to have you join our classes. But that wasn't why I came here. Bennie
told me that he had a dear little sister. And I came to see her."
A change swept miraculously over Ella's cold face. Rose-Marie could see,
all at once, that she and her young brother were strikingly alike--that
Jim was the different one in this family.
"I'll get Lily," Ella said simply, and there was a warmth, a tenderness
in her dark eyes that had been so hard. "I didn't understand," she added,
as she went quickly past Rose-Marie and into the small inner room that
Bennie had said his sisters shared. In a moment she came out leading a
small girl by the hand.
"This is Lily!" she said softly.
Even in that dingy place--perhaps accentuated by the very dinginess of
it--Lily's blond loveliness struck Rose-Marie with a sense of shock. The
child might have been a flower--the very flower whose name she
bore--growing upon an ash heap. Her beauty made the rest of the room fade
into dim outlines--made Jim and Ella and Bennie seem heavy, and somehow
overfed. Even Pa, snoring lustily, became almost a shadow. Rose-Marie
stepped toward the child impulsively, with outflung arms.
"Oh, you dear!" she said shakily, "you dear!"
Nobody spoke. Only Ella, with gentle hands, pushed her little sister
forward. The child's great blue eyes looked past Rose-Marie, and a vague
smile quivered on her lips.
"Oh, you dear!" Rose-Marie exclaimed again, and went down on her knees on
the dirty floor--real women will always kneel before a beautiful child.
Lily might have been four years old. Her hair, drawn back from her white
little face, was the colour of pale gold, and her lips were faintly
coral. But it was her deep eyes, with their vague expression, that
clutched, somehow, at Rose-Marie's heart.
"Tell me that you're going to like me, Lily!" she almost implored. "I
love little girls."
The child did not answer--indeed, she did not seem to hear. But one thin
little hand, creeping out, touched Rose-Marie's face with a gesture that
was singularly appealing, singularly full of affection. When the fingers
touched her cheek, Rose-Marie felt a sudden suspicion, a sudden dread.
She noticed, all at once, that no one was speaking--that the room was
quite still, except for the beastial grunts of the sleeping Pa.
"Why," she asked, quite without meaning to, "why doesn't she answer me?
She isn't afraid of me, is she? Why doesn't she say something?"
It was, curiously enough, Mrs. Volsky who answered. Even her voice--that
was usually so dull and monotonous--held a certain tremor.
"Lily," she said slowly, "can't spick--'r hear.... An' she's--blind!"
VII
A LILY IN THE SLUMS
Rose-Marie started back from the child with a sickening sense of shock.
All at once she realized the reason why Bennie's eyes grew tender at the
mention of his little sister--why Ella forgot anger and suspicion when
Lily came into the room. She understood why Mrs. Volsky's dull voice held
love and sorrow. And yet, as she looked at the small girl, it seemed
almost incredible that she should be so afflicted. Deaf and dumb and
blind! Never to hear the voices of those who loved her, never to see the
beautiful things of life, never--even--to speak! Rose-Marie choked back a
sob, and glanced across the child's cloud of pale golden hair at Ella. As
their eyes met she knew that they were, in some strange way, friends.
With a sudden, overwhelming pity, her arms reached out again to Lily. As
she gathered the child close she was surprised at the slenderness of the
tiny figure, at the neatness of the faded gingham frock that blended in
tone with the great, sightless eyes. All at once she remembered what
Bennie had said to her, the day before, in the park.
"I love Lily," he had told her, "I wouldn't let nobody hurt Lily! If any
one--even Pa, so much as spoke mean to her--I'd kill him...."
Glancing about the room, at the faces of the others, she sensed a silent
echo of Bennie's words. Mrs. Volsky, who would keep neither her flat nor
herself neat, quite evidently saw to it that Lily's little dress was
spotless. Ella, whose temper would flare up at the slightest word, cared
for the child with the tender efficiency of a professional nurse;
Bennie's face, as he looked at his tiny sister, had taken on a cherubic
softness. And Jim ... Rose-Marie glanced at Jim and was startled out of
her reflections. For Jim was not looking at Lily. His gaze was fixed upon
her own face with an intensity that frightened her. With a sudden impulse
she spoke directly to him.
"You must be very kind to this little sister of yours," she told him.
"She needs every bit of love and affection and consideration that her
family can give her!"
Jim, his gaze still upon her face, shrugged his shoulders. But before
he could answer Ella had come a step closer to Rose-Marie. Her eyes
were flashing.
"Jim," she said, "ain't got any love or kindness or consideration in him!
Jim thinks that Lily ain't got any more feelin's than a puppy dog--'cause
she can't answer back. Oh," in response to the question in Rose-Marie's
face, "oh, he'd never put a finger on her--not that! But he don't speak
kind to her, like we do. It's enough fer him that she can't hear th'
words he lays his tongue to. Even Pa--"
Suddenly, as if in answer to his spoken name, there came a scuffling
sound from the corner where Pa was sleeping. All at once the empty bottle
dropped from the unclenched hand, the mouth fell open in a prodigious
yawn, the eyes became wide, burned-out wells of drunkenness. And as she
watched, Rose-Marie saw the room cleared in an amazing fashion. She heard
Mrs. Volsky's terrified whisper, "He's wakin' up!" She heard Jim's harsh
laugh; she saw Ella, with a fiercely maternal sweep of her strong arms,
gather the little Lily close to her breast and dart toward the inner
room. And then, as she stood dazedly watching the mountain of sodden
flesh that was Pa rear itself to a sitting posture, and then to a
standing one, she felt a hot little hand touch her own.
"We better clear out," said the voice of Bennie. "We better clear out
pretty quick! Pa's awful bad, sometimes, when he's just wakin' up!"
With a quickness not unlike the bump at the end of a
falling-through-space dream, Rose-Marie felt herself drawn from the
room--heard the door close with a slam behind her. And then she was
hurrying after the shadowy form of Bennie, down the five rickety flights
of stairs--past the same varied odours and the same appalling sounds that
she had noticed on the way up!
VIII
ANOTHER QUARREL
When Rose-Marie came out into the sunlight of the street she glanced at
her watch and saw, with an almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only
four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like
doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first
time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty,
and--she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes--a menace that she
did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age
and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had
stayed a few moments longer, she would have seen downright brutality. Her
hand, reaching out, clutched Bennie's hand.
"Dear," she said--and realized, from the startled expression of his eyes,
that he had not often been called "Dear,"--"is it always like that, in
your home?"
Bennie looked up into her eyes. He seemed, somehow, younger than he had
appeared the day before, younger and softer.
"Yes, Miss," he told her, "it's always like that, except when it's
worse!"
"And," Rose-Marie was still asking questions, "do your older sister and
brother just drift in, at any time, like that? And is your father home in
the middle of the day? Don't any of them work?"
Bennie's barriers of shyness had been burned away by the warmth of her
friendship. He was in a mood to tell anything.
"Pa, he works sometimes," he said. "An' Ella--she uster work till she had
a fight with her boss last week. An' now she says she ain't gotta work no
more 'cause there's a feller as will give her everythin' she wants, if
she says th' word! An' Jim--I ain't never seen him do nothin', but he
always has a awful lot o' money. He must do his workin' at night--after
I'm asleep!"
Rose-Marie, her mind working rapidly, realized that Bennie had given
revelations of which he did not even dream. Pa--his condition was what
she had supposed it to be--but Ella was drifting toward danger-shoals
that she had never imagined! Well she knew the conditions under which a
girl of Ella's financial status stops working--she had heard many such
cases discussed, with an amazing frankness, during her short stay at the
Settlement House. And Jim--Jim with his sleek, patent-leather hair, and
his rat-like face--Jim did his work at night! Rose-Marie could not
suppress the shudder that ran over her. Quickly she changed the subject
to the one bright spot in the Volsky family--to Lily.
"Your little sister," she asked Bennie, "has she always been as she is
now? Wasn't there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?"
Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered. Rose-Marie,
who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him
better for the tears. "Yes, Miss," he told her, "she was born all
healthy, Ma says. But she had a sickness--when she was a baby. An' she
ain't been right since!"
They walked the rest of the way in silence--a silence of untold depth.
But it was that silent walk, Rose-Marie felt afterward, that cemented the
strange affection that had sprung suddenly into flower between them. As
they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement
House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child
and a grown-up. And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of
course, to come to some of their boys' clubs he assented in a manner as
casual as her own.
* * * * *
As she sat down to dinner, that night, Rose-Marie was beaming with
happiness and the pride of achievement. The Superintendent, tired after
the day's work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic
smile--the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was
aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized
that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place;
that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless
slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that
a quarrel lay, starkly, between them.
Rose-Marie, herself, could scarcely have told why she was so bubbling
over with gladness. When she left the tenement home of the Volskys she
had been exceedingly depressed, when she parted from Bennie at the
Settlement House steps she had been ready to cry. But the hours between
that parting and dinnertime had brought her a sort of assurance, a sort
of joyous bravery. She felt that at last she had found her true vocation,
her real place in the sun. The Volsky family presented to her a very
genuine challenge.
She glanced, covertly, at the Young Doctor. He was eating soup, and no
man is at his best while eating soup. And yet as she watched him, she
considered very seriously whether she should tell him of her adventure.
His skill might, perhaps, find some way out for Lily, who had not been
born a mute, who had come into the world with seeing eyes. Bennie had
told her that the child's condition was the result of an illness. Perhaps
the Young Doctor might be able to effect at least a partial cure. Perhaps
it was selfish of her--utterly, absurdly selfish, to keep the situation
to herself.
The Superintendent's voice broke, sharply, into her reverie. It was a
pleasant voice, and yet Rose-Marie found herself resenting its
questioning tone.
"Did you have a pleasant afternoon, dear?" the Superintendent was asking.
"I noticed that you were out for a long while, alone!"
"Why, yes," Rose-Marie faltered, as she spoke, and, to her annoyance, she
could feel the red wave of a blush creeping up over her face (Rose-Marie
had never learned to control her blushes). "Why, yes, I had a very
delightful afternoon!"
The Young Doctor, glancing up from his soup, felt a sudden desire to
tease. Rose-Marie, with her cheeks all flushed, made a startlingly
colourful, extremely young picture.
"You're blushing!" he told her accusingly. "You're blushing!"
Rose-Marie, feeling the blushes creep still higher, knew a rude impulse
to slap the Young Doctor. All of her desire to confide in him died away,
as suddenly as it had been born. He was the man who had said that the
people who lived in poverty are soulless. He would scoff at the Volskys,
and at her desire to help them. Worse than that--he might keep her from
seeing the Volskys again. And, in keeping her from seeing them, he would
also keep her from making Bennie into a real, wholesome boy--he would
keep her from showing Ella the dangers of the precipice that she was
skirting. Of course, he might help Lily. But, Rose-Marie told herself
that perhaps even Lily--golden-haired, angelic little Lily--might seem
soulless to him.
"I'm not blushing, Dr. Blanchard," she said shortly, and could have
bitten her tongue for saying it.
The Young Doctor laughed with a boyish vigour.
"I thought," he said annoyingly, "that you were a Christian, Miss
Rose-Marie Thompson!"
Rose-Marie felt a tide of quite definite anger rising in her heart.
"I am a Christian!" she retorted.
"Then," the Young Doctor was still laughing, "then you must never, never
tell untruths. You are blushing!"
The Superintendent interrupted. It had been her role, lately, to
interrupt quarrels between the two who sat on either side of her table.
"Don't tease, Billy Blanchard!" she said, sternly. "If Rose-Marie went
anywhere this afternoon, she certainly had a right to. And she also has a
right to blush. I'm glad, in these sophisticated days, to see a girl who
can blush!"
The Young Doctor was leaning back in his chair, surveying the pair of
them with unconcealed amusement.
"How you women do stick together!" he said. "Talk about men being
clannish! I believe," he chuckled, "from the way Miss Thompson is
blushing, that she's got a very best beau! I believe that she was out
with him, this afternoon!"
Rose-Marie, who had always been taught that deceit is wicked, felt a
sudden, unexplainable urge to be wicked! She told herself that she hated
Dr. Blanchard--she told herself that he was the most unsympathetic of
men! His eyes, fixed mirthfully upon her, brought words--that she
scarcely meant to say--to her lips.
"Well," she answered slowly and distinctly, "what if I was?"
There was silence for a moment. And then--with something of an
effort--the Superintendent spoke.
"I told you," she said, "not to bother Rose-Marie, Doctor. If Rose-Marie
was out with a young man I'm sure that she had every right to be.
Rose-Marie"--was it possible that her eyes were fixed a shade inquiringly
upon the blushing girl--"would have nothing to do with any one who had
not been approved by her aunts. And she realizes that she is, in a way,
under my care--that I am more or less responsible for her safety and
welfare. Rose-Marie is trustworthy, absolutely trustworthy. And she is
old enough to take care of herself. You must not bother her, Billy
Blanchard!"
It was a long speech for the Superintendent, and it was a kindly one. It
was also a speech to invite confidences. But--strangely
enough--Rose-Marie could not help feeling that there was a question half
concealed in the kindliness of it. She could not help feeling that the
Superintendent was just a trifle worried over the prospect of an unknown
young man.
It was her time, then, to admit that there was nobody, really--that she
had gone out on an adventure by herself, that there had been no "beau."
But the consciousness of the Young Doctor's eyes, fixed upon her face,
prohibited all speech. She could not tell him about the Volskys--neither
could she admit that no young man was interested in her. Every girl wants
to seem popular in the eyes of some member of the opposite sex--even
though that member may be an unpleasant person--whom she dislikes. And
so, with a feeling of utter meanness in her soul--with a real weight of
deceit upon her heart--she smiled into the Superintendent's anxious face.
"I do appreciate the way you feel about me," she said softly, "I do,
indeed! You may be sure that I won't do anything that either you, or my
aunts, would disapprove of!"
After all, she assured herself a trifle uncomfortably, she had in no way
told a direct falsehood. They had assumed too much and she had not
corrected their assumptions. She said fiercely, in her heart, that she
was not to blame if they insisted upon taking things for granted!
IX
AND ANOTHER
As the days crept into weeks, Rose-Marie no longer felt the dull unrest
of inaction. She was busy at the Settlement House--her clubs for mothers
and young girls, her kindergarten for the little tots, had grown
amazingly popular. And at the times when she was not busy at the
Settlement House, she had the Volsky family and their many problems to
occupy her.
The Volsky family--and their many problems! Rose-Marie would have found
it hard to tell which problem was the most important! Of course Lily came
first--her infirmities and her sweetness made her the central figure. But
the problem of Ella was a more vital one to watch--it was, somehow, more
immediate. Rose-Marie had found it hard to reach Ella--except when Lily
was the topic of conversation; except when Lily's welfare was to be
considered, she stayed silently in the background. But the flashings of
her great dark eyes, the quiverings of her too scarlet mouth, were
ominous. Rose-Marie could see that the untidiness of the flat, the
drunken mutterings of Pa, and her mother's carelessness and dirt had
strained Ella's resistance to the breaking point. Some day there would be
a crash and, upon that day Ella would disappear like a gorgeous butterfly
that drifts across the road, and out of sight. Rose-Marie was hoping to
push that day into the background--to make it only a dim uncertainty
rather than the sword of Damocles that it was. But she could only hope.
Bennie, too, was a problem. But it was Bennie who cheered Rose-Marie when
she felt that her efforts in behalf of Ella were failing. For Bennie's
brain was the fertile ground in which she could plant ideals, and dreams.
Bennie was young enough to change, and easily. He got into the way of
waiting for her, after his school had been dismissed, in the little park.
And there, seated close together on an iron bench, they would talk; and
Rose-Marie would tell endless stories. Most of the stories were about
knights who rode upon gallant quests, and about old-time courtesy, and
about wonderful animals. But sometimes she told him of her home in the
country--of apple trees in bloom, and frail arbutus hiding under the
snow. She told him of coasting parties, and bonfires, and trees to climb.
And he listened, star-eyed and adoring. They made a pretty picture
together--the slim, rosy-cheeked girl and the ragged little boy, with the
pale, city sunshine falling, like a mist, all about them.
Lily and Ella and Bennie--Rose-Marie loved them, all three. But Jim
Volsky was the unsolvable problem--the one that she tried to push to the
back of her mind, to avoid. Mrs. Volsky and Pa she gave up as nearly
hopeless--she kept, as much as possible, out of Pa's way, and Mrs. Volsky
could only be helped in the attaining of creature comforts--her spirit
seemed dead! But Jim insisted upon intruding upon her moments in the
flat; he monopolized conversations, and asked impertinent questions, and
stared. More than once he had offered to "walk her home" as she was
leaving; more than once he had thrust himself menacingly across her path.
But she had managed, neatly, to avoid him.
Rose-Marie was afraid of Jim. She admitted it to herself--she even
admitted, at times, that the Young Doctor might be of assistance if any
emergency should arise out of Jim's sleek persistence. She had noticed,
from the first, that the doctor was an impressive man among men--she had
seen the encouraging swell of muscles through the warm tweed of his coat
sleeve. But to have asked his help in the controlling of Jim would have
been an admission of deceit, of weakness, of failure! To prove her own
theory that the people were real, underneath--to prove that they had some
sort of a code, and worth-while impulses--she had to make the reformation
of the Volsky family her own, individual task.
Yes--Rose-Marie was busy. Almost she hated to give up moments of her time
to the letters she had to write home--to the sewing that she had to do.
She made few friends among the teachers and visitors who thronged the
Settlement House by day--she was far too tired, when night came, to meet
with the Young Doctor and the Superintendent in the cosy little
living-room. But often when her activities lasted well along into the
evening, often when her clubs gave sociables or entertainments, she was
forced to welcome the Young Doctor (the Superintendent was always
welcome); to make room for him beside her own place.
It was during one of these entertainments--her Girls' Sewing Society was
giving a party--that she and the Young Doctor had their first real talk.
Before the quarrel at the luncheon table they had had little time
together; since the quarrel the Young Doctor had seldom been able to
corner Rose-Marie. But at the entertainment they were placed, by the hand
of circumstance, upon a wooden settee in the back of the room. And there,
for the better part of two hours--while Katie Syrop declaimed poetry and
Helen Merskovsky played upon the piano, and others recited long and
monotonous dialogues--they were forced to stay.
The Young Doctor was in a chastened mood. He applauded heartily whenever
a part of the program came to a close; the comments that he made behind
his hand were neither sarcastic nor condescending. He praised the work
that Rose-Marie had done and then, while she was glowing--almost against
her will--from the warmth of that praise, he ventured a remark that had
nothing to do with the work.
"When I see you," he told her very seriously, "when I see you, sitting
here in one of our gray coloured meeting rooms, I can't help thinking how
appropriate your name is. Rose-Marie--there's a flower, isn't there,
that's named Rosemary? I like flowery names!"
Rose-Marie laughed, as lightly as she could, to cover a strange feeling
of embarrassment.
"Most people don't like them," she said--"flowery names, I mean. I don't
myself. I like names like Jane, and Anne, and Nancy. I like names like
Phyllis and Sarah. I've always felt that my first name didn't fit my last
one. Thompson," she was warming to her subject, "is such a matter-of-fact
name. There's no romance in it. But Rose-Marie--"
The Young Doctor interrupted.
"But Rose-Marie," he finished for her, "is teeming with romance! It
suggests vague perfumes, and twilight in the country, and gay little
lights shining through the dusk. It suggests poetry."
Rose-Marie had folded her hands, softly, in her lap. Her eyes were bent
upon them.
"My mother," she said, and her voice was quiet and tender, "loved poetry.
I've heard how she used to read it every afternoon, in her garden. She
loved perfumes, too, and twilight in the country. My mother was the sort
of a woman who would have found the city a bit hard, I think, to live in.
Beauty meant such a lot--to her. She gave me my name because she thought,
just as you think, that it had a hint of lovely things in it. And, even
though I sometimes feel that I'd like a plainer one, I can't be sorry
that she gave it to me. For it was a part of her--a gift that was built
out of her imagination," all at once she coughed, perhaps to cover the
slight tremor in her voice, and then--