Through all the days that immediately followed--the days that were
nights, and the nights that were red noondays--a thousand horrors,
from subtle word to recurring experience, conjoined to assure to Mary
the reality of her servitude. All of that first day, after Rose had
left her with the dark blood oozing from her cut chin upon the
scented pillows, she lay, like a wounded dog, now in a faint and then
in a stupor, on the disordered bed. As the sunlight shifted and the
shadows lengthened in the room, torpor gave way to reawakened fear,
and she crawled into a corner and tried to hide herself, trembling,
with chattering teeth, at every sound of laughter that rose from the
lower floors, at every footstep upon the stair.
Thrice Rose returned. Each time she bore a steaming dish that, as
the girl's physical pain grew less, assailed the nostrils with
increasing poignancy. Each time Mary shook her stubborn russet head.
And each time the visit ended in a beating.
Escape by door or window was out of the question; to attempt to raise
an alarm was to invite fresh violence; and gradually grew the
certainty that the situation was genuinely as the jailer had
described it: that the street was worse than the house, and that Mary
was her own prisoner. She found the bottle labeled "Poison," and bit
one of the tablets, but she was young and afraid, and she spat the
burning crumbs from her mouth. She did not dare to die, and when
Rose came again to the room, her captive was too weak to refuse the
broth that was fed her, as if she were a sick child, from a spoon.
"You're a dear girl, after all," said the mistress, as she
administered the grateful food. "You do as I say and you won't never
be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I'm your friend."
Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer.
"And now," Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink."
And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.
The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed
upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the
inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a
fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was
simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent
to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but
hell itself must be endured.
It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary's cell
and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key.
They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé
garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with
straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant
frame--a younger Rose--the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and
dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a
swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this
one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary's
would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak.
"'Ello!" she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like
pomegranate seeds. "We have come to make the call."
Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet
beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved
more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself.
Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had
not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word.
But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her
head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke
curling toward the ceiling.
"My name," she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, "eet
ees Celeste, an' my good frien' here," she continued with an easy
gesture of the cigarette, "she ees Fritzie--chust a bar-bar-ous
German."
Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless.
"An' you' name?" pursued Celeste, "eet ees--what?"
Fritzie supplied the answer, speaking in a ponderous contralto.
"Her name is Mary," said she.
"_Bien_--a pretty name," Celeste rattled on, precisely as if her
unwilling entertainer had made the response. "I like eet well;
but"--and she studied with unobtrusive care the russet-framed,
indignant face before her--"eet ees not so good as ees yourself. I
t'ink--let me see--yaas: I t'ink I shall call you 'Violet.'--Violet,
why you don't eat more een dees 'ouse?"
"I'm hardly ever hungry," said Mary.
"Not hongry?--Oh-h, but you mohst be hongry! Anyone so young mohst
want to eat, and anyone so beautiful mohst eat so as not to loose the
beauty.--Ees eet not so, Fritzie?"
The German girl smiled gently and nodded her blonde head.
"Ach, yes," she rumbled. "The liebchen!"
"No," insisted Mary. "I don't care about nothing. I have a headache
all the time. I have one now."
Celeste jumped lightly to the floor: it was as if to uncoil her feet
and to reach the door required but a single movement.
"_Un moment!_" she laughed. "I shall feex the _mal de tête_
immediate!"
There was no time for remonstrance; the door closed upon her
concluding word, and Mary was left there gazing into the stolid,
sphinxlike face of the placidly smiling German. It was not a bad
face, and soon Mary realized that it was a contented one.
Fritzie was returning her look with an equal curiosity.
"Are you vorried?" she finally inquired.
"No," lied Mary proudly.
"I dought you looked like vorried," the German continued. "Bud you
should be nod. Dis iss a goot place. Dere are loads vorse blaces in
New York dan dis: I know 'em."
She paused, but Mary's lips remained closed, her eyes fixed.
"You bed I know 'um!" Fritzie repeated. "Bud dis blace--vhy, ve haf
de best meals, so goot nobody gould besser haf! I like dis blace."
A faint question shot into Mary's face. At once Fritzie answered it.
"Dat's righd. Listen: I gome over here two year ago in de steerage.
Some of de vomen, men meet dem--oh, most all de nod-family vons--un'
took dem to dese here intelligence office dat are only fakes, un'
sold dem, vidout dere knowin' nussin' of it, fur ten un' fifteen
dollar' each. Bud I vas careful. I get a real tshob.--Ach, himmel!"
She waved a broad palm in disgust.
"Id vas bad enough in de steerage mit all de sailor-mens kissin' you
to-day un' kickin' you to-morrow; bud dat tshob of mine, dat vas de
real limit! I gome over here because I vouldn't vork in de fields
back home, bud in dat boarding-house vhere I get dat tshob, I get up
at dree o'clock every mornin', because some of de mens vork in
Jefferson Market, un' I haf to scrub, un' make de beds, un' help
cook, un' vait on dable, un' vash dishes, un' sweep de whole house
oud. Un' den till late at nighd I haf to help cook, un' vait on
dable, un' vash dishes some more still. Vhenever I am sick, or late,
or break von dish, or a boarder don' pay, I gets docked. Un' almost
every veek I'm sick or late or break a dish or a boarder don' pay.
My vages is d'ree dollar a veek, un' I never gets more as
two-fifty--sometime, two--un' dat vill nod pay my clothes ad first,
un' don' pay my doctor bills aftervard."
The story was told monotonously, without much show of emotion, but it
was enough of itself to wring a word from the woman to whom it was
addressed.
"You got sick?" asked Mary.
"Who vouldn't?" said Fritzie. "You bed I get sick, un' vhen I gome
oud of de hospital, de young doctor--he'd been makin' grand lofe to
me--he tell me I vas too nice a girl to vork my hands off fur nussin'
a veek, un' he gif me his visitin' card vith a writin' on it to a
voman he knowed, un' I quit un' vent dere."
She paused, but Mary was silent, and the German resumed:
"It vas a goot place, bud nod so goot as dis von. I stay a mont'
till she move to Philadelphia. Den I vent to anozzer house, not so
goot as dat first, fur two mont's till the voman die. Un' den, after
some more, I gome here, pretty soon, to Miss Rose's. No"--she waved
her thick hand toward the door through which Celeste had lately
passed--"I'm nod like dat Frenchie. She's vhat Phil Beekman calls a
'gongenital,' vatever dat iss; I vork hard enough now, und I vanted
to vork righd den; bud I tell you I could not stand it, dough I vas
so strong. No, I'm glad I gome here."
She leaned back upon her elbow.
"Now, dis Celeste----" she began, but the French girl, just then
entering, came with an air that was a sufficient explanation of her
never complex temperament.
"_Voilà!_" she smiled, holding aloft a long glass filled by a dull
green liquid. "Let the leetle girl tak some of thees wheech I meex
for her."
Before she had well realized what she was doing, Mary had accepted
the glass.
"What is it?" she asked weakly.
"Absinthe," replied Celeste.
"It smells like licorice," said Mary.
"Ah, but no; eet ees not that. You try thees, an' then you can eat."
"But I don't think I want to eat."
"Poof! That ees folly! See, now, I meex thees myself--I myself have
_frappé_ eet. Ees eet what you call polite that you say 'no' to me?
Say, now: ees eet?"
Involuntarily Mary smiled. It was a rueful little smile, but it was
a smile of exhausted consent.
"It won't hurt me?"
"Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache,
of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve."
For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her
they turned no key upon their exit.
So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that
immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There
was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of
visitors--clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters,
thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of
horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone
filthy of mind--the green government note was their certificate of
qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right
to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained
to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they
might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts
demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken?
She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive
the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as
wit. She must pass from this to that--and she must not care.
And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final
the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if
she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to
court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of
either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street
that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be,
she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was
ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities
of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a
back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter
never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims'
brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there
was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most,
starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but
little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a
tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where
food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where
old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was
no more than supine acquiescence.
Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the
slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man
of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their
wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly
searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was,
theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board and
_lingerie_ demanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each
woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.
With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened
Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some
likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied,
and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that
point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious
discomfort. To the hope of Max's return she still, in her own heart,
clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an
acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink
between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she
knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and
left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic
destiny.
Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly
numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a
child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every
personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself
for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth
that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against
the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be
but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both
herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as
mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.
And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release.
Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no
escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to
the one source from which she could conceive of their coming.