Having the choice between going southward either by Fifth Avenue or by
Madison Avenue, Letty took the former for the reason that there were
no electric cars crashing through it, so that she would be less
observed. It seemed to her important to get as far from East
Sixty-seventh Street as possible before letting a human glance take
note of her personality, even as a drifting silhouette.
In this she was fortunate. For the hour between one and two in the
early morning this part of Fifth Avenue was unusually empty. There was
not a pedestrian, and only a rare motor car. When one of the latter
flashed by she shrank into the shadow of a great house, lest some eye
of miraculous discernment should light on her. It seemed to her that
all New York must be ready to read her secret, and be on the watch to
turn her back.
She didn't know why she was going southward rather than northward,
except that southward lay the Brooklyn Bridge, and beyond the Brooklyn
Bridge lay Beehive Valley, and within Beehive Valley the Excelsior
Studio, and in the Excelsior Studio the faint possibility of a job.
She was already thinking in the terms that went with the old gray rag
and the battered hat, and had come back to them as to her
mother-tongue. In forsaking paradise for the limbo of outcast souls
she was at least supported by the fact that in the limbo of outcast
souls she was at home.
She was not frightened. Now that she was out of the prince's palace
she had suddenly become sensationless. She was like a soul which
having reached the other side of death is conscious only of release
from pain. She was no longer walking on blades; she was no longer
attempting the impossible. Between her and the life which Barbara
Walbrook understood the few steps she had taken had already marked the
gulf. The gulf had always been there, yawning, unbridgeable, only that
she, Letty Gravely, had tried to shut her eyes to it. She had tried to
shut her eyes to it in the hope that the man she loved might come to
do the same. She knew now how utterly foolish any such hope had been.
She would have perceived this earlier had he not from time to time
revived the hope when it was about to flicker out. More than once he
had confessed to depending on her sympathy. More than once he had told
her that she drew out something he had hardly dared think he
possessed, but which made him more of a man. Once he harked back to
the dust flower, saying that as its humble and heavenly bloom
brightened the spots bereft of beauty so she cheered the lonely and
comfortless places in his heart. He had said these things not as one
who is in love, but as one who is grateful, only that between
gratitude and love she had purposely kept from drawing the
distinction.
She did not reproach him. On the contrary, she blessed him even for
being grateful. That meed he gave her at least, and that he should
give her anything at all was happiness. Leaving his palace she did so
with nothing but grateful thoughts on her own side. He had smiled on
her always; he had been considerate, kindly, and very nearly tender.
For what he called the wrong he had done her, which she held to be no
wrong at all, he would have made amends so magnificent that the mere
acceptance would have overwhelmed her. Since he couldn't give her the
one thing she craved her best course was like the little mermaid to
tremble into foam, and become a spirit of the wind.
It was what she was doing. She was going without leaving a trace. A
girl more important than she couldn't have done it so easily. A
Barbara Walbrook had she attempted a freak so mad, would be discovered
within twenty-four hours. It was one of the advantages of extreme
obscurity that you came and went without notice. No matter how
conspicuously a Letty Gravely passed it would not be remembered that
she had gone by.
With regard to this, however, she made one reserve. She couldn't
disappear forever, not any more than Judith of Bethulia when she went
to the tent of Holofernes. The history of Judith was not in Letty's
mind, because she had never heard of it; there was only the impulse to
the same sort of sacrifice. Since Israel could be delivered only in
one way, that way Judith had been ready to take. To Letty her prince
was her Israel. One day she would have to inform him that the
Holofernes of his captivity was slain--that at last he was free.
There were lines along which Letty was not imaginative, and one of
those lines ran parallel to Judith's experience. When it came to love
at first sight, she could invent as many situations as there were
millionaires in the subway. In interpreting a part she had views of
her own beyond any held by Luciline Lynch. As to matters of dress her
fancy was boundless.
Her limitations were in the practical. Among practical things "going
to the bad" was now her chief preoccupation. She had always understood
that when you made up your mind to do it you had only to present
yourself. The way was broad; the gate wide open. There were wicked
people on every side eager to pull you through. You had only to go out
into the street, after dark especially--and there you were!
Having walked some three or four blocks she made out the figure of a
man coming up the hill toward her. Her heart stopped beating; her
knees quaked. This was doom. She would meet it, of course, since her
doom would be the prince's salvation; but she couldn't help trembling
as she watched it coming on.
By the light of an arc-lamp she saw that he was in evening dress. The
wicked millionaires who, in motion-pictures, were the peril of young
girls, were always so attired. Iphigenia could not have trodden to the
altar with a more consuming mental anguish than Letty as she dragged
herself toward this approaching fate; but she did so drag herself
without mercy. For a minute as he drew near she was on the point of
begging him to spare her; but she saved herself in time from this
frustration of her task.
The man, a young stock-broker in a bad financial plight, scarcely
noticed that a female figure was passing him. Had the morrow's market
been less a matter of life and death to him he might have thrown her
a glance; but as it was she did not come within the range of his
consciousness. To her amazement, and even to her consternation, Letty
saw him go onward up the hill, his eyes straight before him, and his
profile sharply cut in the electric light.
She explained the situation by the fact that he hadn't seen her at
all. That a man could actually _see_ a girl, in such unusual
conditions, and still go by inoffensively, was as contrary to all she
had heard of life as it would have been to the principles of a Turkish
woman to suppose that one of this sex could behold her face and not
fall fiercely in love with her. As, however, two men were now coming
up the hill together Letty was obliged to re-organize her forces to
meet the new advance.
She couldn't reason this time that they hadn't seen her, because their
heads turned in her direction, and the intonation of the words she
couldn't articulately hear was that of faint surprise. Further than
that there was no incident. They were young men too, also in evening
dress, and of the very type of which all her warnings had bidden her
beware. The immunity from insult was almost a matter for chagrin.
As she approached Fifty-ninth Street encounters were nearly as
numerous as they would have been in daylight; but Letty went on her
way as if, instead of the old gray rag, she wore the magic cloak of
invisibility. So it was during the whole of the long half mile between
Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-second Street. In spite of the fact that
she was the only unescorted woman she saw, no invitation "to go to the
bad" was proffered her. "There's quite a trick to it," Steptoe had
said, in the afternoon; and she began to think that there was.
At Forty-second Street, for no reason that she could explain, she
turned into the lower and quieter spur of Madison Avenue, climbing and
descending Murray Hill. Here she was almost alone. Motor-car traffic
had practically ceased; foot-passengers there were none; on each side
of the street the houses were somber and somnolent. The electric lamps
flared as elsewhere, but with little to light up.
Her sense of being lost became awesome. It began to urge itself in on
her that she was going nowhere, and had nowhere to go. She was back in
the days when she had walked away from Judson Flack's, without the
same heart in the adventure. She recalled now that on that day she had
felt young, daring, equal to anything that fate might send; now she
felt curiously old and experienced. All her illusions had been dished
up to her at once and been blown away as by a hurricane. The little
mermaid who had loved the prince and failed to win his love in return
could have nothing more to look forward to.
She was drifting, drifting, when suddenly from the shadow of a flight
of broad steps a man stalked out and confronted her. He confronted her
with such evident intention that she stopped. Not till she stopped
could she see that he was a policeman in his summer uniform.
"Where you goin', sister?"
"I ain't goin' nowheres."
She fell back on the old form of speech as on another tongue.
"Where you come from then?"
Feeling now that she had gone to the bad, or was at the beginning of
that process, she made a reply that would seem probable. "I come from
a fella I've been--I've been livin' with."
"Gee!" The tone was of deepest pity. "Darned sorry to hear you're in
that box, a nice girl like you."
"I ain't such a nice girl as you might think."
"Gee! Anyone can see you're a nice girl, just from the way you walk."
Letty was astounded. Was the way you walked part of Steptoe's "trick
to it?" In the hope of getting information she said, still in the
secondary tongue: "What's the matter with the way I walk?"
"There's nothin' the matter with it. That's the trouble. Anyone can
see that you're not a girl that's used to bein' on the street at this
hour of the night. Ain't you goin' _anywheres_?"
Fear of the police-station suddenly made her faint. If she wasn't
going _anywheres_ he might arrest her. She bethought her of Steptoe's
scrawled address. "Yes, I'm goin' there."
As he stepped under the arc-light to read it she saw that he was a
fatherly man, on the distant outskirts of youth, who might well have a
family of growing boys and girls.
"That's a long ways from here," he said, handing the scrap of paper
back to her. "Why don't you take the subway? At this time of night
there's a train every quarter of an hour."
"I ain't got no bones. I'm footin' it."
"Footin' it all the way to Red Point? You? Gee!"
Once more Letty felt that about her there was something which put her
out of the key of her adventure.
"Well, what's there against _me_ footin' it?"
"There's nothin' against you footin' it--on'y you don't seem that
sort. Haven't you got as much as two bits? It wouldn't come to that if
you took the subway over here at----"
"Well, I haven't got two bits; nor one bit; nor nothin' at all; so I
guess I'll be lightin' out."
She had nodded and passed, when a stride of his long legs brought him
up to her again. "Well, see here, sister! If you haven't got two bits,
take this. I can't have you trampin' all the way over to Red
Point--not _you_!"
Before knowing what had happened Letty found her hand closing over a
silver half-dollar, while her benefactor, as if ashamed of his act,
was off again on his beat. She ran after him. Her excitement was such
that she forgot the secondary language.
"Oh, I couldn't accept this from you. Please! Don't make me take it.
I'm--" She felt it the moment for making the confession, and possibly
getting hints--"I'm--I'm goin' to the bad, anyhow."
"Oh, so that's the talk! I thought you said you'd gone to the bad
already. Oh, no, sister; you don't put that over on me, not a nice
looker like you!"
She was almost sobbing. "Well, I'm going--if--if I can find the way. I
wish you'd tell me if there's a trick to it."
"There's one trick I'll tell you, and that's the way to Red Point."
"I know that already."
"Then, if you know that already, you've got my four bits, which is
more than enough to take you there decent." He lifted his hand, with a
warning forefinger. "Remember now, little sister, as long as you spend
that half dollar it'll bind you to keep good."
He tramped off into the darkness, leaving Letty perplexed at the ways
of wickedness, as she began once more to drift southward.
But she drifted southward with a new sense of misgiving. Danger was
mysteriously coy, and she didn't know how to court it. True, there was
still time enough, but the debut was not encouraging. When she had
gone forth from Judson Flack's she had felt sure that adventure lay in
wait for her, and Rashleigh Allerton had responded almost
instantaneously. Now she had no such confidence. On the contrary; all
her premonitions worked the other way. Perhaps it was the old gray
rag. Perhaps it was her lack of feminine appeal. Men had never flocked
about her as they flocked about some girls, like bees about flowers.
If she was a flower, she was a dust flower, a humble thing, at home in
the humblest places, and never regarded as other than a weed.
She wandered into Fourth Avenue, reaching Astor Place. From Astor
Place she descended the city by the long artery of Lafayette Street,
in which teams rumbled heavily, and all-night workers shouted
raucously to each other in foreign languages. One of a band of
Italians digging in the roadway, with colored lanterns about them,
called out something at her, the nature of which she could only infer
from the laughter of his compatriots. Here too she began to notice
other women like herself, shabby, furtive, unescorted, with terrible
eyes, aimlessly drifting from nowhere to nowhere. There were not many
of them; only one at long intervals; but they frightened her more than
the men.
They frightened her because she saw what she must look like herself, a
thing too degraded for any man to want. She was not that yet, perhaps;
but it was what she might become. They were not wholly new to her,
these women; and they all had begun at some such point as that from
which she was starting out. Very well! She was ready to go this road,
if only by this road her prince could be freed from her. Since she
couldn't give up everything for him in one way, she would do it in
another. The way itself was more or less a matter of indifference--not
entirely, perhaps, but more or less. If she could set him free in any
way she would be content.
The rumble and stir of Lafayette Street alarmed her because it was so
foreign. The upper part of the town had been empty and eerie. This
quarter was eerie, alien, and occupied. It was difficult for her to
tell what so many people were doing abroad because their aims seemed
different from those of daylight. What she couldn't understand struck
her as nefarious; and what struck her as nefarious filled her with the
kind of terror that comes in dreams.
By these Italians, Slavs, and Semites she was more closely scrutinized
than she had been elsewhere. She was scrutinized, too, with a hint of
hostility in the scrutiny. In their jabber of tongues they said things
about her as she passed. Wild-eyed women, working by the flare of
torches with their men, resented her presence in the street. They
insulted her in terms she couldn't understand, while the men laughed
in frightful, significant jocosity. The unescorted women alone looked
at her with a hint of friendliness. One of them, painted, haggard,
desperate, awful, stopped as if to speak to her; but Letty sped away
like a snowbird from a shrike.
At a corner where the cross-street was empty she turned out of this
haunted highway, presently finding herself lost in a congeries of
old-time streets of which she had never heard. Her only knowledge of
New York was of streets crossing each other at right angles, numbered,
prosaic, leaving no more play to the fancy than a sum in arithmetic.
Here the ways were narrow, the buildings tall, the night effects
fantastic. In the lamp light she could read signs bearing names as
unpronounceable as the gibbering monkey-speech in Lafayette Street.
Warehouses, offices, big wholesale premises, lairs of highly
specialized businesses which only the few knew anything about, offered
no place for human beings to sleep, and little invitation to the
prowler. Now and then a marauding cat darted from shadow to shadow,
but otherwise she was as nearly alone as she could imagine herself
being in the heart of a great city.
Still she went on and on. In the effort to escape this overpowering
solitude she turned one corner and then another, now coming out
beneath the elevated trains, now on the outskirts of docks where she
was afraid of sailors. She was afraid of being alone, and afraid of
the thoroughfares where there were people. On the whole she was more
afraid of the thoroughfares where there were people, though her fear
soon entered the unreasoning phase, in which it is fear and nothing
else. Still headed vaguely southward she zigzagged from street to
street, helpless, terrified, longing for day.
She was in a narrow street of which the high weird gables on either
side recalled her impressions on opening a copy of _Faust_,
illustrated by Gustave Dore, which she found on the library table in
East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks
were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional
side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she
kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was
afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled
her marrow and curdled her blood.
Suddenly she heard the clank of footsteps. She stopped to listen,
making them out as being on the other side of the street, and
advancing. Before she had dared to move on again a man emerged from
the half light and came abreast of her. As he stopped to look across
at her, Letty hurried on.
The man also went on, but on glancing over her shoulder to make sure
that she was safe she saw him pause, cross to her side of the street,
and begin to follow her. That he followed her was plain from his whole
plan of action. The ring of his footsteps told her that he was walking
faster than she, though in no precise hurry to overtake her. Rather,
he seemed to be keeping her in sight, and watching for some
opportunity.
It was exactly what men did when they robbed and murdered unprotected
women. She had read of scores of such cases, and had often imagined
herself as being stalked by this kind of ghoul. Now the thing which
she had greatly feared having come upon her she was nearly hysterical.
If she ran he would run after her. If she only walked on he would
overtake her. Before she could reach the docks on one side or Broadway
on the other, where she might find possible defenders, he could easily
have strangled her and rifled her fifty cents.
It was still unreasoning fear, but fear in which there was another
kind of prompting, which made her wheel suddenly and walk back towards
him. She noticed that as she did so, he stopped, wavered, but came on
again.
Before the obscurity allowed of her seeing what type of man he was she
cried out, with a half sob:
"Oh, mister, I'm so afraid! I wish you'd help me."
"Sure!" The tone had the cheery fraternal ring of commonplace
sincerity. "That's what I turned round for. I says, that girl's lost,
I says. There's places down here that's dangerous, and she don't know
where she is."
Hysterical fear became hysterical relief. "And you're not going to
murder me?"
"Gee! Me? What'd I murder you for? I'm a plumber."
His tone making it seem impossible for a plumber to murder anyone she
panted now from a sense of reassurance and security. She could see too
that he was a decent looking young fellow in overalls, off on an
early job.
"Where you goin' anyhow?" he asked, in kindly interest. "The minute I
see you on the other side of the street, I says Gosh, I says! That
girl's got to be watched, I says. She don't know that these streets
down by the docks is dangerous."
She explained that she was on her way to Red Point, Long Island, and
that having only fifty cents she was sparing of her money.
"Gee! I wouldn't be so economical if it was me. That ain't the only
fifty cents in the world. Look-a-here! I've got a dollar. You must
take that----"
"Oh, I couldn't."
"Shucks! What's a dollar? You can pay me back some time. I'll give you
my address. It's all right. I'm married. Three kids. And say, if you
send me back the dollar, which you needn't do, you know--but if you
_must_--sign a man's name to the letter, because my wife--well, she's
all right, but if----"
Letty escaped the necessity of accepting the dollar by assuring him
that if he would tell her the way to the nearest subway station she
would use a portion of her fifty cents.
"I'll go with you," he declared, with breezy fraternity. "No distance.
They're expecting me on a job up there in Waddle Street, but they'll
wait. Pipe burst--floodin' a loft where they've stored a lot of
jute--but why worry?"
As they threaded the broken series of streets toward the subway he
aired the matrimonial question.
"Some think as two can live on the same wages as one. All bunk, I'll
say. My wife used to be in the hair line. Some little earner too. Had
an electric machine that'd make hair grow like hay on a marsh. Two
dollars a visit she got. When we was married she had nine hunderd
saved. I had over five hunderd myself. We took a weddin' tour;
Atlantic City. Gettin' married's a cinch; but _stayin_' married--she's
all right, my wife is, only she's kind o' nervous like if I look
sideways at any other woman--which I hardly ever do intentional--only
my wife's got it into her head that...."
At the entrance to the subway Letty shook hands with him and thanked
him.
"Say," he responded, "I wish I could do something more for you; but I
got to hike it back to Waddle Street. Look-a-here! You stick to the
subway and the stations, and don't you be in a hurry to get to your
address in Red Point till after daylight. They can't be killin' nobody
over there, that you'd need to be in such a rush, and in the stations
you'd be safe."
To a degree that was disconcerting Letty found this so. Having
descended the stairs, purchased a ticket, and cast it into the
receptacle appointed for that purpose, she saw herself examined by the
colored man guarding the entry to the platform. He sat with his chair
tilted back, his feet resting on the chain which protected part of the
entrance, picking a set of brilliant teeth. Letty, trembling, nervous,
and only partly comforted by the cavalier who was now on his way to
Waddle Street, shrank from the colored man's gaze and was going down
the platform where she could be away from it. Her progress was
arrested by the sight of two men, also waiting for the train, who on
perceiving her started in her direction.
The colored man lifted his feet lazily from the chain, brought his
chair down to four legs, put his toothpick in his waistcoat pocket,
and dragged himself up.
"Say, lady," he drawled, on approaching her, "I think them two fellas
is tough. You stay here by me. I'll not let no one get fresh with
you."
Languidly he went back to his former position and occupation, but when
after long waiting, the train drew in he unhooked his feet again from
the chain, rose lazily, and accompanied Letty across the otherwise
empty platform.
"Say, brother," he said to the conductor, "don't let any fresh guy get
busy with this lady. She's alone, and timid like."
"Sure thing," the conductor replied, closing the doors as Letty
stepped within. "Sit in this corner, lady, next to me. The first mutt
that wags his jaw at you'll get it on the bean."
Letty dropped as she was bidden into the corner, dazed by the
brilliant lighting, and the greasy unoccupied seats. She was alone in
the car, and the kindly conductor having closed his door she felt a
certain sense of privacy. The train clattered off into the darkness.
Where was she going? Why was she there? How was she ever to accomplish
the purpose with which two hours earlier she had stolen away from East
Sixty-seventh Street? Was it only two hours earlier? It seemed like
two years. It seemed like a space of time not to be reckoned....
She was tired as she had never been tired in her life. Her head sank
back into the support made by the corner.
"There's quite a trick to it," she found herself repeating, though in
what connection she scarcely knew. "An awful wicked lydy, she is,
what'd put madam up to all the ropes." These words too drifted through
her mind, foolishly, drowsily, without obvious connection. She began
to wish that she was home again in the little back spare room--or
anywhere--so long as she could lie down--and shut her eyes--and go to
sleep....