Children seemed to spring up from the sidewalk and descend from the roofs
as his cab, after a long trip through crowded streets with which three
months before he would have been totally unfamiliar, stopped at the
number Ann had given. All the way over he had been seeing children: dirty
children, pale-faced children, children munching at things and children
looking as though they had never had anything to munch at--children
playing and children crying--it seemed the children's part of town. The
men and women of tomorrow were growing up in a part of the city too
loathsome for the civilized man and woman of today to set foot in. He was
too filled with thought of Ann--the horror of its being where she
lived--to let the bigger thought of it brush him more than fleetingly,
but it did occur to him that there was still a frontier--and that the men
who could bring about smokeless cities--and odorless ones--would be
greater public servants than the men who had achieved smokeless powder.
Riding through that part of town it would scarcely suggest itself to any
one that what the country needed was more battleships.
The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as
interested in life as if life had been treating them well.
He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her
hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel.
She looked very much as the bell had sounded.
She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for
some of the army's boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make
one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.
Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening
door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones,
U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better
protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from
lives of struggle.
"She the girl that's sick?" the woman demanded in response to his inquiry
for Miss Forrest.
He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third
floor and turn to the right. It was the second door.
He hesitated, coloring.
"Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may
prefer to see me--down here."
The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she
laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front
teeth gone.
"Well we ain't got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their
young men in," she said mockingly. "And if you climbed as many stairs
as I did--"
"I beg your pardon," said he, and started up the stairway.
On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter
would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were
housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress did not take women
and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its
indignation.
Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor. They fanned back and
forth the fumes of cabbage and grease. He grew sick, not at the thing
itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann.
Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it--the fact
that people lived that way--even the fact of her living that way--things
that mattered but dimly.
As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet
clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night
at the dance.
The woman's manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann's door
infuriated him.
But when the door was opened--by Ann--he instantly forgot all outside.
He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her. For the
moment that was all that mattered. And in that moment he knew how much it
mattered--had mattered all along. Even how Ann looked was for the moment
of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there.
But he saw that she was indeed ill--worn--feverish.
"You are not well," were his first words, gently spoken.
She shook her head, her eyes brimming over.
He looked about the room. It was evident she had been lying on the bed.
"I want you to lie down," he said, his voice gentle as a woman's to a
child. "You know you don't mind me. I come as one of the family."
He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the
miserable spread.
Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing.
He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her
hair, and waited. His face was white, his lips trembling.
"It's all over now," he murmured at last. "It's all over now."
She shook her head and sobbed afresh.
His heart grew cold. What did she mean? A fear more awful than any which
had ever presented itself shot through him. But she raised her head and
as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that.
"What is it about Katie?" she whispered.
"Why, Ann, can't you guess what it is about Katie? Didn't you know what
Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?"
"I left so she wouldn't have to suffer."
"Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us--" But as, looking into
her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.
She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright,
her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the
marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear.
_Fear_--that thing so invaluable in building character.
Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: "Ann--how could you!"
"Why I thought I was doing right," she murmured. "I thought I was
being kind."
He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.
"But how could you think that?" he pressed. "Not that it matters now--but
I don't see how you could."
She looked at him strangely. "Do you--know?"
He nodded.
"Then don't you see? I left to make it easy for Katie."
He thought of Katie's summer. "Well your success in that direction was
not brilliant," he said with his old dryness.
Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he
would have stroked Worth's had he hurt him. And as he touched her--it
was a hot hand he touched--it struck him as absurd to be quibbling
about why she had gone. She was there. He had found her. That was all
that mattered.
He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered. He wanted to
draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered. But he did
not--dared not.
"And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?" he asked
with a faint smile.
"I wanted--I wanted to hear about Katie. And I wanted"--her eyes had
filled, her chin was trembling--"I was lonesome. I wanted to hear
your voice."
His heart leaped. For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness
from his look.
"And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper. A woman brought
back some false hair to be exchanged--I sell false hair," said Ann, with
a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair--"and what she
wanted exchanged--though we don't exchange it--was wrapped up in a
newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name. Wasn't
that funny?"
"Very humorous," he replied, almost curtly.
"I had been sick all day--oh, for lots of days. But I was trying to keep
on. I had lost two other places by staying away for being sick--and I
didn't dare--just didn't dare--lose this one. You don't know how
_afraid_ you get--how frightened you are--when you're afraid you're
going to be sick."
The fear--sick fear that fear of sickness can bring--that was in her eyes
as she talked of it suddenly infuriated him. He did not know what or whom
he I was furious at--but it was on Ann it broke.
He rose, overturning his unsteady chair as he did so, and, seeking
command, looked from the window which looked down into a squalid court.
The wretchedness of the court whipped his rage. "Well for God's sake," he
burst forth, "what did you _do_ it for! Of all the unheard
of--outrageous--unpardonable--What did you _mean_"--turning savagely
upon her--"by selling false hair?"
"Why I sold false hair," said Ann, a little sullenly, "so I could live."
"Well, didn't you know," he demanded passionately, "that you could _live_
with _us_?"
She shook her head. "I didn't think I had any right to--after--what
happened."
He came back to her. "Ann," he asked gently, "haven't you a 'right
to'--if we want you to?"
She looked at him again in that strange way. "Are you sure--you know?"
"Very sure," he answered briefly.
"And do you mean to say you would want me--anyhow?" she whispered.
He turned away that she might not see how badly and in what sense he
wanted her. His whole sense of fitness--his training--was against her
seeing it then.
The pause, the way she was looking at him when he turned back to her,
made restraint more and more difficult. But suddenly she changed, her
face darkening as she said, smolderingly: "No--I'm not _that_ weak. If I
can't live--I'll _die_. Other people make a living! Other girls get
along! Katie would. Katie could do it."
She sat up; he could see the blood throbbing in her neck and at her
temples. She was gripping her hands. She looked so frail--so helpless.
"But Katie is strong, Ann," he said soothingly.
"Yes--in every way. And I'm not." She turned away, her face
twitching. "Why I seem to be just the kind of a person that has to be
taken care of!"
He did not deny it, filled with the longing to do it.
"It's--it's humiliating."
He would at one time have supposed that it would be, should be; would
have held to the idea that every man and woman ought be able to make a
living, that there was something wrong with them if they couldn't. But
not after the things he had seen that summer. The something wrong was
somewhere else.
"And yet you don't know," Ann was saying brokenly, "how hard it is. You
don't know--how many things there are."
She turned to him impetuously. "I want to tell you! Then maybe it will
go. I couldn't tell Katie. But I don't know--I don't know why--but I
could tell you anything."
He nodded, not clear-eyed, and took one of her hands and stroked it.
Her cheeks grew more red; her eyes glitteringly bright. "You see--it's
_men_--things like--that's what makes it hard for girls."
He pressed her hand more firmly, though his own was shaking.
"Katie told you--Katie must have told you about--the first of it--" She
faltered. He drew in his breath sharply and held it for an instant. "And
after that--" She turned upon him passionately. "_Do_ they know? _Does_
it make a difference?"
He did not get her meaning for an instant and when he did it brought the
color to his face; he had always been a man of great reserve. But Ann
seemed unconscious. This was the reality that realities make.
He shook his head. "No. You only imagine."
"No, I don't imagine. They pretend. Pretend they know."
He gritted his teeth. So those were the things she had had to meet!
"They lie," he said briefly. "Bluff." And for an instant he covered his
eyes with her hand.
"You see after--after that," she went on, "I couldn't go back to the
telephone office. I don't know that I can explain why--but it seemed the
one thing I couldn't do, so--oh I did several things--was in a store--and
then a girl got me on the stage--in the chorus of 'Daisey-Maisey.' I
thought perhaps I could be an actress, and that being in the chorus would
give me a chance."
She laughed bitterly. "There are lots of silly people in the world,
aren't there?" was her one comment on her mistake.
"That night--the last night--" she told it in convulsive little
jerks--"the manager said something to me. _He_ pretended. And when he saw
how frightened I was--and how I loathed him--it made him furious--and he
said things--vowed things--and he kissed me--and oh he was so
_terrible_--his face--his lips--"
She hid her face, rocking back and forth. He sat on the bed beside her,
put his arm around her as he would around Katie or Worth, holding her
tenderly, protectingly, soothingly, his own face white, biting his lips.
"He vowed things--he claimed--I knew I couldn't stay with the company. I
was even afraid to stay until it was over that night. I had a chance to
run away--Oh I was so _frightened_." She kept repeating--"I was so
_frightened_.
"I can't explain it--you'd have to see him--his _lips_--his thick, loose
awful lips!"
"Ann," he whispered. "Please, dear--don't talk about it--don't think
about it!"
"But I want it to go away! I don't want to be alone with it. I want
somebody to know. I want _you_ to know."
"All right," he murmured. "All right. I want to hear." His whole body was
set for pain he knew must come.
Ann's eyes were full of terror, that terror that lives after terror,
the anguish of terror remembered. "It's awful to be alone with awful
thoughts," she whispered. "To be shut in with something you're
afraid of."
"I know--I know," he soothed her. "But you're going to tell me. Tell
_me_. And then you'll never be alone with it again."
"I've been afraid so much," she went on sobbingly. "Alone so much--with
things that frightened me. That night I was alone. All alone. And afraid.
You see I went and went and went. Just to be getting _away_. And at last
I was out in the country. And then I was afraid of _that_. I went in
something that seemed to be a barn. Hid in some hay--"
He gripped her arm as if it were more than he could stand. His face was
colorless.
"I almost went crazy. Why I think I _did_ go crazy--with fear. Being
alone. Being afraid."
He looked away from her. It seemed unfair to her to let himself see her
like that--her face distorted--unlovely--in the memory of it.
"When it came daylight I went to sleep. And when I woke up--when I woke
up--" She was laughing and sobbing together and it was some time before
he could quiet her. "When I woke up another man was bending over me--an
old man--so _old_--so--
"Oh, I suppose it was just that he was surprised at finding me there. But
I thought--I hadn't got over the night before--
"So again I went. Just went. Just to get away. And that was when I saw it
was life I'd have to get away from. That there wasn't any place in it for
me. That it meant being alone. Afraid. That it was just _that_--those
thick awful lips--that old man's eyes--Oh no--no--not that!"
She was fighting it with her hands--trying to push it away. It took both
tenderness and sternness to quiet her.
"So I hurried on,"--she told it in hurried, desperate way, as if fearful
she would not get it all told and would be left alone with it. "To find
a way. A place. I just wanted to find the way--the place--before
anything else could happen. I thought all the people who looked at me
_knew_. I thought there was nothing else for me--I thought there was
something wrong with me--and when I remembered what I had wanted--I
hated--hated them.
"I saw water--a bridge. On the bridge I looked down. I was going to--but
I couldn't, because a man was looking up at me. I hated him, too." She
paused. "Though I've thought of it since. It was a queer look. I believe
that man _knew_. And wanted to help me.
"But I didn't want to be helped. Nothing could help. I just wanted to get
away--have it over. So I hurried on--across your Island--though I didn't
know--just looking for a place--a way. Just to have it all over."
She changed on that, relaxed. Her eyes closed. "To have it all over," she
repeated in a whisper. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Doesn't
that ever seem to you a beautiful thing?"
His eyes were wet. "Not any more," he whispered. "Not now."
"Then again I saw water--the other side of the Island." She went back to
it with an effort, exhausted. "I ran. I wanted to get there. Have it all
over--before anything else could happen. I couldn't _look_--but I kept
saying to myself it would only be a minute--only a minute--then it would
be all over--not so bad as having things happen--being alone--afraid--"
She shuddered--drew back--living it--realizing it. Her
visioning--realizing--had gone on beyond her words, beyond the events.
She was shuddering as if the water were actually closing over her. But
again she was called back by Katie's voice and that look he felt he
should not be seeing went as a faint smile formed on her lips. "Then
Katie. Katie calling to me. Dear Katie--pretending.
"I didn't want to go. I thought it was just something else. And oh how I
wanted to get it all over!" She sobbed. "But I saw it was a girl. Sick. I
wasn't able to help going--and then--Well, you know. Katie. How she
fooled me. And saved me."
She looked up at him, again the suggestion of a smile on her
colorless lips. "Was there ever anybody in the world so wonderful--so
funny--as Katie?
"But at first I couldn't believe in her. I thought it must be just
something else." She stopped, looking at him. "Why I think it wasn't till
after I met _you_ I felt sure it couldn't be--"
His arm about her tightened. He drew her closer to him. He was shaken by
a deep sob.
And so she rested, lax, murmuring about things that had happened,
sometimes smiling faintly as she recalled them. The terror had gone, as
if, as she had known, telling it to him had freed her. That twisted,
unlovely look which he had tried not to see, loving her too well to wish
to see it, had gone. She was worn, but lovely. She was resting. At peace.
And so many minutes passed when she would not speak--resting, rescued.
And then she would whisper of little things that had happened and smile a
little and seem to drift the farther into the harbor of security into
which she had come.
He saw that--exhausted, protected, comforted--she was going to fall
asleep. His heart was all tenderness for her as he held her, adoring her,
sorrowing over her, guarding her. "I haven't really slept all summer,"
she murmured at last, and after a few minutes her breathing told that
sleep had come.
But when, in trying to unfasten her collar--he longed to be doing some
little thing for her comfort--he took his hand from hers, she started up
in alarm and he had to put it back, reassuring her, telling her that she
was not alone, that nothing could ever harm her again.
An hour passed. And in that hour things which he would have believed
fixed loosened and fell. It was all shaken--the whole of his thinking. It
could never be the same again. Old things must go. New things come.
Watching Ann, yearning over her, sorrowing, adoring, he saw life as what
life had done to her. Saw it as the thing she had found.
He watched the curve of her mouth. Her beautiful bosom rising and falling
as she slept. The lovely line of her throat, the blood throbbing in her
throat, her long lashes upon her cheek, that loveliness--beauty--that
sweetness and tenderness--and _what it had met_. She, so exquisitely
fashioned for love--needful of it--so perfect--so infinitely to be
desired and cherished--and _what she had found_. He writhed under a
picture of that old man bending over her--of that other man--bully,
brute--thick awful lips snatching at her as a dog at meat. And then still
another man. That first man. Darrett. _His_ friend. _His_ sort. The man
who could so skillfully use the lure of love to rob life--
As he thought of him--his charm, cleverness--how that, too, had been
pitted against her--starved, then offered what she would have no way of
judging--close to her loveliness, conscious of her warmth, her breath,
the superb curves of her lovely body--thinking of what Darrett had
found--taken--what he had left her _to_--there were several minutes when
his brain was unpiloted, a creaking ship churning a screaming sea.
And now? Had it killed it in her? Taken it? If he were to kiss her in the
way he hungered to kiss her would it wake nothing more than that sick
terror in her wonderful eyes? That thought became as a band of hot steel
round his throat. Was it _gone_? How could she be sleeping that way with
her hand in his--his face so close to her--if there remained any of that
life-longing that had been there for Darrett to find?
Life grew too cold, too gray and misshapen in that thought to see it as
life. It could not be. It was only that she was exhausted. And her
trust in him.
At least there was that. Then he would make her care for him by caring
for her--caring for her protectingly, tenderly, surrounding her with that
sea of tenderness that was in his heart for her. Life would come back. He
would woo it back. And no matter how the flame in his own heart might
rage he would wait upon the day when he could bring the love light to
her eyes without even the shadow of remembering of fear.
So he yearned over her--sorrowing, hoping. And life was to him two
things. What life had done to Ann. What life would be with Ann. He wanted
to let himself touch his lips lightly to her temple--so close to him. But
he would not--fearing to wake the fear in her, vowing to wait till love
could come through a trust that must cast fear forever from the heart.
Passion melted to tenderness; the tenderness flooding him in thought of
the love he would give her.
That same night he had her taken to a hospital. It was the only way he
could think of for caring for her, and she was far enough from well to
permit it. He left her there, again asleep, and cared for. Then returned
to his hotel and telephoned Katie. It was past daylight before sleep
came to him.