But, as it happened, they were not separated. The crowd, pouring down
either staircase, soon thinned. There was better breathing-space, and a
fairer chance as well, for the more demoralized to push and struggle.
Slocumb kept close behind Claire. He warded off from her a number of
desperate thrusts. She was not aware of these defensive tactics; she
paid no further heed to her former champion; as her sense of danger
lessened, the idea of re-meeting Josie took shape and strength. When the
first step of the staircase was reached, she stumbled, and then regained
herself. She had no suspicion, at this moment, what actually doughty
work Slocumb was doing, just in her rear. He was a man of unusual
muscular power, and, like not a few of his rough, pugnacious species,
endowed with dogged physical courage. At sight Claire had keenly
attracted him; her recent aversion had piqued him into liking her still
more. If the occasion had grown one of sharper immediate jeopardy, it is
by no means doubtful that he might have shown intrepid heroism as her
rescuer. He was gross, coarse, unprincipled, but he had that quality of
stubbornly defending what he liked which we often see in the finest of
brutes and sometimes in the least fine of men.
Up to this time the prevailing affright had meant bitter ill to all
whom it had seized. The threat of a hideous destruction had by no means
passed when the crowd about Claire grew less dense; for not far behind
her were two opposite streams of life that had met and were each
destroying the other's progress by their very madness of encounter.
Below stairs, and at one of the intermediate landings, numerous people
had already been severely hurt; limbs had been broken, and acute
injuries of other kinds had been dealt. The cries heard here and there
were made as much by pain as fear.
But powers of good were working with ardor among the lower quarters of
the building. A man had sprung forth upon the stage, and was imploring
order amid the smoke which partly enveloped him, while at the same time
he shouted to the multitude that the fire was now under perfect control.
Two policemen and two ushers were abetting him further on, where neither
his entreaties nor explanations could reach. Suddenly, with the same
speed shown by the panic at its origin, an orderly lull was manifest in
its haphazard turmoil. A few caught the sense of the cheering
intelligence, and these spread it swiftly from tongue to tongue. At the
moment when this change began to be clearly assertive, Claire and
Slocumb had almost gained the last landing of the stairs. By the time
they were in the lower part of the theatre, not a few persons who
desired to air their bravery, now that safety seemed certain, were
returning to their seats in dress-circle or parquette. "It's on'y a
hoax, after all," said Slocumb. "There's a heap more scared nor hurt.
S'pose we git upstairs again? Hey? What d'yer think?"
Claire shook her head. "No, I want to find Josie," she answered. "I
don't care to go back. I think she will not, either."
"All right," said Slocumb; "jus' take my hook, an' we'll git out o'
here, an' watch fur Jim an' her where they're mos' likely to be."
He extended an arm to Claire as he spoke, and pointed at the same time
toward a spacious outer hallway, in which the terrified multitude had
already become much more tractable. But Claire resolutely refused to see
the offered arm. She had begun to tremble; now that the cause for fright
had passed, she was made to realize with how strong a wrench she had
screwed her nerves to the sticking-point. A touch of giddiness came upon
her; then a knot rose in her throat, and she fought transiently, but
with silent success, against a novel sensation that only slight
self-surrender might have encouraged into turbid hysteria. Still, she
preserved her repugnance, as it were. She would not accept Slocumb's
arm. She had made up her mind that he was a vulgar and worthless
creature, and moreover she had a distressing instinct that he had thus
stayed at her side because of some new-born personal enticement.
He saw plainly her rebuff, though she did not put it in any salient way,
choosing to let him suppose it a mere unconscious omission. But he
preferred not to let it pass unnoticed.
"Oho," he said, with surly force, while still keeping his arm crooked,
and shoving it so prominently toward her that no further subterfuge was
possible. "So y' ain't goin' to ketch on, hey? W'at's the reason? We can
git 'long better. Come, now, _let's_."
"No," said Claire, driven to bay. "I am very much obliged to you, but I
don't need any help."
"Oh! You'll go it alone. All right."
But Mr. Slocumb did not look as if he thought it by any means right. His
hard, brown face had clouded with sulky disapprobation. A little gleam
of teeth had stolen out under his crisp, short mustache, with an effect
not unlike what we see when an angry dog snarls. He felt offended, and
this meant that he should either sting with his tongue or smite with his
fists. But in the present case a fresh glance at Claire, whose profile
was turned to him, made his spleen swiftly perish. Her cheek had got a
deep tint of rose; he saw the liquid sparkle of one dark-blue eye, and
the dense, rippling hair, chestnut threaded with gold, flowing above one
faint-veined temple.
'_Ain't_ she a stunner!' he thought. After that he forgot to be
offended. They were now in a spacious hallway leading directly to the
street. The panic had quite subsided. Knots of people were standing here
and there, loudly discussing their late alarms. Some of the women looked
and acted as if they were midway between mirth and tears. Most of the
men seemed grave; a few were laughing, but in a nervous, furtive way.
Along the centre of the broad passage pressed a line of people whom the
shock had left too dispirited for further sojourn in the house.
Claire, with her adherent, was among these latter. In quest of Josie,
she scanned every face within her field of vision. She had already
caught sight of more than one injured unfortunate, further back, where
the rush on the lower floor had been most disastrous, and just before
she and Slocumb had gained their present open quarters. On this account,
rather than because of the wild stampede itself, she had quite lost
desire to wait through the rest of the play. It was now her fixed design
to regain Josie and urge the plan of an immediate return to Greenpoint.
Her sense of having met her father's known wishes with overt disrespect
had become an assailant self-reproach. The very harshness of the event
which had so rudely broken in upon her enjoyment seemed to have borrowed
its disrelish from the rebuke that she had known as waiting all along to
shame her. Providence, for the time, had gone with her father; it had
abetted him; it had been telling her, in stern terms of personal threat,
how flagrant was her filial disloyalty.
She searched for Josie, but found her nowhere visible. She had soon
reached the limit of the large passage. A gate now confronted her, where
a man waited, ready to give those who sought egress a strip of cardboard
insuring their readmission.
Claire took this guarantee of further diversion unconsciously. The man
had stood at his post through all the furor that had just ended. He was
a sort of new Horatius at the bridge, though possibly with less sublime
motive, his wage being a permanent annuity, and his position one of easy
proximity to Broadway.
Claire stood in the vestibule of the theatre, and felt the breeze from
the street blow on her heated face, before she was well aware just what
vantage of exit she had secured. Still she had not seen Josie. And she
now began to realize that there was a very strong chance of not seeing
Josie. True, the girl might have returned with Mr. MacNab to their
former seats in the second gallery of the theatre. But Claire's
reluctance to place herself again within the walls of the building had
by this time grown a fierce distaste. Meanwhile, Slocumb had maintained
an unrelenting nearness to her. She knew this perfectly well. If
possible, a more meagre means than the extreme corner of each eye had
told her of it; for so great was her repugnance that she had thus far
grudged him even the knowledge of receiving the most minute regard. But
now she was forced to turn and look at him.
"Do you think Josie can have gone back into the theatre?" she asked, not
being herself aware just what frost and distance she had put into voice
and manner.
"Dunno," said Slocumb. "Guess she ain't, though. Guess her an' him's out
there in the crowd." The crowd to which he referred was already dense,
and every moment increasing. It flooded the flag-stones and a portion of
the middle street. Three or four policemen were stirring it to the
needful sense of decorum, no less by application than menace of their
clubs.
"I am afraid I should never find her there," Claire said, hopelessly.
"That's so," quickly returned Slocumb. "You'd better come inside agin.
The scare'll be over in a minnit. The piece'll go on, 'fore long,
certain sure."
"I don't care for the piece," replied Claire, with a little toss of the
head, more anxious than imperious. "I don't want to see the rest of it.
I want to find Josie, and have her take me home at once."
"All right. Jus' step inside an' wait fur 'em both."
Claire looked straight at the speaker. She did not know of the droop in
each full-fringed lid of her beautiful eyes. It was an unconscious token
of her abhorrence.
"Suppose that they should not return," she said.
"All right," replied Slocumb, brutally impervious. "_I'll_ take yer
home, if they don't."
"Thank you," faltered Claire. This view of the question gave her a new
shock. It was like hearing that the ferry-boats between New York and
Greenpoint had stopped running for the night. "But I won't trouble you,"
she added, trying to make her voice and mien indifferently calm. "I will
wait here a little while, and then, if I don't find Josie, I will go
home alone."
"Go home alone?" repeated Slocumb, with a sort of sympathetic
interrogation that was detestable to her. "Why, how far is it?"
"Oh, not very far," she replied, turning her back on him, and feeling
that in another moment she might treat his offensive persistence with
the blunt rigor it deserved.
"I thought you was livin' over to Greenpoint," said Slocumb, shifting
with tough pertinacity round to her side.
What a man of cleaner life and thought would simply have praised as
sweet and chaste about her fired in this corrupt oaf his one gross
substitute for sentiment. She could no more appeal to him by her
fineness of line, coloring, or movement than the field-flower when
cropped by the brute mouth whose appetite its very grace and perfume may
perhaps whet. And Claire divined this. Pure things know impure ones, all
through the large scheme of nature. There are nicer grades of
intelligence, of course, as we move along the upward scale of such
antagonisms. The milk will not cloud till we dilute it with the
ink-drop, but a white soul can usually note a black one by earlier and
wiser signals of alarm.
"Why should I not go home alone?" Claire had been saying to herself. "No
one would know me--I could reach the Tenth Street Ferry--I could ask
some one, and get the right car--Yes, I will try no more to find
Josie--I will break away from this low creature--I have enough money to
bring me safely home--I don't care; I will take my chances and slip
off--he will not follow me when he sees me shun him like that."
She ignored his last remark. She did not even glance at him where he now
stood. Her gaze was fixed on the crowd, and she was watching to find a
brief break in its edge, through which she might flit and be lost. The
next instant such a chance came. Claire seized it. She made an oblique
dart through the large doorway, slanted her nimble steps across the
pavement, and was soon breasting the adverse tide, so to speak, of a
little human sea. Each man or woman stood in the place of a choppy,
obstructive wave. At every moment poor Claire found herself gently
buffeting a new impediment, male or female, as the case might be. Since
she wanted to move in a course different from that of nearly every one
before or beside her, the carrying out of her object involved a good
amount of determined propulsion. But she at length gained the open, as
it were. She had now only to strike along in a northerly direction until
she reached the point at which a certain line of small cars crossed
Broadway. She was not sure at just what street this intersection
occurred; she knew that it was by no means near by. A cumbrous omnibus
rolled clamorously toward her, and for a moment she was inclined to
hail it; but a swift look into its lighted space, well freighted with
passengers, made her shrink from the concentration of stares that her
sex and loneliness must equally provoke. The publicity of the long,
lamp-fringed sidewalk, with its incidents of potential if not always
tangible policemen, expressed, after all, a more secure privacy. When
she took one of the little trundling cars which would bring her eastward
to the ferry, she would not be forced to clamber and stoop and stagger
before getting a seat. Their mode of conveyance, too, would be somehow
more safely plebeian; they would hold their last fragments of the
work-a-day world going back to Greenpoint; in case of insult, she might
have her final appeal to some reputable occupant bound for the same
destination as herself.
Meanwhile, the big-bodied omnibus clattered by. Claire had resolved to
walk. The high-perched driver had not seen her pause, hurry to the
curbstone, and then lift a hand which was straightway dropped at the
bidding of her changed mood. But this action, while it wrought delay in
her progress, rendered somewhat earlier her meeting with one who still
obstinately pursued her. Just as she had again started, with slightly
quickened pace, the inexterminable Slocumb appeared at her side. He
seemed to have used no effort in catching up with her. There was a
terrible ease in the way his length of limb accommodated its free stride
to Claire's more repressed motions. He had not immediately given chase.
She had got rather deep into the crowd about the theatre-doors before
his impudence, positive as it always was, had trumped up sufficient real
nerve to follow her. Claire continued walking; but she looked at him
with fixity as she said, "I suppose you saw that I wanted to go alone."
"'T aint right, nohow," he replied, peering into her face with his bad,
hard eyes. "A putty gal like you hadn't ought t' walk the streets all by
herself after dark. You lemme go along. Don' look scared; I wouldn't
hurt ye fur a cent."
"Oh, I am not afraid of you," said Claire, between her teeth. "Why
should I be?"
"That's the ticket. W'y should ye be?"
"I don't want your company. I have shown this to you, and now I tell it
to you."
Slocumb laughed. It seemed to Claire that his laugh had the cold of ice
and the thrust of steel in it. His lowered arm touched hers with
intentional pressure, but she swerved sideways, at once thwarting the
contact. He, however, promptly narrowed the distance thus made between
them.
"Say!" he now broke forth, in peculiar, confidential undertone, as
though a third party were listening. "W'at ye mad fur, hey? You was
along with Jimmy MacNab, wasn't ye? An' wasn't we intrerdooced all
reg'lar? I'm a better feller 'n Jim, any day in the year. Jus' gimme a
show. Won't ye? Say, now, _won't_ ye? I took a dead shine to you the
minnit I clapped eyes on them two nice pink cheeks--blowed if I didn't!
I sez to myself, 'She can walk round any gal I've seen fur a devil of a
time,' I sez."
Claire looked straight ahead. She still went quickly along. Her feet and
limbs felt light, almost void of sense. Fear had to do with this, and
she was keenly frightened. For the first time in her life she knew the
terror that feminine honesty has when fronted with the close chance of
physical insult.
Slocumb justified her dread. He had no more regard for common laws of
restraint than the majority of untamed brutes, when conscious, as in his
case, of firm thews and active bulk. As for moral bravery, his nature
harbored no concern with such nicer elements. The only vices he did not
possess were those for which he had never known an hour of temptation.
His father had drank himself to death, and he inherited what was perhaps
an embryo taste in the same direction. He got drunk once a fortnight,
now, in his twenty-seventh year, whereas, two years ago, these
diversions had been much rarer; in a decade, under his uncontrolled
conditions, there was a fair chance of his becoming a sot. To speak more
generally, the vast social momentum of heredity, which seems to be so
plainly understood and so ill appreciated in our golden century, had
Slocumb well in its stern grip. There were no outward incident forces,
as the philosophic phrase goes, to make his case in any way a hopeful
one. He had seen Claire; he had exchanged a word with her; he had liked
her. If his liking were put in the baldest form of explanation it would
have to deal with rather darksome realisms. And it is always preferable
that the pursuant satyr and the unwilling nymph be treated wholly from
the poetic and picturesque point of view.
Claire would not speak. She was very frightened, as before has been
recorded: she seemed to see, between the gloomy interspaces of the
lamps, a phantasmal semblance of her father, looking untold rebuke at
her, and then vanishing only to reappear. She walked onward with fleet
energy. An idea shot through her mind that she might call a policeman to
rid her of this incubus. But she dismissed the idea at once. It was too
savagely desperate even for the confronting dilemma.
By this time Slocumb had begun to see plainly that Claire was proof
against all his known methods of conquest. But she was unprotected, and
he had a dogged dislike of giving up the siege. The silence continued
for nearly five blocks. During this time his eyes scarcely once left her
face, gleaming distinct or dim as the lamplight waxed or waned.
"Say!" he at length re-addressed her. "Ain't ye hungry? I was thinkin' a
stew would go putty good, just now, or a dish o' ice-cream. P'r'aps ye'd
rather tackle sumpn sweet. Hey?"
She made no answer. He peered closer into her face, and repeated the
last odious little interrogative monosyllable a good many times. But
Claire remained as mute and irresponsive as though it had fallen on
stone-deaf ears.
This lure suddenly held out to appetite was his last persuasive stroke.
It sprang naturally enough from the man who dealt it. It expressed in
the most exhaustive terms just how narrow and barren his conception was
of Claire's reasons for shunning him. He stood as the hideous result of
a hideous phase of society; and he could no more divine or imagine
higher and richer levels of life than if to know of these had meant to
be familiar with the soil and climates of a remote star.
He was disappointed and chagrined, but not angry. Anger could not
consort with his present state; another kind of heat already filled his
veins; one flush kept the other aloof. He had now decided that Claire
was not to be conciliated, and yet the perfect lawlessness of his past
made him in a manner unable to snap the bond of attraction and leave
her. Self-control was a sealed book to him; he had not even opened its
cover, apart from learning its rudimentary lessons.
When they had gone five or six blocks further, and the street at which
Claire would take the cross-town car was by no means far away, he
abruptly caught her arm and drew it close to his side, so holding it
with an exertion of purely muscular strength, beside which her own
resistance counted for little more than the flutter of a bird.
Even at this most trying juncture she still moved on. He continued to
walk, as well. She veered her face toward his, however, forced out of
all her previous pitiful disdain, and he saw that she had grown pale as
death.
"Let me go," she said. "Don't dare to hold me like this!"
"Look here!" he returned, his tones taking a nasal whisper, and his
breath sweeping so close to her nostrils that she caught in it a stale
taint, as of liquor drank some time ago. "I wouldn't harm a hair o' your
head; you can jus' bet on that. I've took a likin' to you, an' I'll
treat ye good. If you wus a lady livin' up t' Fifth Avenyer, ye wouldn't
git more respectfuller behaved to nur I'll do."
"If you don't let me go," said Claire, gasping a little as she got out
the words, "I'll complain to the first policeman we meet."
He dropped her arm at once, stopping short. "D' ye mean it?" he asked,
with great show of reproach. "Say! d' ye mean it?"
But Claire hurried on. She had a wild momentary hope that she had hit at
random upon a blessed source of deliverance. Here, however, she had
quite miscalculated. Slocumb's outburst had merely formed a bit of the
cheap sentimentality which one of his race and stamp would select as the
lame makeshift in a forlorn cause.
It chanced that when Claire reached the desired corner a car was
opportunely passing. She signaled to it; the driver saw her; it stopped,
and she entered it. Meanwhile Slocumb had kept at her side, though with
the distance between them materially widened. She paid no heed to the
question of whether or not he entered with her. The car was entirely
empty as she took her seat. A little later she slipped a five-cent piece
into the small glass repository for passengers' fares--that touching
proof of the confidence reposed in drivers by those who employ them.
Shortly afterward she saw Slocumb standing on the outer platform. Her
heart and courage almost failed her, then. He presently walked inside
the car, and paid his fare, as she had done. She expected him to sit
down and resume his persecutions, but he did neither. He went out again
and stood on the platform.
The little car jingled along Eighth Street. It passed the grim, bastard
architecture of the Mercantile Library, once, long ago, an opera house,
in which Steffenone sang to assemblages where a gentleman in
evening-dress or a lady without her bonnet was a rare enough incident,
and nothing prophesied the horse-shoe of resplendent boxes before which
Patti and Nilsson have since revealed their vocal charms. Soon afterward
it came to Third Avenue, easily betrayed by the flare of gaslight in
beer-saloon or liquor-shop, and a thoroughfare in which night revelry
seems to have claimed especial stronghold. Near at hand, that hideous
monument of philanthropy, the Cooper Union, frowns its unavailing
displeasure upon the malt of Schneider and the alcohol of Moriarty, both
of which project their noxious forces southward through the Bowery to
the City Hall, and northward across many reputable side streets on to
the shabby vulgarity of Harlem.
But Claire was naturally unprepared, just now, either to recognize or
ponder the importance of this great popular boulevard which we call
Third Avenue; how it blends our ruling Irish and German elements in one
huge strand of commercial interests, each petty by itself, yet all, when
massed together, of enormous metropolitan note; how its very name is
pronounced with a mild sneer by our so-called better classes; how it is
held common and of ill repute; how one must not speak of it in a Fifth
Avenue drawing-room, lest he shall be suspected of having trodden its
tainted pavements; and yet how there pulses through its big, tough
artery nearly all the hot, impure political blood that feeds the
venality of our elective systems, making it for this reason a fact to be
always deplored but never lightly dismissed. Should the sombre growl
against that sin of over-possession which we term monopoly ever grow
into a revolutionary roar, it is very thinkable that the Robespierre of
such an event would be born in Third Avenue; but if not, he might safely
be depended on for having near relations there. The little car presently
crossed Second Avenue, at its most quiet portion. All the garish
brilliance had now quite vanished. Once beloved of respectability, this
broad street, here in what we designate its lower portion, has preserved
abundant souvenirs of perished fame. Many of the roomy old mansions
that line it may be dispeopled of their pristine Knickerbockers, but
even these retain much of their old stately repose. Up beyond, the
tenement-house thrives, and the tavern flaunts a bottle-decked casement;
but here, within generous limits, it remains a quarter full of decent
though not dismal gloom, and touched with an occasional solid grandeur.
The car soon advanced into a very different region. It had reached one
of the two long if not deep river-edges which skirt the central domain
of our wealth and thrift. That squalor which dogs the heel of poverty
was everywhere manifest. The very street-lamps seemed to burn with a
dejected flicker. Night, however, was kind, and spared from view much
unsightly soilure. The high brick houses, thronged with inmates whom all
degrees of want and all modes of toil oppressed, lost themselves in
shadow; but now and then you caught glimpses of the liquid filth
clogging the gutters, and perhaps of a half-submerged cabbage-leaf or a
more buoyant egg-shell, to fleck its slime with baleful color. Here
spoke a crying municipal disgrace. The prosperous part of our city has
its streets kept cleanly throughout the year, but dread injustice is
wreaked upon these that are skirted by abodes of penury and need. Fat
appropriations are of no avail; the tax-money slips into fingers that
are deft in legerdemain; fraud and mismanagement meet as friends; it is
not enough that our beautiful island must crowd her shores with all the
disfeaturing accompaniments of commerce; she is forced, as well, to see
them polluted, far inland, by the foulness born of bad legislation. This
is one of the too frequent cases where, in our enlightened polity,
democracy plays wantonly into the hands of monarchism.
A little later the car came into a wide, airy expanse, along two of
whose sides it journeyed for a considerable distance. Here was Tompkins
Square, now lighted with innumerable lamps, but only a few years ago a
dark horror to all decent citizens living near it. By day set aside as a
parade-ground for the city militia, which paraded there scarcely twice a
year, its lampless lapse of earth was by night at least four good acres
of brooding gloom, which he who ventured to cross stood the risk of
thievish assault, if nothing more harmful. What added to the unique
repulsiveness of the place for peace-loving denizens of its near
streets, was an occasional concourse of growling and saturnine German
socialists, held with stormy harangues and blood-thirsty diatribes under
moon or star, and amid the congenial environing shadow, which was
relieved, on these lurid occasions, by torches whose fitful flames
typified the feverish theories disclosed.
But the car now passed a very different Tompkins Square from that of
old. The grim blank has become, since then, a bright-lit realm where the
tramp may fall prone on some of its many neat-built benches, but where
the highwayman will find slim chance to ply his fell trade. When this
region had been passed there remained only a brief space to be traversed
before the ferry was reached. The avenues by this time had ceased to be
numerically named; they had become alphabetical. But Avenues A, B, C,
and D are all quite homogeneous as regards dolorous discomfort. The city
here hides some of its worst lairs, and many a desperado infests them.
After a little journey, such as Claire now took, you gain the small,
dull-looking ferry.
Meanwhile seven or eight new passengers had entered the car. They were
mostly Germans, and of both sexes. Claire felt a sense of protection.
One stout woman, of truly colossal build, with a sleeping baby in her
arms and an evident husband so hollow-cheeked and slight that it seemed
wrong for him even to assume the responsibility of paying their double
fare, especially reassured her. The rest were commonplace people enough.
One was a weary work-girl; one was a collier, grimy with his trade and
drowsy from drink; one was a dapper, bejeweled Hebrew, with oily amber
whiskers and large, loose red lips; still another was a handsome young
woman, smartly geared, who had said good-night, on entering, to a male
escort, and who now glanced uneasily about her at intervals, as though
fearful of being known. All this while Slocumb remained on the outer
platform.
Presently the car stopped. Everybody alighted. The Tenth Street Ferry
was close at hand. Claire knew that her hateful adherent was close at
hand also. She paid her toll to the ferryman and glided through the
narrow bit of passage-way forth upon the long dark dock beyond. She
expected, at every new step, to be re-accosted by Slocumb. A boat had
landed, and was soon to disembark again. From the opposite dimness came
an ominous clank of chains, made by the men at either of the two wheels,
and a sudden "All aboard!" flung out in gruff tones as a stimulating
monition. The other passengers all hastened forward. Claire was among
them, though in the rear of the hurry. The foremost had gained the boat,
when she felt a strong clutch upon her arm. Compelled by sheer force to
pause, now, she turned, meeting Slocumb's face quite near her own. He
at once spoke, in the same intimate sort of whisper that she had before
found so distressing.
"Say! 'T ain't right t' shake me like this. I ain't goin' t' stand it,
either. Come, change your mind. Treat me square. Will ye?"
Claire, driven to bay, did what her sex is sometimes held by a few
renowned cynics as having a special talent for doing; she employed
stratagem.