I
"Well, I was wan. The two Maddens was two. Eddie Carey was three. Jim
Powers was four. And--and--But there was five of us, an' I know it.
Wait. I'll count fresh.
"I was wan. The two Maddens was two. Eddie Carey was three. Jim Powers
was four----"
"Shtop it, Casey! I say, Shtop it! I'll be as crazy as you next.
Altogether, I say, altogether how many of you was on the picnic?
_All_-together!"
"Five, I repeat. On me honor as a bricklayer! Five, I will have it. But
I cannot, for the life of me, recollect the fifth. I'll count again----
"I was wan. The two Maddens was two----"
Augusta opened the door to announce tearfully:
"Mister Jimmie, the boarders are saying that they can't stand it!"
"To arms!" cried Jimmie Wardwell, leaping up from the table and
typewriter where he had been laboriously pounding out Casey's count of
the picnic, "to arms to repel boarders!"
And he caught the wholly unready and dignified Augusta full in his arms
and kissed her fairly.
Now Augusta is somewhat incredible. I suppose I can hardly make you
understand her--as much of her, I mean, as I could ever understand.
But, having a whole book before me in which to deal with her, I am
going to try to explain to you the things about her which may be
explained.
There was, for instance, Augusta's look of seraphic innocence. Women
looked at her the first time and she looked back at them with her
friendly, ready-to-wear--"Good morning, I hope you are as happy as I
am," look.
Then they drew away from her with a defensive pursing of backs, saying:
"She _can't_ be so good as that! Or so innocent!"
But then, as they continued to study her, they saw that she was just
the gold that she showed. Then they took her suddenly to their hearts
and wanted to mother her.
Here it must be explained that Augusta had never till this moment been
kissed by a man. She knew that there was no harm in Jimmie Wardwell's
kiss. To know innocence and harmlessness, when one meets them, is as
great a part of wisdom as to know their opposites when met. Augusta
had this large division of wisdom. Yet she was unaccountably hurt by
Jimmie's act.
She was angry, but not with the anger that would prompt her to box his
ears; as would have been adequate in a smaller matter. She would not
let it go as a boy-and-girl tilt.
Jimmie Wardwell, looking into the dry, pained depths of the girl's
gray-blue eyes, saw that she was not going to be angry in any ordinary
way. He had hurt her. And he was going to be punished. He stood,
suddenly quiet and sober, awaiting his verdict.
"You will have to leave the house, Mr. Wardwell," she said at last,
very quietly. "You must make your own reason. I do not wish to be
obliged to tell mother."
She had spoken with a grave, settled finality which left Jimmie
Wardwell silent and without defense.
The girl dropped the matter where she had finished it. Nor did she
return to the other matter about which she had come to the room. She
crossed to the typewriter and stood looking down reading the story
that showed half written there.
"I thought you were going to begin on your own work," she said,
ignoring everything that had passed.
Wardwell knew that he had been ordered out of his boarding house as
definitely as if his trunk had been deposited on Eighteenth Street. But
he was willing to forget that for the instant and to answer on the new
ground that she had chosen.
"I did do something on the book," he said. "But what's the use! I
can't put the time on it. I'd never finish it. I have to live. And
that"----he pointed angrily at the paper on the machine----"that's the
only kind of stuff that anybody'll pay me for! I couldn't sell that if
it wasn't ancient and bearded!"
"You couldn't sell that," the grave critic answered judiciously, "if it
wasn't good of it's kind. But you don't love it. So you always hate to
have to do it, and you must get away from it."
"Yes," said Wardwell, "I must." But it was plain that he was not
thinking of her wise counsel about himself and his work. He was
thinking of this child--She was no more in time, just a year out of
Julia Richman High School. Yet it was a woman's personality that looked
out of her child's dancing eyes.
He did think of returning to the question of his leaving. But he
remembered that there was no question. It was not a matter of appeasing
her anger, of explaining. She knew. She understood. And she had spoken
her decision.
"I wonder," the girl said, crossing to look down into the street.
"Mother is very long in coming. And she never delays. Could anything
happen to her between here and Sixteenth Street. But, of course, what
_could_ happen! She goes and comes every morning. And everybody knows
her."
"I don't know," said Jimmie darkly, peering doubtfully down into the
street. "This great city is full of designing men. I've often wondered
how you let her go about the streets in broad day unchaperoned. A
lovely woman, an altogether delectable woman!" he proceeded, warming up
to his nonsense. "Why, she's not safe a minute!"
"In fact," he announced cheerfully, "I've often thought of running away
with her myself."
Augusta's laugh broke through the gathering cloud of anxiety on her
face, and her eyes danced as she thought of her mother, Rose Wilding,
Rose the strong, the capable, the wise, the mother of all the street,
being carried off--Her white hair, her broad, stately person, her two
hundred pounds of active woman!
"You're right, of course; I know you are. It's silly to think of
anything happening to her. But sometimes, you know, before things
happen a feeling of dread comes over me. And I just _know_ that
something is wrong. I don't know where it comes from, or how. Did you
ever feel yourself waiting for a loud shock to come before you hear it?"
Wardwell looked sharply at the girl for an instant. He had heard
some strange things from women in the boarding house. They certainly
believed that Augusta had some insight or foresight, or something. She
had told them things about themselves. But when he spoke he was blandly
didactic.
"That, you know," he explained, "is just the first quiver of the shock,
felt by the ganglia, the nerve knots; before the rude noise gets to the
brain."
"_There was a man in our town_," Augusta chanted, skipping to the door,
"_And he was wondrous wise_----"
Wardwell listened to the receding hum of her voice as it died down in
the well of the stairs. Then he turned and with a vicious yank tore
the offending story of Casey's picnic from the machine and ground the
paper into the floor with his heel.
An hour later he was sitting on the floor with half a novel of loose
sheets of paper scattered all about him. He had found the table too
small for the work, had transferred his operations to the bed--he
was cutting madly at page after page of the type-written stuff--but,
finding that he was jabbing the pencil through the paper, he had swept
the whole business to the floor and gone at it with vengeance.
He had spent eight months on the book, and it was still a formless
wad of words. There was an idea in it, a live, working idea. But "The
Feet of the Plodders," as he was calling the book, would neither plod
nor jig. They strutted along, he complained, stiff as wooden horses,
fatuous as roosters.
"You talk like a hatful of wood," he said contemptuously to Gerald
Straight, his hero, who, on the paper, was giving out some pet ideas of
Wardwell's own on the dignity of labor. Down came the pencil and the
whole paragraph was condemned as, "Rot!"
He did not notice Augusta coming back into the room. He looked up as he
grunted his disapproval of what he had thought very fine while writing
it.
The girl stood in the doorway, swaying and clutching desperately at the
door frame for support. She must have run madly up the stairs, for it
was plain that she was breathless from physical exertion, as well as
speechless from some strange, uncanny fright.
"She's gone!" she gasped, as Wardwell jumped from the floor and hurried
to her. "I can almost see it! It almost seems that I did see it," she
went on, fighting with herself to tell a plain story.
"The apple woman at the corner saw her fall. Her head struck on the
curb. The apple woman ran to her. But she got to her feet and walked
away without looking back.
"Right past her own doorway she went, without looking up--the apple
woman saw her--and straight over toward Broadway.
"I ran all the way, asking, begging people to say they'd seen her. But
not one would say it!"
"But," said Wardwell, "it doesn't prove anything. She was a little
dazed. She didn't want to come in to frighten you. She just walked
around a little and went, maybe, to a doctor. That's what she'd do,
can't you see?"
"I wish I could, Jimmie. But it isn't what she'd do at all. She'd just
walk quietly into the house, and I'd never know that anything had
happened.
"I'm going out again! I can't stay, she may be wandering farther and
farther from me every minute!"
There was a fierce, mothering eagerness in the girl's voice, as though
she already saw the tragedy of the months to come, and had already
taken up the burden of being mother to her mother.
Wardwell laid a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder, saying:
"I think you could better let me go. I can go farther than you."
"She went toward Broadway," the girl said slowly. "But it's no use
trying to save me that way. I must find her _myself_. I _know_ that."
Jimmie had already pushed past her through the door and started for the
stairs. He saw that she was in such a state that unless she saw someone
doing something she would herself start out again.
"Thank you," she said simply. "But I cannot promise to stay in."
"I think you must. You know we're both foolish. We don't either of us
really believe that anything's happened to her. But you must stay in.
She's sure to come in any minute."
Arguing her into a kind of silent promise that she would not go out
and would not worry, Wardwell left the house and started east through
Eighteenth Street.
In the open, quiet street, away from the urge of Augusta's excitement,
Wardwell felt entirely foolish. He expected to see the strong-willed,
self-reliant woman who was Augusta's mother coming along the street at
any moment, and he wondered what he should say to her.
Nothing ever did happen, anyway. Rose Wilding had just walked into a
drug store or a doctor's, maybe, and had had to wait. That was it, of
course.
He walked toward Broadway, taking, without any conscious notion of
following a trace, the direction which the old apple woman had given.
Coming out of the quiet cross street he stepped thoughtlessly into the
rush of traffic that sweeps through Union Square. An automobile brushed
carelessly by within inches of him. A great lumbering truck came
charging down upon him. A motorcycle screamed at his ear. He leaped
back to the curb, muttering at the grinning fiend in goggles who shot
past.
Wardwell stood on the curb looking out over the shifting lines and
tides of trucks, handcarts, automobiles, horses and people. He was
looking for one person out of the hundreds and hundreds that moved
within range of his eye. As well, he thought, look for a particular
stone in the paving.
A few men have stepped into the wilderness and never been seen again.
But how many, many men, and women, have stepped off a curb into a
stream like that and never been seen again.
There's Flynn, the cop, across the street. He knows me by sight. He
could say he saw me step off the curb. And that's all he could say. I
could lose myself from anybody that ever saw me. The string that holds
us where we are is so thin that--Why it's a wonder that anybody stays
where he is! It's so easy to walk out, completely out!
And then some of Augusta's excited worry came upon him. Rose Wilding
_might_ have been stunned by the fall. She _might_ have walked, dazed,
right past her own door, right off this curb and into that sea of
moving life!
"Is it kiddin' me you are?" snorted officer Flynn. "Lookin' for your
boarding mistress! More like, she's lookin' for you."
"No, I'm not," said Jimmie quietly. "I'm right in earnest. Her daughter
has it that she fell and struck her head on the curb, and lost--"
"Sure. There'd have to be a daughter in it."
"Oh, go to Blazes!" snapped Jimmie, turning on his heel.
"I might have known better," he growled as he walked away. "They never
do anything unless you show them a corpse. And then they'd like to club
you for giving them trouble."
He turned south, looking to the only other resource he knew. He was
a New Yorker with all of a New Yorker's entire dependence on the two
forces that govern his town--the police and the newspapers.
At Astor Place he ran across Jim Ray, a dark little crank of a man, a
man who looked as old as the first thing that ever happened, and seemed
to have been present at every happening since the first. He was coming
from a stormy, snapping interview with an irate, bullying financier,
and he was on his way to get the personal story of an interesting
adventuress who had gotten herself into jail.
But he listened to Wardwell. In fact, he always listened to
everything, until he was sure it was not worth listening to.
He had known Wardwell during the latter's sporadic incursions into
newspaper work, and had shown a grudging, contrary sort of liking for
him.
"Which do you want to go on," Ray questioned noncommittally, "the
facts, or the daughter's imagination?"
"Both," said Wardwell stubbornly.
"All right," Ray admitted. "But, if you don't want to be guyed, stick
to the facts. Go on down to the office, Grayson will be just about
coming in. Tell him I sent you. He'll give the word to the boys as
they're going out on their assignments. If anything has happened to the
woman, they'll get the thread somewhere."
Wardwell was more or less at home in Newspaper Row, and he thoroughly
believed that no accident happening in the city could slip through the
net of active intelligence centered there. When he had gotten assurance
that the word would be passed to all the reporters going out for their
rounds, that every newspaper in the city would be informed, that every
police blotter and hospital record would be scanned, he started back to
the house with the sure feeling that he had done all that was possible.
Augusta listened, dry-eyed, almost listless, it seemed. She did not say
anything. It was plain that she had expected nothing from his search.
And Wardwell was chilled by the obvious fact, that he had really
accomplished nothing.
Augusta sat a little while, not seeming to notice that Wardwell had
stopped speaking. Her soft blue eyes took on a deep, dark blue in
which there was no visible expression. Her features were strained and
sharp, as though she reached somewhere to another medium of knowledge,
outside the common senses. After a little she said vaguely:
"She is not hurt. Not that way. She cannot be found that way. She has
lost her thought. I've never yet called to her without getting an
answer."
"Eh, what's that?" questioned Jimmie sharply.
The girl seemed to be awakened by his voice. She shivered and suddenly
jumped up from her chair.
"What was I saying--? I don't remember."
"You were saying something about calling her and always getting an
answer. I don't think you ought to worry so," he soothed. "We haven't
the least reason to think that anything's happened her. It couldn't be
anything bad, or we'd know of it before now."
Augusta moved quietly out of the common parlor where she had been
sitting by the window, and stood at the glass in the hall, putting on
her coat. She had been in street dress and had evidently only been
waiting for Wardwell to come in before she should go out.
"What have you eaten today?" Wardwell asked, trying to interpose the
commonplace, for he was frightened at the strange suppressed quiet of
the girl.
"I had my breakfast," she said, without turning.
"Yes, but it's 'long in the afternoon now. You mustn't think of going
out without something. Come into the kitchen and we'll see if Ann
hasn't some tea, or something."
"Will you make her eat, Misther Jimmie!" Ann appealed. "She's beyond
me. Her worritin' about Rose Wildin' that's as safe in the sthreet as a
blessed child! Sure, she stepped into a neighbor's somewhere an' had a
bite an' a chat. An' now, I'll bet ye what ye dare, she's calyin' over
about Jimmie Hearn's, askin' the price o' things she don't want."
The big gaunt Irishwoman who ruled the kitchen of the boarding house
set them down at her own white table, while she drew tea and scolded:
"You're worse nor she is, Misther Jimmie, humorin' her."
But, with all her stout talk, it was plain to Wardwell that Ann had
been listening to Augusta. She kept up a rattle of cheery scolding. She
even hinted that the whole affair, for all they knew, might be some of
Jimmie's own doing. She "wouldn't put it past him!" But, under it all,
Wardwell saw that she was nervous.
Augusta, with a kind of forced obedience, was munching at a piece of
bread when that straining, listening look came to her face again.
Wardwell caught himself turning unconsciously to follow her gaze. He
pulled himself back sharply, confused and half angry. But Augusta had
not noticed.
With that same expectant, baffled look in her eyes, she rose quickly
from the table and hurried out through the dark hall to the door, as
though she followed a call which she could not quite hear or understand.
When Wardwell caught up with her on the street, except that she tacitly
allowed him to fall into step beside her, she gave no sign of being
aware of him.
He had a curious feeling, as they hurried through the street, of
walking with a somnambulist. Yet the girl seemed entirely able to care
for herself. He saw that she knew just where she was going, that she
was aware of everything moving about her. Only, there was that strange,
in-seeing, strained detachment about her, as though she were trying to
look or listen into another world of sight and sound.
Here began those incredible nightmare days, and nights, when it seemed
that they were forever in the street, hurrying, the girl leading,
Wardwell a wholly useless body-guard following, from house to house
of all the people who had known Rose Wilding. Then came the fearful,
timid questionings, at hospitals, at emergency wards, at police
stations. And all the while Wardwell kept every newspaper office
in town in a constant bad temper with his persistent prodding, by
telephone.
Augusta did not go to the newspaper offices, either because she
believed that Wardwell's acquaintance would get more attention than she
could, or because she believed, as she had said in the beginning, that
she herself must find her mother.
Then there were the worse times, when Wardwell, leaving Augusta
peremptorily in the hands of Ann, went by himself on the last,
gruesome, hopeless round. He did not tell Augusta that he was going to
the morgue. He said nothing when he came back, gray of face and deathly
quiet in spite of his every effort to hold up cheer. But Augusta knew
where he had been, and what he had seen--and what he had not found.
As the days went on Jim Ray put his wits to the matter. It began to be
baffling, and as a thing became puzzling just so Jim Ray's interest in
it grew in proportion.
But in the end, he gave his verdict:
"She is not in this city, Wardwell. She must have left it by her own
will, and in an ordinary way. Nothing else could have happened, I'd
stake thirty years of work on it."
"But that's just what she wouldn't do! What she couldn't do! Why, she
couldn't in her right mind walk off and leave her daughter!"
"Well," said Ray imperturbably, "that's just what fills
newspapers--people doing what they couldn't and wouldn't."
So Wardwell saw that Jim Ray was ready to give up. And he knew that
when Ray gave up a matter it meant that the resources of newspaper
tracing had been exhausted. To himself, he was willing to admit that
Ray must be right. Rose Wilding, it seemed, must have gone out of the
city in a quiet, commonplace way. But, walking the streets at Augusta's
side, watching that tense, listening look upon her face, seeing her
evidently straining for a sight or a voice that she could not quite
get, he was again ready to believe with Augusta that Rose Wilding was
near, that Augusta would find her.
There were days now when Augusta walked, as it seemed, aimlessly. There
were no more definite places to be visited. She walked, Wardwell, with
a dull pain of helplessness, dogged and uncomplaining at her side,
through lower Fifth Avenue and University Place at the noon time when
the thousands of women and girls spilled out from loft buildings and
swarmed the sidewalks. Evening found her watching the cross streets
from Broome to Fourteenth Street, searching excitedly the myriad faces
of the crowds that move eastward to that world wonder of human hives,
the great East Side.
One half of working Manhattan rides jammed, complaining, but
submissive, to its wide flung homes. The other half walks, hurrying,
stooping away from the setting sun, into that unexplored, uncounted
medley of crowded tenements which lies beyond Second Avenue. It was
the faces of these hurrying, jostling thousands that Augusta scanned
desperately in the falling darkness of the cold November evenings.
Until it was long past dark and the streams of people had begun to
fail, they walked and watched.
But Wardwell, watching the girl, the weary, sharply cut look in her
face, the pinched, thinning lines of her slender body as she walked
home beside him, decided that this must stop. There could be but one
end of it for the high strung, over-sensitized mind of the girl.
There was no one to whom he could appeal as having authority. So far as
he had learned in the year which he had lived in Mrs. Wilding's house,
she had no relatives. But some one must soon take a way of stopping
Augusta from this hopeless, unending search.
"We both know it's doing no good, Augusta. And you're breaking yourself
down," he reasoned with her one morning, when three weeks of looking
had given not the slightest clue to the whereabouts of her mother. "She
will come back somehow, I am sure. And she mustn't come to find you a
wreck. She'll be needing your care. Don't you think I'm right, little
girl?"
"Of course, you're right, Mr. Jimmie. You're always right, now. And
you've been so good to me. But I can't stop. I can't stop! She's
getting farther and farther from me all the time, I must follow until I
find her."
"But, child dear, you've done all that's within human power. Now we
can only wait and hope." Jimmie was now the sobered gentleman, the
tried and patient servitor always at her side. Neither of them knew
how close to each other in sympathy and understanding they had come in
these weeks. They had, in truth, been living in a world almost all by
themselves with their search. The girl was ready to listen, to believe,
to trust; but she could not promise obedience. "I'll stay in today, if
I can," she promised. "But, if I hear her calling--"
With this he had to be content. And leaving her with Ann he went to his
room, hoping to get some work done. His money was about gone. He must
get some of the hated skits ready for the Sunday paper from which he
drew a hand-to-mouth living.
In the middle of the forenoon he heard Ann's step pounding heavily up
the stairs of the quiet house.
"She's away out again, Misther Jimmie!" the big woman panted. "I but
shtepped out the alley to the corner for an onion. An' I'm just back
this blessed minute. An' she's away!"
Wardwell started for the door, but came back. "There's no use going
out now," he said. "I wouldn't know where to look. Probably she has
started off on some new thought. But about noon I'll know where to look
for her. Don't worry, Ann; she's not in the least danger." But it was
a confidence he was far from feeling, whatever his common sense might
tell him.
Long before noon he was walking Fifth Avenue expecting to see Augusta
upon her quest among the working women. But Augusta did not come. He
went home, not knowing what else to do, and sat stupid and useless
through the entire afternoon, waiting until it should be time to go to
look for her in the places they had been haunting in the evenings of
the last week or so.
Just as the dusk was gathering he heard her key in the door and ran
down the stairs. She staggered into his arms in the hall and began to
cry fearfully. They were the first tears that he had seen her cry in
these weeks, and he did not know whether it was good or bad.
"Oh Jimmie, Jimmie," she cried, with the first direct appeal that she
had made to him, "they wouldn't let me have her! They wouldn't let her
come with me! I wanted to take her by the hand and bring her home. And
they wouldn't--She wanted to come!--They wouldn't let me! Oh, Jimmie,
they said she was a crazy woman! My darling good mamma! She isn't
crazy, she just forgot.
"She said she was Rosie Dale--that was her name before she was
married--and that she was eighteen. They had it in the book! And the
man laughed!"
"Yes, yes, dear. No, no, of course not," Wardwell repeated soothingly
as he carried her up to her mother's room. When Ann had brought her
something to drink he sat down beside the lounge on which Augusta lay
and began to question quietly.
"Tell Ann and me," he prompted, "just where you went first."
"To Bellevue. It came to my mind so strong. I just had to go there. And
I begged and begged with the man who had the book, and then another man
came, and at last they let me see the book myself. And there it was,
Rosie Dale. You see she'd just forgotten. And I asked the man, and he
laughed. He said she was sixty if she was a day! And she thought she
was eighteen! They brought her there from a hat factory. She used to
make hats when she first came to New York, a young girl. I know it all
now."
"And then?" questioned Wardwell quietly.
"Oh, Jimmie, that was more than a week ago. They took her there for
'observation.' Nobody knew anything about her. And they sent her to
Ward's Island.
"I went there over the cold, black water. Oh! it was so cold and so
black. But I didn't care, I was going to get my darling mother.
"But they wouldn't let me go to her. They said it wasn't the day. And
one man was so cruel. He said people ought to take better care of their
folks. And, oh, it wasn't my fault! Was it, Jimmie?"
"No, no, child, of course not."
"And then they did let me into the place. And I waited and waited. And
then I saw a door open, and I looked in.
"Oh Jimmie, a great big room! And all the most terrible people, looking
so queer, and talking to themselves! And, Jimmie, I said: That's _Hell_
in there!
"And then, Oh! Over in a far corner, my poor darling mamma, crouching,
her back turned to the rest!
"Oh Jimmie, Jimmie! She didn't know me at all! But she isn't crazy! You
_know_ she isn't! She's just forgotten.
"They took me away. They said I couldn't have her. They said I was
only a little girl. Where was my father? Didn't I have any brothers?
"And so they said--It was the head doctor now--He said I couldn't have
her, I wasn't of age, I couldn't make a home for her.
"Then they--He said if I was married and had a husband and a home I
could have her. That was the only way.
"Can that be so, Jimmie? Can that be so? Is that the only way I can
take her out of that place and have her? Have I got to be married to
have her with me? Have I got to be married?"
"Why, no," said Jimmie, rising sharply and striding across the room.
"Why no, certainly, of--of--course not--_of course not!_"
Then he turned to meet the brilliant, half hysterical, pleading eyes of
the girl fixed full upon him.
"Of course not. Of course--" he murmured, sitting down again.