
she came to dally with it, ably assisted in that direction by mamma.
What had he done to warrant such absurd melodramatics?... More and more
her mind had fastened upon the genuine tenderness, the emotion, the man
had shown in his last moment with her. In love with her without quite
realizing it himself, he had in the moment of parting been swept away by
his feelings, and had taken a not strictly authorized kiss or two. What
Sir Galahad among men was proof against such a tripping in the presence
of lovely and irresistible temptation?...
"Hortense gave you no notice at all?" she demanded out of a dream.
"Did you ever? Why, honestly, Cally ..."
He was to pause once again, to bid the Paynes farewell, on his final
progress back to what he had once called lights and home. That would be
in April, said Cousin Willie Kerr, when his six months' sentence ran
out. The distant promise brought the girl no comfort now. Why, really,
should she not take this new opportunity he had given her, and dispatch
him a little note, saying in a friendly way that she had wanted to see
him again? By day after to-morrow, he could be at her side....
It was a little note that mamma, though ignorant of the circumstances,
had so specially recommended in the desolate weeks; had commanded,
offered bribes for, cried for with real tears, blustered and threatened
for with a purpling birthmark. In her own mind the girl had already
worded many which met the situation with merely a front of sweet
generosity, carrying no forfeiture of dignity, no real acknowledgment of
surrender. What was the fibre of foolish hardness in her that resisted
all mamma's importunities, all her own urgent wisdom?
"Five years ago," said Hen, "we paid eight dollars a month, and got
really good ones. Now the greenest of them holds you up for twelve and
fourteen. Hortense was simply bribed off...."
Cally roused, glancing about. "Papa says," she observed, absently, "it
will all end in something like the French Revolution. Heavens! What a
perfectly sickening street!"
"Isn't it?" said Hen, cheerfully. "Yet it's interesting too, Cally, for
this is where the city makes all its money."
Money-making, indeed, Canal Street looked. Long processions of trucks
rolled up and down it, giving motorists more time than they desired to
look about. All around them, as the car moved slowly on, were
warehouses, new and old cheek by jowl together; commission merchants,
their produce spilled over the sidewalk; noisy freight yards, with
spur-tracks running off to shipping-rooms of all descriptions;
occasional empty ground used as dumps, littered with ashes and old tin
cans; over all a thousand smells, each more undelectable than the last.
But _April_! You might as well say in another life. How could she ever
get through the days till then?...
"I'm glad you're interested," she said aloud, sharply, thinking that
this was exactly what came of giving a lift to the Cooneys. "I think
it's simply disgusting.... Get us through this, William."
"It's familiar, at any rate. Let's see. Dunbar must be the next street
over but one, isn't it?"
Cally, lifting a handkerchief to obliterate the adjacent odors of a
gas-tank, said: "I haven't the smallest idea."
"Why, don't you like the rattle of business, Cally? Don't you like the
bustle, the fine democratic air?--Why, _hello_! There's V.V.!"
Carlisle's head turned at once.
"He's signalling us," said Hen, waving back; and she nervily added:
"Stop, William!"
Following Henrietta Cooney's look, Carlisle's eyes fell, sure enough,
upon the tall figure of Dr. Vivian crossing the humming side-street
straight toward them. Her glance caught him in the act of removing his
derby, bowing in response to the cheeky salute of Hen....
"Ah, he's using a cane," added Hen, below her breath. "That means his
foot is bad...."
"But he has no right to signal _me_," said Carlisle. "Drive on,
William."
But she herself unconsciously spoke in an undertone, and the order
appeared to be lost in the enveloping din. William, all but blockaded
anyway, had come to a halt. Coincidentally sounded the voice of Hen, the
pachyderm:
"Hello, V.V.! What're you doing way down here in the wilds? Not visiting
the sick, without your little black bag?"
V. Vivian stood bareheaded at the side of Mr. Heth's (of the Works)
shining car.
"How'do, Henrietta?--Oh, good afternoon, Miss Heth. No, I--I'm down here
on other business this time...."
Carlisle, her eyes about on a level with the young man's interesting
piscatorial necktie, had acknowledged his greeting by the smallest and
frigidest inclination of her head. That done, feeling outraged by this
whole proceeding, she at once looked ostentatiously in another
direction.
The lame doctor, for his part, appeared a little embarrassed by the
rencontre, or perhaps excited, one or both.
"I--it's a very fortunate coincidence, meeting you in this way," he
began at once. "The fact was, I--ah--was just thinking of you at that
moment, Miss Heth,--wishing very much to see you--"
Miss Heth turned her pretty head once more, this time with a sort of
jerk. So the man pretended to have forgotten that she had ordered him
not to address her again.
Now her eyes fully met those of Dalhousie's friend, and in that meeting
she was conscious of an odd little shock, almost like a physical
impact.... Why was it that this impossible man, with his ridiculous
opinions, his wicked untruths, and his face so full of a misplaced
hopefulness, kept coming like a destiny across and across her path? What
was her silly weakness, that he never looked at her with those quite
misrepresentative eyes without making her angry and unhappy?...
She felt herself, as it were, turning pale inside, but into her cheeks
there sprang a cold color.
"You wished to see me?"
"Well, do put on your hat, V.V.," interjected Hen, matter of fact, but
glancing round at Cally's voice. "You'll catch pneumonia...."
"Yes--thank you.... I'd like to enlist your help, if I could, Miss Heth.
I've just come from the Works, you see," he hurried on with curious
intensity--"where I went to try to right what seems to be a clear
injustice. I wonder--do you remember the girl I happened to mention to
you at my uncle's that night,--a buncher here at the Works?..."
His expression said that he was counting on her remembering. The girl in
the car was looking him through and through. Hen Cooney disappeared from
between them; the roar of traffic faded away.
"No, I don't remember," said Miss Heth, biting her lip a little.
"Oh!--the girl I wanted the _matrons_ for? Well, it's no matter," the
tall young man said, with a belying look of youthful disappointment. But
he went on with undiminished eagerness: "She's one of the best
operatives in the Works, I assure you--a really valuable employee
because she can get more work out of a machine than any two
inexperienced girls. She's had over two years' practice, you see. This
morning she reported again for work after nearly a month's illness in
bed: she's had pleurisy. Well, MacQueen--the superintendent--declines to
give her her place back."
"Why, what a shabby trick!" cried Hen....
She looked as if she desired to say much more, but she saw that V.V.'s
eyes were fixed on Cally, whose father owned MacQueen, and forbore.
Cally's breast rose and fell. She saw what was coming now.... How did he
dare--he who had so maligned her personally, who had so maliciously
thrown bricks at papa and the Works--how did he dare to turn and beg
favors from the objects of his slanders? This was the supreme
impertinence. Now she would say to him what would destroy him from her
ways forever....
V. Vivian was hurrying on, as if perceiving that he hadn't made the
matter fully plain as yet: "It is quite a serious thing for her, because
she can make more at the Works than anywhere else--she's a born buncher.
And she and her mother are dependent on her earnings. It seems a--a
great hardship that she should be thrown out this way, without any fault
of her own...."
"Put-on-your-hat!" ordered Hen, _sotto voce_; and again repressed
further remarks seething within her.
The slum doctor, having neglected Hen's injunction hitherto, now obeyed
it, though with inattention to the processes. He continued speaking,
blind to all discouragements.... Would no one stop the God's fool,
rushing with eager eyes to his doom?...
"I don't, of course, like to trouble you. But don't you think you could
stop a moment, and say just a word to MacQueen--or to your father if he
is in?..."
Now was the moment to demolish the irrepressible fanatic, who seemed
incapable of understanding that his betters wanted none of him. And
strange, oh, strange!--Cally Heth sat silent.... As the man reached the
climax of his madness, the girl's hard challenging gaze, as if by some
miracle of his ministering angels, had suddenly wavered and broken. Her
eyes flitted from his face, rested fixedly on a hideous sprawling pile
on the corner ahead, an abode of trade exceptionally repellent to all
the senses. However, she was unaware of the detestable object, so
confused was she by the odd frustrating weakness that suddenly possessed
her, staying her hand in the act of delivering the mace-blow. It might
be the very superlativeness of the man's temerity that disarmed her,
paralyzing the hot will. It might be merely that ludicrous trusting look
in his eyes, which somehow seemed to put him in the non-combatant class,
like some confiding child....
"I know, of course," he was concluding with unfaltering expectancy, "a
word from you will make everything right at once."
And Carlisle, her glance returning toward him, but not to him, heard
with disquiet and mortification her own voice saying, not indignantly
at all:
"You will have to speak to my father about it if--if injustice has been
done. I--I haven't time to go to the Works now--"
"Time!" cried Hen Cooney, at last assuming control of things. "Why, good
heavens, Cally! It wouldn't take us any _time_! We're right there
now!--and don't you think Uncle Thornton _ought_ to be told how that
brute's behaved ..."
Hen intended only an argument; but it happened that her explosive
statement sprang out like a switchman, finally shifting the train of
the talk.
"Oh!" said Cally, staring bewildered at her cousin. "Why--where are the
Works--from here, I mean ...?"
Hen's strange look, confirmed her own confused conviction that she was
appearing at an annoying disadvantage all at once. And forebodings
possessed her, as of one walking wide-eyed into unsuspected perils.
"You _are_ lost, Cally, indeed. Why, my dear, we're right on the corner
of Seventeenth and Canal now--they're leaning right up against your
nose. There!"
Following Hen's nod, Cally's gaze rested again on the somewhat
displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her
fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of
weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away
(as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building,
obviously old, certainly not fragrant, quite sinister-looking
somehow....
The girl felt as if the skies were falling. She perceived that there was
some mistake. "Oh ... You mean that is part of them? But the--the main
part, I suppose, is--"
"No, this is all there is of 'em, Cally!" said Hen, suddenly with a kind
note in her voice. And she waved upward toward a wire screen atop the
ancient building, where large black letters spelled out: