It was on the day following her eavesdropping upon Rose that Violet
was awakened early--as early as eleven o'clock in the morning--by a
sudden cry. The sound was one of some pain and more terror,
beginning in the high note of horrified amazement and ending in an
attenuating moan of despair.
Violet had been living in a highly charged atmosphere: she sat up in
bed, sleep immediately banished from her brain. She remained still
and listened. She heard Rose's now familiar footstep. She heard a
door open and close. She heard that cry frightfully begin again, and
then she heard it more frightfully stop in mid-power, cease in abrupt
and hideous silence.
There came a discreet tapping at her own door.
"Are you alone, my dear?"
It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet
replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.
Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her
yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to
have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were
dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over
the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint
little red veins that lay close below its white skin.
"My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its
foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and
that"--she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come--"that's
one of them."
She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but
with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a
rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony.
"What was it?" asked Violet.
"You ought to know. It was another of them."
"You mean----" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's
whitening lips.
"Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad
shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess
produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my
nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with
dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run
downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for
company."
"How--how did this happen?"
"How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them,
my dear, and one about as narsty as the others."
"But this?"
"Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the
details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough
before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's
so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while
their wives cook the dinners--three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and
no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma,
the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the
kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly
snake under the apple-tree."
"He brought her here?"
"Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have
come along of her own self sometime."
"How could she?"
"How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living
in--there isn't room for that--they're just to eat in, when you've
got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you
have to."
"So this girl had to live outside?"
"On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and
down the street when it wasn't."
Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was
less, because her surroundings had been better.
"That must have been pretty bad," she said.
"It was bad, but it wasn't so bad as being indoors, my dear. That's
what most girls think about it anyway, and that's why they never go
home before ten or eleven. How else do the moving-picture shows keep
running and how else do the dance-halls make their cakes and ale?"
"The dance-halls?" The word was new to Violet.
"Yes, my dear, I said the dance-halls--where you pay five cents to
dance in the dust, with the windows nailed fast to start a thirst,
and then buy you bad beer of the kind proprietor. That's where the
lodger took this girl, and that's where she learned to drink."
"Too much?"
"Chuck it, dearie, chuck it. Among all the wasters I've known, I've
never found one drunkard: they all called themselves moderate
drinkers. Well, this girlie played double for a bit, and then met a
nice young man that wanted to marry her next day. She woke up here."
"Did they drug her?"
"Did they drug you? They don't have to drug you: you know that. The
minute a girl tells me she was drugged, I say to myself: 'You're the
kind that walk in and won't take "No" for an answer.' No, you catch
flies with syrup; you don't shoot them with machine-guns. Narsty
business, no?"
Violet was hearing for the first time how life made the net in which
it had taken her. She passed her hand across her burning eyes.
"You seem to have seen a lot," she said.
"Haven't I just? I had my own little flat--to myself, too--once upon
a time, and I kept my eyes about me. There was the Dago woman that
owned a fruit-stand on my corner. She lived in an alley off Houston
Street, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter who worked twelve hours a
day rolling cigarettes.--Chuck me another, there's a good girlie.
Thanks, awfully.--That girl hated her work--can you blame her?--met a
man that told her she wouldn't have to work any more, and good-by."
"She went with him?"
"Parsed out of sight completely, my dear. Mother nearly crazy. Went
to the police. Police added the girlie's name to their three columns
of other missing girls for that year, and said they couldn't guess
where she was. An uncle tried to go on an inspection-tour of his
own, and had spent about all the family cash when he got to a flat on
West Fortieth Street and had its girls in for the usual drinks. He
saw his niece, but the bouncer knocked him down, and when he woke up
in the arey, the happy family had moved."
"And that was all?"
"That was all till, some two years later, the girl sent for her
mother to come to Bellevue to see her die. As soon as she was used
up, they'd turned her out without one of the pennies she had earned
for them.--Narsty, eh?"
There was a brief pause.
"I guess," said Violet, "there ain't much chance for you unless
you're good."
"My dear," answered the Englishwoman, "if you're good, you haven't a
chance at all. It's just a question of whether you have or haven't
enough to live on. The best guardian of a man's virtue is the worst
enemy of a woman's--and that's an empty pocketbook, my dear."
But Violet was in no mind for generalizations.
"It's a business, then, ain't it?" she asked.
"A regular business," nodded Evelyn,--"fifty cents up--and now that
they've smashed the lotteries, policy, and the races, it's more of a
business than ever. There are hundreds of young chaps all over the
country who make their living by selling girls to places like
this--and worse than this; and there are more who make better livings
by making one, or two, or even three girls walk the street for them.
Just now, in New York, the street's the main thing."
"An' people like Miss Rose----?"
"They buy the girls and pay a percentage on their work, my dear, till
the debt's cleared. Sometimes they give their girls nothing but
brass checks for every job, but whether we get brass checks or real
cash, it's all the same: board and lodging and clothes are so high
that we never get out of debt to the madam. Trust her for that!"
She had a thorough knowledge of her subject, and she ran on as if her
only interest in it were economic. She talked of Denver, with its
two-room houses in which the front seemed one large window where the
sole inmate displayed her wares; of Chicago with the curtained doors
through which was thrust only a hand to receive the varying price of
admission, even a quarter of a dollar occasionally sufficing; of the
same city's infamous club maintained by politicians for their own
debauches. She told of the proprietresses making a specialty of
"sending out" for girls that worked at other and ill-paid tasks by
day; of women conducting flats on a partnership basis; of those who
rented, for high prices, houses that would otherwise be tenantless
because of poor conditions or the opening of some street that must
soon be cut through the premises. She said that young girls unsoiled
would sometimes fetch their owners fifty dollars for their initial
destruction, but that, as a rule, the sums were relatively small.
"And Miss Rose has to pay the police," asked Violet; "don't she?"
"She does just, little innocent. And the police have to pay the
officers above them, and the officers above them have to pay the
ward-bosses above _them_--and there you are. It's all the worse
since the bosses can't make any money from gambling-houses, and it's
all the worse since the business got organized and meant votes for
the gang at every election.--Oh," Evelyn broke off--"I tell you it's
the same in every city the world over, my dear, and you and I haven't
even the comfort of being exceptions."
"Don't people know about it?"
"People don't want to know about it. People don't want to feel
badly. People say that it isn't true, and that, if it is true, it
isn't fit to mention."
"Did you ever go to a dance-hall?"
Forgetting her recent attitude of democracy, Evelyn raised her
pointed chin.
"I should say not," she answered. "Only a year ago I had that
apartment of my very own. An Africander took me out of the chorus at
the 'Gaiety' over home,--and a good job, too--and, when he died and I
came here, one of the best doctors in this town took care of me. He
said he was going to marry me," she ended with a short laugh, "but
when his old wife died, he forgot that, and forgot me, and married a
society girl young enough to be his grandchild. Of course he died
himself after a few months, but that didn't help me, my dear: I had
to strike out, and now, from the best places I've come down as far as
this."
Violet was still too young to feel keenly for another while herself
in suffering, a fact that must have presented itself to Evelyn,
because she turned from her own story with an easy shrug.
"After all," she pursued, "the thing's at least better run now that
it has become a men's business. There are no jobs left at the top
except the running of the houses: the men get the girls, the rents,
and most of the profits."
"Fritzie said they got lots of immigrants."
"Well, rather. Most of the Dago ditch-diggers go home every winter,
and any one of them will bring a girl back with him as his wife if
you'll pay him a little over the price of the passage money. That's
one way, but there are a jolly lot more, not to mention the
make-believe employment agencies that catch the girls by regiments.
The women are packed over here in the steerage like cattle, my dear,
and ticketed like low-class freight. All they own goes into a small
handbag and once they get here, they're herded ten in a room till the
agency-runners call for them. Around Houston Street you can see
streets full of those nifty little agencies: they ship the girls all
over the States."
"I never thought such things could happen."
"Of course you didn't. Nobody does, my dear--and that's one reason
they do happen. Not that the immigrants are unduly favored. All
over the East Side you can see families of the Chosen People going
into real mourning for cadet-caught girlies, just as if the poor
things were really dead. The other races suffer quite as much, too,
though the Yankees are less likely to get into the cheaper joints."
"That's where they give them the brass checks?" asked Violet.
"Yes. The man buys the checks downstairs, on a commutation schedule,
just the w'y we used to buy our drink checks in a beer garden. The
girls never see real money--except when they make a touch, and then
it's not any use--because they cash in their checks to the madam, and
she counts them against what her young l'idies owe her. Even at
that"--Evelyn nearly sat upright in her animation--"even at that,
they do s'y the men try to jew you down as badly as they do here.
I've always noticed that the honestest man that ever lived will try
to cheat a girl. But you'll learn it all in time, girlie. I'm only
sorry that you'll never see the better plices."
Violet missed the innuendo, but she asked:
"Then there are better and worse?"
Evelyn laughed.
"Right-oh!" she said. "The horrid truth is, my dear, that we and
Rose are hopelessly middle-class. I wish you could see the better,
and as for the worse, wait till you live in a plice where there are
sliding panels in the wall, and men are robbed every night."
If there had been any sympathy in the Englishwoman's tone, Violet
might have appealed to her for whatever of real assistance she could
give, but Evelyn's scarcely interrupted monologue soon made it clear
that she had no help to offer.
"It's all rotten," she continued,--"all rotten because it has to be.
Do you fancy that, if Rose wasn't sure of us, she wouldn't have her
ear at that keyhole now? She can call in Angel half the time, and
one cop or another's never far around the corner. Three weeks ago
Phil Beekman, one of her best customers, tried to balance a lamp on
his nose and broke it, and Riley was there to arrest him for
disorderly conduct before the boy could get to his wallet. He had to
pay twenty-five dollars--half went to Riley--for that fifteen-dollar
lamp that Rose had insured for eighteen. We're all that w'y; we all
have to be spies on the rest. I am, you soon will be, and that
little Wanda--well, of course, Rose makes too much fuss over her."
"What do you mean?" asked Violet.
But Evelyn only shook her towsled yellow head.
"I mean, my dear," she said, "that there are some things, you know,
that even I don't fancy discussing."
"She was an immigrant, wasn't she?"
"Oh, yes," Evelyn acquiesced, with a yawn. Already her restless
heart was tiring of the conversation and her insistent thirst was
crying for more alcohol. "Wanda came over here to be a housemaid.
She landed in Philadelphia and went directly to an employment agency,
like a good girlie. They took her money for their commission in
getting her a job, and then they sold her right over here to a
sailors' joint."
"For housework?"
"Housework? My dear, you overact your part. There's no housework
done in those plices; but Wanda's won her w'y up in the world. Here
she is at Rose's, if you please, though by what sort of housework I
shan't tell you."
"I wish----"
"Not another word, my dear. Talking is a dry game. After all,
drinking is the king of indoor sports. Come on down and rig a bit of
fizz."
But Violet did not join in this predatory expedition. She forgot the
plight of the new captive whose cries she had heard; she forgot even
the details of Evelyn's just-related case; she remembered only so
much of the general situation, now made clear to her, as bore upon
her own position, and she came at last to a pitch of crafty courage
that was far more promising of success than any of the hysterical
determinations that she had previously experienced. Open revolt was
futile; she would employ methods more circuitous, and would use
whatever weapons were at hand.
It was, as Evelyn had said, a house of spies and eavesdroppers, and,
at the next opportunity--which occurred that night--Violet sought
again her secret place of vantage on the back stairs, and listened
again to her jailer in conversation with the Italian. Her time, as
it chanced, was brief, but she heard enough to know that Wesley Dyker
was the subject of the conference, and that betrayal of some sort was
its intent.
"Nothin' much," Rose was saying, in apparent answer to some question
asked before the spy had taken up her breathless post in the darkened
stairway. "I'll get more out of him later on."
"Yas," replied Angel, "but how mooch?"
"He said he thought he'd pull it off, all right, but wasn't sure of
O'Malley. Said he'd got a bunch of kind words from up top, but was
scared for fear O'Malley would knife him. He's a pretty wise guy for
all he's a swell, and he's lookin' out for the double-cross from your
crowd."
"He ast you to helpa keepa lookout?"
"Sure he did. Said if O'Malley's man put up a bluff at runnin'
independent, I was to tip him off when O'Malley began registering
votes here."
"That isa good. More?"
"Some. Said he wanted me to keep my ears wide for any news. Wanted
me to pump you."
"He deed?" The voice grew threatening. "Say, now, you tella me why
he knaw you knawa me?"
"I guess he has as good ears as most people."
"But how he knawa me an' you----"
"He don't know that, Angel. Keep your hair on. He don't know
nothin' about it. If he did, do you think he'd stand for it, an'
cough up all these here straight tips to me?"
"Na-aw," the Italian drawlingly admitted, in slow mollification.
"Naw, maybe he woulda not."
"He certainly wouldn't. He don't know nothin' about it. What he's
afraid of is that somebody might think _he_ stood in too good here."
"He say that?"
"Yep."
"Alla right. Now, you tella him when he comes again, O'Malley
means----"
The voice dropped to so low a whisper that Violet could hear no more,
and, before it was raised, the doorbell had sounded and she had heard
Celeste, upstairs, calling her. She tiptoed back to the upper
hallway.
"Cassie say you' New York Central frien' ees askin' for you,"
volunteered the French girl as they met.
"All right," answered Violet. "I'll be right down. I was trying to
swipe a bottle. And say, Celeste, how does that Wesley Dyker come to
have such a pull with Miss Rose?"
"Oh-h! You don' know? That Wes' Dyk' 'e mabby be a magistrate nex'
'lection. 'E's one gran' man now for bail an' lawyer when trouble
come.--'Es's frien's with so many politicians, too. But Meess Rose,
she know 'e will be some more eef 'e be 'lected magistrate."
"Oh, I see. But doesn't she keep standing in, on the quiet, with the
other people who want the place, too?"
Celeste nodded a cheerful agreement.
"But of a certainty," she said. "Meess Rose, she know 'er beezness.
Whoever get that 'lection, Meess Rose, she will 'ave been 'ees
frien'."
Violet asked no more. She had learned enough to put into her hands
the best weapon just then available.