The Island of Faith
By MARGARET E. SANGSTER
1921
To M's M and Chance
Contents
I. INTRODUCING--THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE
II. THE QUARREL
III. CONCERNING IDEALS
IV. THE PARK
V. ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE
VI. "THERE'S NO PLACE--"
VII. A LILY IN THE SLUMS
VIII. ANOTHER QUARREL
IX. AND ANOTHER
X. MRS. VOLSKY PROMISES TO TRY
XI. BENNIE COMES TO THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE
XII. AN ISLAND
XIII. ELLA MAKES A DECISION
XIV. PA STEPS ASIDE
XV. A SOLUTION
XVI. ENTER--JIM
XVII. AN ANSWER
XVIII. AND A MIRACLE
XIX. AND THE HAPPY ENDING
I
INTRODUCING--THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE
There is a certain section of New York that is bounded upon the north by
Fourteenth Street, upon the south by Delancy. Folk who dwell in it seldom
stray farther west than the Bowery, rarely cross the river that flows
sluggishly on its eastern border. They live their lives out, with
something that might be termed a feverish stolidity, in the dim crowded
flats, and upon the thronged streets.
To the people who have homes on Central Park West, to the frail winged
moths who flutter up and down Broadway, this section does not exist. Its
poor are not the picturesque poor of the city's Latin quarter, its
criminals seldom win to the notoriety of a front page and inch-high
headlines; it almost never produces a genius for the world to smile
upon--its talent does not often break away from the undefined, but none
the less certain, limits of the district.
It is curious that this part of town is seldom featured in song or story,
for it is certainly neither dull nor unproductive of plot. The tenements
that loom, canyon-like, upon every side are filled to overflowing with
human drama; and the stilted little parks are so teeming with romances,
of a summer night, that only the book of the ages would be big enough to
hold them--were they written out! Life beats, like some great wave, up
the dim alleyways--it breaks, in a shattered tide, against rock-like
doorways. The music of a street band, strangely sweet despite its
shrillness, rises triumphantly above the tumult of pavement vendors, the
crying of babies, the shouting of small boys, and the monotonous voices
of the womenfolk.
In almost the exact center of this district is the Settlement House--a
brown building that is tall and curiously friendly. Between a great
hive-like dwelling place and a noisy dance-hall it stands valiantly, like
the soldier of God that it is! And through its wide-open doorway come and
go the girls who will gladly squander a week's wage for a bit of satin or
a velvet hat; the shabby, dull-eyed women who, two years before, were
care-free girls themselves; the dreamers--and the ones who have never
learned to dream. For there is something about the Settlement House--and
about the tiny group of earnest people who are the heart of the
Settlement House--that is like a warm hand, stretched out in welcome to
the poor and the needy, to the halt in body and the maimed in soul, and
to the casual passer-by.
II
THE QUARREL
"They're like animals," said the Young Doctor in the tone of one who
states an indisputable fact. "Only worse!" he added.
Rose-Marie laid down the bit of roll that she had been buttering and
turned reproachful eyes upon the Young Doctor.
"Oh, but they're not," she cried; "you don't understand, or you wouldn't
talk that way. You don't understand!"
Quite after the maddening fashion of men the doctor did not answer until
he had consumed, and appreciatively, the last of the roll he was eating.
And then--
"I've been here quite as long as you have, Miss Thompson," he remarked, a
shade too gently.
The Superintendent raised tired eyes from her plate. She was little and
slim and gray, this Superintendent; it seemed almost as though the slums
had drained from her the life and colour.
"When you've been working in this section for twenty years," she said
slowly, "you'll realize that nobody can ever understand. You'll realize
that we all have animal traits--to a certain extent. And you'll realize
that quarrelling isn't ever worth while."
"But"--Rose-Marie was inclined to argue the point--"but Dr. Blanchard
talks as if the people down here are scarcely human! And it's not right
to feel so about one's fellow-men. Dr. Blanchard acts as if the people
down here haven't _souls_!"
The Young Doctor helped himself nonchalantly to a second roll.
"There's a certain sort of a little bug that lives in the water," he
said, "and it drifts around aimlessly until it finds another little bug
that it holds on to. And then another little bug takes hold, and
another, and another. And pretty soon there are hundreds of little bugs,
and then there are thousands, and then there are millions, and then
billions, and then--"
The Superintendent interrupted wearily.
"I'd stop at the billions, if I were you," she said, "particularly as
they haven't any special bearing on the subject."
"Oh, but they _have_" said the doctor, "for, after a while, the billions
and _trillions_ of little bugs, clinging together, make an island. They
haven't souls, perhaps," he darted a triumphant glance at Rose-Marie,
"but they make an island just the same!"
He paused for a moment, as if waiting for some sort of comment. When it
did not come, he spoke again.
"The people of the slums," he said, "the people who drift into, and out
of, and around this Settlement House, are not very unlike the little
bugs. And, after all, _they do help to make the city_!"
There was a quaver in Rose-Marie's voice, and a hurt look in her eyes, as
she answered.
"Yes, they are like the little bugs," she said, "in the blind way that
they hold together! But please, Dr. Blanchard, don't say they are
soulless. Don't--"
All at once the Young Doctor's hand was banging upon the table. All at
once his voice was vehemently raised.
"It's the difference in our point of view, Miss Thompson," he told
Rose-Marie, "and I'm afraid that I'm right and that you're--not right.
You've come from a pretty little country town where every one was fairly
comfortable and fairly prosperous. You've always been a part of a
community where people went to church and prayer-meeting and
Sunday-school. Your neighbours loved each other, and played Pollyanna
when things went wrong. And you wore white frocks and blue sashes
whenever there was a lawn party or a sociable." He paused, perhaps for
breath, and then--"I'm different," he said; "I struggled for my
education; it was always the survival of the fittest with me. I worked my
way through medical school. I had my hospital experience in Bellevue and
on the Island--most of my patients were the lowest of the low. I've tried
to cure diseased bodies--but I've left diseased minds alone. Diseased
minds have been out of my line. Perhaps that's why I've come through with
an ideal of life that's slightly different from your sunshine and apple
blossoms theory!"
"Oh," Rose-Marie was half sobbing, "oh, you're so hard!"
The Young Doctor faced her suddenly and squarely. "Why did you come
here," he cried, "to the slums? Why did you come to work in a Settlement
House? What qualifications have you to be a social service worker, you
child? What do you know of the meaning of service, of life?"
Rose-Marie's voice was earnest, though shaken.
"I came," she answered, "because I love people and want to help them. I
came because I want to teach them to think beautiful thoughts, to have
beautiful ideals. I came because I want to show them the God that I
know--and try to serve--" she faltered.
The Young Doctor laughed--but not pleasantly.
"And I," he said, "came to make their bodies as healthy as possible. I
came because curing sick bodies was my job--_not because I loved people
or had any particular faith in them_. Prescribing to criminals and
near-criminals isn't a reassuring work; it doesn't give one faith in
human nature or in human souls!"
The Superintendent had been forgotten. But her tired voice rose suddenly
across the barrier of speech that had grown high and icy between the
Young Doctor and Rose-Marie.
"You both came," she said, and she spoke in the tone of a mother of
chickens who has found two young and precocious ducklings in her brood,
"you both came to help people--of that I'm sure!"
Rose-Marie started up, suddenly, from the table.
"I came," she said, as she moved toward the door that led to the hall,
"to make people better."
"And I," said the Young Doctor, moving away from the table toward the
opposite side of the room and another door, "I came to make them
healthier!" With his hand on the knob of the door he spoke to the
Superintendent.
"I'll not be back for supper," he said shortly, "I'll be too busy.
Giovanni Celleni is out of jail again, and he's thrown his wife down a
flight of stairs. She'll probably not live. And while Minnie Cohen was
at the vaudeville show last night--developing her soul, perhaps--her
youngest baby fell against the stove. Well, it'll be better for the
baby if it does die! And there are others--" The door slammed upon his
angry back.
Rose-Marie's face was white as she leaned against the dark wainscoting.
"Minnie Cohen brought the baby in last week," she shuddered, "such a dear
baby! And Mrs. Celleni--she tried so hard! Oh, it's not right--" She was
crying, rather wildly, as she went out of the room.
The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang for the stolid maid.
Her voice was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If
she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with
semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a
darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours
and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did not
mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was folding her napkin,
and then--
"They're both very young," she murmured, a shade regretfully. Perhaps she
was remembering the enthusiasm--and the intolerance--of her own youth.
III
CONCERNING IDEALS
"Sunshine and apple blossoms!" Rose-Marie, hurrying along the hall to her
own room, repeated the Young Doctor's words and sobbed afresh as she
repeated them. She tried to tell herself that nothing he could think
mattered much to her, but there was a certain element of truth in
everything that he had said. It was a fact that her life had been an
unclouded, peaceful one--her days had followed each other as regularly,
as innocuously, as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow
each other.
Of course, she told herself, she had never known a mother; and her father
had died when she was a tiny girl. But she was forced to admit--as she
had been forced to admit many times--that she did not particularly feel
the lack of parents. Her two aunts, that she had always lived with, had
been everything to her--they had indulged her, had made her pretty
frocks, had never tried, in any way, to block the reachings of her
personality. When she had decided suddenly, fired by the convincing
address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the small town of her
birth, they had put no obstacle in her path.
"If you feel that you must go," they had told her, "you must. Maybe it is
the work that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all faith in you,
Rose-Marie!"
And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance, had never known that
their pillows were damp that night--and for many another night--with the
tears that they were too brave to let her see.
They had packed her trunk, folding the white dress and the blue
sash--Rose-Marie wondered how the Young Doctor had known about the dress
and sash--in tissue paper. They had created a blue serge frock for work,
and a staunch little blue coat, and a blue tam-o'-shanter. Rose-Marie
would have been aghast to know how childish she looked in that
tam-o'-shanter! Her every-day shoes had been resoled; her white ruffled
petticoats had been lengthened. And then she had been launched, like a
slim little boat, upon the turbulent sea of the city!
Looking back, through a mist of angry tears, Rose-Marie felt her first
moment of homesickness for the friendly little town with its wide,
tree-shaded streets, its lawn parties, and its neighbours; cities, she
had discovered, discourage the art of neighbouring! She felt a pang of
emptiness--she wanted her aunts with their soft, interested eyes, and
their tender hands.
At first the city had thrilled her. But now that she had been in the
Settlement House a month, the thrill was beginning to die away. The great
buildings were still unbelievably high, the crowds of people were still a
strange and mysterious throng, the streets were as colourful as ever--but
life, nevertheless, was beginning to settle into ordinary channels.
She had thought, at the beginning of her stay there, that the Settlement
House was a hotbed of romance. Every ring of the doorbell had tingled
through her; every step in the hall had made her heart leap, with a
strange quickening movement, into her throat--every shabby man had been
to her a possible tragedy, every threadbare woman had been a case for
charity. She had fluttered from reception-hall to reading-room, and back
again--she had been alert, breathless, eager.
But, with the assignment of regular duties, some of the adventure had
been drained from life. For her these consisted of teaching a club of
girls to sew, of instructing a group of mothers in the art of making
cakes and pies and salads, and of hearing a half hundred little children
repeat their A B Cs. Only the difference in setting, only the twang of
foreign tongues, only the strange precociousness of the children, made
life at all different from the life at home. She told herself, fiercely,
that she might be a teacher in a district school--a country school--for
all the good she was accomplishing.
She had offered, so many times, to do visiting in the tenements--to call
upon families of the folk who would not come to the Settlement House.
But the Superintendent had met her, always, with a denial that was
wearily firm.
"I have a staff of women--older women from outside--who do the visiting,"
she had said. "I'm afraid" she was eyeing Rose-Marie in the blue coat and
the blue tam-o'-shanter, "I'm afraid that you'd scarcely be--convincing.
And," she had added, "Dr. Blanchard takes care of all the detail in that
department of our work!"
Dr. Blanchard ... Rose-Marie felt the tears coming afresh at the thought
of him! She remembered how she had written home enthusiastic,
schoolgirlish letters about the handsome man who sat across the dining
table from her. It had seemed exciting, romantic, that only the three of
them really should live in the great brownstone house--the Young Doctor,
the Superintendent--who made a perfect chaperon--and herself. It had
seemed, somehow, almost providential that they should be thrown together.
Yes, Rose-Marie remembered how she had been attracted to Dr. Blanchard at
the very first--how she had found nothing wanting in his wiry strength,
his broad shoulders, his dark, direct eyes.
But she had not been in the Settlement House long before she began to
feel the clash of their natures. When she started to church service, on
her first Sunday in New York, she surprised a smile of something that
might have been cynical mirth upon his lean, square-jawed face. And when
she spoke of the daily prayers that she and her aunts had so beautifully
believed in, back in the little town, he laughed at her--not unkindly,
but with the sympathetic superiority that one feels for a too trusting
child. Rose-Marie, thinking it over, knew that she would rather meet
direct unkindness than that bland superiority!
And so--though there had never been an open quarrel until the one at the
luncheon table--Rose-Marie had learned to look to the Superintendent for
encouragement, rather than to the Young Doctor. And she had frigidly
declined his small courtesies--a visit to the movies, a walk in the park,
a 'bus ride up Fifth Avenue.
"I never went to the movies at home," she had told him. Or, "I'm too
busy, just now, to take a walk." Or, "I can't go with you to-day. I've
letters to write."
"It's a shame," she confided, on occasion, to the Superintendent, "that
Dr. Blanchard never goes to church. It's a shame that he has had so
little religious life. I gave him a book to read the other day--the
letters of an American Missionary in China--and he laughed and told me
that he couldn't waste his time. What do you think of that! But later,"
Rose-Marie's voice sank to a horrified whisper, "later, I saw him reading
a cheap novel--he had time for a cheap novel!"
The Superintendent looked down into Rose-Marie's earnest little face.
"My dear," she said gently, stifling a desire to laugh, "my dear, he's a
very busy man. He gives a great deal of himself to the people here in the
slums. The novel, to him, was just a mental relaxation."
But to the Young Doctor, later, the Superintendent spoke differently.
"Billy Blanchard," she said, and she only called him Billy Blanchard when
she wanted to scold him, "I've known you for a long time. And I'm sure
that there's no harm in you. Of course," she sighed, "I wish that you
could feel a little more in sympathy with the spiritual side of our work.
But I've argued with you, more than once, on that point!"
The doctor, who was packing medicines into his bag, looked up.
"You know, you old dear," he told her, "that I'm hopeless. I haven't had
an easy row to hoe, not ever; you wouldn't be religious yourself if you
were in my shoes! There--don't look so shocked--you've been a mother to
me in your funny, fussy way, since I came to this place! That's the main
reason, I guess, that I stick here, as I do, when I could make a lot more
money somewhere else!" He reached up to pat her thin hand, and then, "But
why are you worrying, just now, about my soul?" he questioned.
The Superintendent sighed again.
"It's the little Thompson girl," she answered; "she's so anxious to
convert people, and she's so sincere,--so very sincere. I can't help
feeling that you are a thorn in her flesh, Billy. She says that you won't
read her missionary books--"
The Young Doctor interrupted.
"She's such a pretty girl," he said quite fiercely. "Why on earth didn't
she stay at home, where she belonged! Why on earth did she pick out this
sort of work?"
The Superintendent answered.
"One never knows," she said, "why girls pick out certain kinds of work.
I've had the strangest cases come to my office--of homely girls who
wanted to be artists' models, and anemic girls who wanted to be physical
directors, and flighty girls who wanted to go to Bible School, and quiet
girls who were all set for a career on the stage. Rose-Marie Thompson is
the sort of a girl who was cut out to be a home-maker, to give happiness
to some nice, clean boy, to have a nursery full of rosy-cheeked babies.
And yet here she is, filled with a desire to rescue people, to snatch
brands from the burning. Here she is in the slums when she'd be
dramatically right in an apple orchard--at the time of year when the
trees are covered with pink and white blossoms."
The Young Doctor laughed. He so well understood the Superintendent--so
enjoyed her point of view.
"Yes," he agreed, "she'd be perfect there in an organdy frock with
the sun slanting across her face. But--well, she's just like other
girls. Tell a pretty girl that she's clever, they say, and tell a
clever girl that she's a raving, tearing beauty. That's the way for a
man to be popular!"
The Superintendent laughed quietly with him. It was a moment before she
grew sober again.
"I wonder," she said at last, "why you have never tried to be popular
with girls. You could so easily be popular. You're young and--don't try
to hush me up--good-looking. And yet--well, you're such an antagonistic
person. From the very first you've laughed at Rose-Marie--and she was
quite ready to adore you when she arrived. How do I know? Oh, I could
tell! Take the child seriously, Billy Blanchard, before she actually
begins to dislike you!"
The Young Doctor put several bottles of violently coloured pills into his
bag before he spoke.
"She dislikes me already," he said. "She's such a cool little person.
What are you trying to do, anyway? Are you trying to matchmake; to
stir up a love affair between the both of us--" suddenly he was
laughing again.
"I'm too busy to have a romance, you old dear," he told the
Superintendent, "far too busy. I'm as likely to fall in love, just now,
as you are!"
The woman's face was averted as she answered. But her low voice
was steady.
"When I was your age, Billy," she said gently, "I _was_ in love.
That's why, perhaps, I came here. That's why, perhaps, I stayed. No,
he didn't die--he married another girl. And dreams are hard things to
forget. That's why I left the country. Maybe that's why the little
Thompson girl--"
But the Young Doctor was shaking his head.
"She hasn't had any love affair," he told the Superintendent. "She's too
young and full of ideals to have anything so ordinary as a romance.
Everybody," his laugh was not too pleasant, "can have a romance! And few
people can be so filled with ideals as Miss Thompson. Oh, it's her ideals
that I can't stand! It's her impractical way of gazing at life through
pink-coloured glasses. She'll never be of any real use here in the slums.
I'm only afraid that she'll come to some harm because she's so trusting
and over-sincere. I'd hate to see her placed in direct contact with some
of the young men that I work with, for instance. You haven't--" All at
once his voice took on a new note. "You haven't let her be with any of
the boys' classes, have you? Her ideals might not stand the strain!"
The Superintendent answered.
"Ideals don't hurt any one," she said, and her voice was almost as fierce
as the doctor's. "No, I haven't given her a bit of work with the boys.
She's too young and too untouched and, as you say, too pretty. I'm
letting her spend her time with the mothers, and the young girls, and the
little tots--not even allowing her to go out alone, if I can help it.
Such innocence--" The Superintendent broke off suddenly in the middle of
the sentence. And she sighed again.
IV
THE PARK
Crying helps, sometimes. When Rose-Marie, alone in her room, finally
dried away the tears that were the direct result of her quarrel with Dr.
Blanchard, there was a new resolve in her eyes--a look that had not been
there when she went, an hour before, to the luncheon table. It was the
look of one who has resolutions that cannot be shattered--dreams that are
unbreakable. She glanced at her wrist watch and there was a shade of
defiance in the very way she raised the arm that wore it.
"They make a baby of me here," she told herself, "they treat me like a
silly child. It's a wonder that they don't send a nurse-maid with me to
my classes. It's a wonder"--she was growing vehement--"that they give me
credit for enough sense to wear rubbers when it's raining! I," again she
glanced at the watch, "I haven't a single thing to do until four
o'clock--and it's only just a little after two. I'm going out--_now_. I'm
going into the streets, or into a tenement, or into a--a _dive_, if
necessary! I'm going to show them"--the plural pronoun, strangely,
referred to a certain young man--"that I can help somebody! I'm going to
show them--"
She was struggling eagerly into her coat; eagerly she pulled her
tam-o'-shanter over the curls that, even in the city slums, were full of
sunshine. With her hands thrust staunchly into her pockets, she went out;
out into the jungle of streets that met, as in the center of a labyrinth,
in front of the Settlement House.
Always, when she had gone out alone, she had sought a small park not far
from her new home. It was a comfortingly green little oasis in the desert
of stone and brick--a little oasis that reminded one of the country. She
turned toward it now, quite blindly, for the streets confused her--they
always did. As the crowds closed around her she hurried vaguely, as a
swimmer hurries just before he loses his head and goes down. She caught
her breath as she went, for the crowds always made her feel
submerged--quite as the swimmer feels just before the final plunge. She
entered the park--it was scarcely more than a square of grass--with a
very definite feeling of relief, almost of rescue.
As usual, the park was crowded. But park crowds are different from street
crowds--they are crowds at rest, rather than hurrying, restless throngs.
Rose-Marie sank upon an iron bench and with wide, childishly distended
eyes surveyed the people that surged in upon her.
There was a woman with a hideous black wig--the badge of revered Jewish
motherhood--pressed down over the front of her silvered hair. Rose-Marie,
a short time ago, would have guessed her age at seventy--now she told
herself that the woman was probably forty. There was a slim,
cigarette-smoking youth with pale, shifty eyes. There was an old, old
man--white-bearded like one of the patriarchs--and there was a
dark-browed girl who held a drowsy baby to her breast. All of these and
many more--Italians, Slavs, Russians, Hungarians and an occasional
Chinaman--passed her by. It seemed to the girl that this section was a
veritable melting pot of the races--and that every example of every race
was true to type. She had seen any number of young men with shifty
eyes--she had seen many old men with white beards. She knew that other
black-wigged women lived in every tenement; that other dark-browed girls
were, at that same moment, rocking other babies. She fell to wondering,
whimsically, whether God had fashioned the people of the slums after some
half-dozen set patterns--almost as the cutter, in many an alley
sweatshop, fashions the frocks of a season.
A sharp cry broke in upon her wonderings. It was the cry of an animal in
utter pain--in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet at
the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes
distended she whirled about to face a small boy who knelt upon the ground
behind her bench.
To Rose-Marie the details of the small boy's appearance came back, later,
with an amazing clarity. Later she could have described his dark, sullen
eyes, his mouth with its curiously grim quirk at one corner, his shock of
black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the ability to
see only one thing--the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had tied to the
iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was torturing
with a cold, relentless cruelty.
It shrieked again--with an almost human cry--as she started around the
bench toward it. And the wild throbbing of her heart told her that she
was witnessing, for the first time, a phase of human nature of which she
had never dreamed.
V
ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE
Rose-Marie's hand upon the small boy's coat collar was not gentle. With
surprising strength, for she was small and slight, she jerked him aside.
"You wicked child!" she exclaimed, and the Young Doctor would have
chuckled to hear her tone. "You wicked child, what are you doing?"
Without waiting for an answer she knelt beside the pitiful little animal
that was tied to the bench, and with trembling fingers unloosed the cord
that held it, noting as she did so how its bones showed, even through its
coat of fur. When it was at liberty she gathered it close to her breast
and turned to face the boy.
He had not tried to run away. Even with the anger surging through her,
Rose-Marie admitted that the child was not--in one sense--a coward. He
had waited, brazenly perhaps, to hear what she had to say. With blazing
eyes she said it:
"Why," she questioned, and the anger that made her eyes blaze also put a
tremor into her voice, "why were you deliberately hurting this kitten?
Don't you know that kittens can feel pain just as much as you can feel
pain? Don't you know that it is wicked to make anything suffer? Why were
you so wicked?"
The boy looked up at her with sullen, dark eyes. The grim twist at one
corner of his mouth became more pronounced.
"Aw," he said gruffly, "why don't yer mind yer own business?"
If Rose-Marie's hands had been free, she would have taken the boy
suddenly and firmly by both shoulders. She felt an overwhelming desire to
shake him--to shake him until his teeth chattered. But both of her hands
were busy, soothing the gray kitten that shivered against her breast.
"I am minding my own business," she told the boy. "It's my business to
give help where it's needed, and this kitten," she cuddled it closer,
"certainly needed help! Haven't you ever been told that you should be
kind? Like," she faltered, "like Jesus was kind? He wouldn't have hurt
anything. He loved animals--and He loved boys, too. Why don't you try to
be the sort of a boy He could love? Why do you try to be bad--to do
wrong things?"
The eyes of the child were even more sullen--the twist of his mouth was
even more grim as he listened to Rose-Marie. But when she had finished
speaking, he answered her--and still he did not try to run away.
"Wot," he questioned, almost in the words of the Young Doctor, "wot do
you know about things that's right an' things that's wrong? It ain't bad
t' hurt animals--not if they're little enough so as they ain't able t'
hurt you!"
Rose-Marie sat down, very suddenly, upon the bench. In all of her
life--her sheltered, glad life--she had never heard such a brutal creed
spoken, and from the lips of a child! Her eyes, searching his face, saw
that he was not trying to be funny, or saucy, or smart. Curiously enough
she noted that he was quite sincere--that, to him, the torturing of a
kitten was only a part of the day with its various struggles and
amusements. When she spoke again her tone was gentle--as gentle as the
tone with which the other slum children, who came to the Settlement
House, were familiar.
"Whoever told you," she questioned, "that it's not wrong to hurt an
animal, so long as it can't fight back?"
The boy eyed her strangely. Rose-Marie could almost detect a gleam of
latent interest in his dark eyes. And then, as if he had gained a sort of
confidence in her, he answered.
"Nobody never told me," he said gruffly. "But I _know_."
The kitten against Rose-Marie's breast cried piteously. Perhaps it was
the hopelessness of the cry that made her want so desperately to make the
boy understand. Conquering the loathing she had felt toward him she
managed the ghost of a smile.
"I wish," she said, and the smile became firmer, brighter, as she said
it, "I wish that you'd sit down, here, beside me. I want to tell you
about the animals that I've had for pets--and about how they loved me. I
had a white dog once; his name was Dick. He used to go to the store for
me, he used to carry my bundles home in his mouth--and he did tricks--"
The boy had seated himself, gingerly, on the bench. He interrupted her,
and his voice was eager.
"Did yer have t' beat him," he questioned, "t' make him do the tricks?
Did he bleed when yer beat him?"
Again Rose-Marie gasped. She leaned forward until her face was on a level
with the boy's face.
"Why," she asked him, "do you think that the only way to teach an animal
is to teach him by cruelty? I taught my dog tricks by being kind and
sweet to him. Why do you talk of beatings--I couldn't hurt anything, even
if I disliked it, until it _bled_!"
The small boy drew back from Rose-Marie. His expression was vaguely
puzzled--it seemed almost as if he did not comprehend what her
words meant.
"My pa beats me," he said suddenly, "always he beats me--when he's
drunk! An' sometimes he beats me when he ain't. He beats Ma, too, an'
he uster beat Jim, 'n' Ella. He don't dare beat Jim now, though"--this
proudly--"Jim's as big as he is now, an' Ella--nobody'd dast lay a
hand on Ella ..." almost as suddenly as he had started to talk, the
boy stopped.
For the moment the episode of the kitten was a forgotten thing. There was
only pity, only a blank sort of horror, on Rose-Marie's face.
"Doesn't your father love you--any of you?" she asked.
"Naw." The boy's mouth was a straight line--a straight and very bitter
line, for such a young mouth. "Naw, he only loves his booze. He hits me
all th' time--an' he's four times as big as me! An' so I hit whoever's
smaller'n I am. An' even if they cry I don't care. I hate things that's
little--that can't take care o' themselves. Everything had oughter be
able t' take care of itself!"
"Haven't you"--again Rose-Marie asked a question--"haven't you ever loved
anything that was smaller than you are? Haven't you ever had a pet?
Haven't you ever felt that you must protect and take care of some one--or
something? Haven't you?"
All at once the boy was smiling, and the smile lit up his small, dark
face as a candle, slowly flickering, brings cheer and brightness to a
dull, lonely room.
"I love Lily," he told her. "I wouldn't let nobody touch Lily! If Pa so
much as spoke mean to her--I'd kill him. I'd kill him with a knife!"
Rose-Marie shuddered inwardly at the thought. But her voice was very even
as she spoke.
"Who is Lily?" she asked.
The boy had slid down along the bench. He was so close to her that his
shabby coat sleeve touched her blue one.
"Lily's my kid sister," he said, and, miracle of miracles, his voice held
a note of tenderness. "Say--Miss, I'm sorry I hurt th' cat."
With a sudden feeling of warmth Rose-Marie moved just a fraction of an
inch closer to the boy. She knew, somehow, that his small, curiously
abject apology was in a way related to the "kid sister"; she knew, almost
instinctively, that this Lily who could make a smile come to the dark
little face, who could make a tenderness dwell in those hard young eyes,
was the only avenue by which she could reach this strange child. She
spoke to him suddenly, impulsively.
"I'd like to see your Lily; I'd like to see her, awfully," she told
him. "Will you bring her some time to call on me? I live at the
Settlement House."
A subtle change had come over the child's face. He slid, hurriedly, from
the bench.
"Oh," he said, "yer one o' them! You sing hymns 'n' pray 'n' tell folks
t' take baths. I know. Well, I can't bring Lily t' see you--not ever!"
Rose-Marie had also risen to her feet.
"Then," she said eagerly, "let me come and see Lily. Where do you live?"
The boy's eyes had fallen. It was plain that he did not want to
answer--that he was experiencing the almost inarticulate embarrassment of
childhood.
"We live," he told her at last, "in that house over there." His pointing
finger indicated the largest and grimiest of the tenements that loomed,
dark and high, above the squalor of a side street. "But you wouldn't
wanter come--there!"
Rose-Marie caught her breath sharply. She was remembering how the
Superintendent had forbidden her to do visiting, how the Young Doctor
had laughed at her desire to be of service. She knew what they would say
if she told them that she was going into a tenement to see a strange
child named Lily. Perhaps that was why her voice had an excited ring as
she answered.
"Yes, I would come there!" she told the boy. "Tell me what floor you live
on, and what your name is, and when it would be best for me to come?"
"My name's Bennie Volsky," the boy said slowly. "We're up five flights,
in th' back. D'yer really mean that you'll come--an' see Lily?"
Rose-Marie nodded soberly. How could the child know that her heart was
all athrob with the call of a great adventure?
"Yes, I mean it," she told him. "When shall I come?"
The boy's grubby hand shot out and rested upon her sleeve.
"Come to-morrow afternoon," he told her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned,
swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like
a small drab-coloured city chameleon.
Rose-Marie, standing by the bench, watched the place where he had
disappeared. And then, all at once, she turned swiftly--just as
swiftly as the boy had--and started back across the park toward the
Settlement House.
"I won't tell them!" she was saying over and over in her heart, as she
went, "I won't tell them! They wouldn't let me go, if I did.... I won't
tell them!"
The kitten was still held tight in her arms. It rested, quite
contentedly, against her blue coat. Perhaps it knew that there was a
warm, friendly place--even for little frightened animals--in the
Settlement House.
VI
"THERE'S NO PLACE--"
When Rose-Marie paused in front of the tenement, at three o'clock on the
following afternoon, she felt like a naughty little girl who is playing
truant from school. When she remembered the way that she had avoided the
Superintendent's almost direct questions, she blushed with an inward
sense of shame. But when she thought of the Young Doctor's offer to go
with her--"wherever she was going"--she threw back her head with a
defiant little gesture. She knew well that the Young Doctor was sorry for
yesterday's quarrel--she knew that a night beside the dying Mrs. Celleni,
and the wails of the Cohen baby, had temporarily softened his viewpoint
upon life. And yet--he had said that they were soulless--these people
that she had come to help! He would have condemned Bennie Volsky from the
first--but she had detected the glimmerings of something fine in the
child! No--despite his more tolerant attitude--she knew that, underneath,
his convictions were unchanged. She was glad that she had gone out upon
her adventure alone.
With a heart that throbbed in quick staccato beats, she mounted the steps
of the tenement. Little dark-eyed children moved away from her,
apparently on every side, but somehow she scarcely noticed them. The
doorway yawned, like an open mouth, in front of her--and she could think
of nothing else. As she went over the dark threshold she remembered
stories that she had read about people who go in at tenement doorways and
are never seen again. Every one has read such stories in the daily
newspapers--and perhaps some of them are true!
A faint light flickered in through the doorway. It made the ascent of the
first flight of creaking stairs quite easy. At least Rose-Marie could
step aside from the piles of rubbish and avoid the rickety places. She
wondered, as she went up, her fingers gingerly touching the dirty
hand-rail, how people could exist under such wretched conditions.
The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow doorway
was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have been gas jets
upon every landing--Rose-Marie supposed that there were--but it was
mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She groped her way up
the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully along each step with
her foot before she put her weight upon it.
On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But she
realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under
difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far
as she could tell--all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage,
and fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the
indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy dishes.
But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours--poignant though they were--took
second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she imagined
that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same place at
one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little children,
the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the crashes of
breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and--worst of all--bursts of
appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the darkness of the
fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected to hear--phrases
of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she started up the fifth
flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the Volsky flat, she
experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she would be shut off,
in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds--at least, in a moment,
she would be in a _home_.
To most of us--particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such as
had always sheltered Rose-Marie--the very sound of the word "home" brings
a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for shelter and
protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be
it ever so humble ..."
And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a
home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word--to be
ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it
would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her
conception of the word. She expected it to be a home because a family
lived there together--a mother, and a father, and children.
In answer to her knock the door swung open--a little way. The glow of a
dingy lamp fell about her, through the opening--she felt suddenly as if
she had been swept, willy-nilly, before the footlights of some hostile
stage. For a moment she stood blinking. And as she stood there, quite
unable to see, she heard the voice of Bennie Volsky, speaking in a
hoarse whisper.
"It's you, Miss!" said the voice, and it was as full of intense
wonderment as a voice could be. "I never thought that you'd come--I
didn't think you was on th' level. So many folks say they'll do things--"
he broke off, and then--"Walk in, quiet," he told her slowly. "Don't make
any noise, if yer can help it! Pa's come home, all lit up. An' he's
asleep, in th' corner! There'll be--" he broke off--"There'll be th'
dickens t' pay, if Pa wakes up! But walk in, still-like. An' yer can see
Ma an' all, an'--_Lily_!"
Rose-Marie, whose eyes had now become accustomed to the dim light,
stepped past the boy and into the room. Her hand, in passing, touched his
arm lightly, for she knew that he was labouring under intense excitement.
She stepped into the room, on mousy-quiet feet--and then, with a quick
gasp, drew back again.
Never, in her wildest dreams of poverty, had Rose-Marie supposed that
squalor, such as she saw in the Volsky home, could exist. Never had she
supposed that a family could live in such cramped, airless quarters.
Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was
possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream--a dream in
which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture
of a home was vanishing--vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap
bubble vanishes, if pricked by a pin.
"Why--why, Bennie!" she began. But the child was not listening. He had
darted from her side and was dragging forward, by one listless,
work-coarsened hand, a pallid, drooping woman.
"Dis is my ma," he told Rose-Marie. "She didn't know yer was comin'. I
didn't tell her!"
It seemed to Rose-Marie that there was a scared sort of appeal in the
woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was
not even appeal in the tone of her voice--it was all a drab,
colourless monotone.
"Whatcha come here fer?" she questioned. "Pa, he's home. If he should ter
wake up--" She left the sentence unfinished.
Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure
of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothing in that figure to hold her gaze--it
was so vague, so like a shadow of something that had been. She saw the
few broken chairs, the half-filled wash tub, the dish-pan with its
freight of soiled cups and plates. She saw the gas stove, with its
battered coffee-pot, and a mattress or two piled high with dingy
bedding. And, in one corner, she saw--with a new sense of horror--the
reclining figure of Pa.
Pa was sleeping. Sleeping heavily, with his mouth open and his tousled
head slipping to one side. One great hairy hand was clenched about an
empty bottle--one huge foot, stockingless and half out of its shoe, was
dragging limply off the heap of blankets that was his bed. A stubble of
beard made his already dark face even more sinister, his tousled hair
looked as if it had never known the refining influences of a comb or
brush. As Rose-Marie stared at him, half fascinated, he turned--with a
spasmodic, drunken movement--and flung one heavy arm above his head.
The room was not a large one. But, at that moment, it seemed appallingly
spacious to Rose-Marie. She turned, almost with a feeling of affection,
toward Bennie. At least she had seen him before. And, as if he
interpreted her feeling, Bennie spoke.
"We got two other rooms," he told her, "one that Ella an' Lily sleep in,
an' one that Jim pays fer, his own self. Ma an' Pa an' me--we sleep
_here_! Say, don't you be too scared o' Pa--he'll stay asleep fer a long
time, now. He won't wake up unless he's shook. Will he, Ma?"
Mrs. Volsky nodded her head with a worn out, apathetic movement.
Noiselessly, but with the appearance of a certain terrible effort under
the shell of quiet, she moved away across the room toward the stove.
"She's goin' t' warm up th' coffee," Bennie said. "She'll give you some,
in a minute, if yer want it!"
Rose-Marie was about to speak, about to assure Bennie that she didn't
want any of the coffee, when steps sounded on the stairs. They were
hurried steps; steps suggesting to the listener that five flights were
nothing, after all! Rose-Marie found herself turning as a hand fell
heavily upon a door-knob, and the door swung in.
A young man stood jauntily upon the threshold. Rose-Marie's first
impression of him was one of extreme, almost offensive neatness--of sleek
hair, that looked like patent leather, and of highly polished brown
shoes. She saw that his blue and white striped collar was speckless, that
his blue tie was obviously new, that his trousers were creased to an
almost dangerous edge. But it was the face of the young man from which
Rose-Marie shrank back--a clever, sharp face with narrow, horribly
speculative eyes and a thin-lipped red mouth. It was a handsome face,
yes, but--
The voice of Bennie broke, suddenly, across her speculations.
"Jim," he said.
Still jauntily--Rose-Marie realized that jauntiness was his keynote--the
young man entered the room. His sharp eyes travelled with lightning-like
rapidity over the place, resting a moment on the sleeping figure of Pa
before they hurried past him to Rose-Marie. He surveyed her coolly,
taking in every feature, every fold of her garments, with a studied
boldness that was somehow offensive.
"Who's she?" he questioned abruptly, of any one who cared to answer, and
one manicured finger pointed in her direction. "Where'd she come from?"
Bennie was the one who spoke. Rather gallantly he stepped in front of
Rose-Marie.
"She's a friend of mine," he said; "she lives by th' Settlement House.
She come up here t' see me, 'n' Ma, 'n' Lily. You leave her be--y'
understand?"
The young man laughed, and his laugh was curiously hard and dry.
"Oh, sure!" he told Bennie. "I'll leave her be! What," he turned to
Rose-Marie with an insolent smile, "what's yer name?"
Rose-Marie met his insolent gaze with a calm expression. No one would
have guessed that she was trembling inwardly.
"My name," she told him, "is Rose-Marie Thompson. I live in the
Settlement House, and I came to see your sister."
"Well," the young man's insolent gaze was still studying Rose-Marie,
"well, she'll be up soon. I passed 'er on th' stairs. But," he laughed
again, "why didn't yer come t' see me--huh?"
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.