Poverty, which produces the slave, breeds, just as surely, the
slaver. Take where you will the trail of the trafficker in women,
this rule is proven. It is proven in puritan Boston and protected
New Orleans, in Chicago and Washington, in Philadelphia and San
Francisco, and on the heroic scale it is nowhere more plainly proven
than in the heroic city of New York.
On Manhattan Island is, indeed, the Mother-Church, however
unconsciously organized, of the black faith, and though, of
necessity, there spontaneously arise elsewhere congregations that
reach back to her, here is founded and established the Congregation
of the Propaganda that reaches out to them. Its missionaries--its
women, men, and methods--have stretched to Nome and the Canal Zone;
they are preaching their own brand of dogma against the native
versions of Buenos Ayres and Sydney, of Shanghai and Cape Town; and
within its home city the hierarchy is entrenched by financial
strength, political power, and legal negligence. As an industry, it
has its wholesalers and retailers; or, as a church, its bishops sit
in their national house of peers, while its younger orders, its
proselyting priests and evangelizing deacons, perform their especial
tasks, the young appealing to the young, the poor preying upon
poverty.
The entrance to these lower orders lies, as in most orders and most
businesses, through a period of probation: the lad of sixteen plays
the rôle of watchdog and spy for his superiors, for which he earns an
occasional fifty-cent piece, or a casual kettle of beer, vastly
increasing his income if he now and then diverts, as he generally
does, his energies to the occupation of amateur theft. From this
stage he is admitted, by his own efforts, to the possession of one
girl, whom he bullies into working for him along the streets. He may
occasionally deign to appear as a waiter in a café, and offer his
woman to its drunken habitués; but most frequently he scorns all
menial labor, for which, in fact, conditions have utterly unfitted
him. Sometimes he increases his slave-holdings to a trio of women,
and even farms out his victims to friends in his own or other
neighborhoods or towns: more often he delivers his human wares to the
proprietors of houses intended for their reception, being paid in a
lump sum, or on a royalty basis; but in either case his ambition is,
naturally, to rise to the position of the large property-holder or
the political receiver of tribute. If he is an Italian, common
consent limits his operations to the southern end of the Bowery; if
he is a Jew, his field lies about the Houston and Essex Streets
districts; whatever his European parentage, he seeks his
fellow-countrywomen, and if he is American born he has the freedom of
Broadway.
His means are multitude. Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he
is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent
complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this
missionary, this "cadet," offering the quack salvation of his
temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish
sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish,
the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another
economic mill; the restless neurotic native-daughters untrained for
work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it
releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at
the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday
food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner
for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are
girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught
to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they
must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants
and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the
dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants,
long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they
call the American language, learn what they are told are American
dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time
waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated
forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés,
or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
Where training is as yet too strong or distress too weak to make
serve the offer of partnership, the promise of marriage usually
suffices. The thing is done, and once done, blows and starvation
perpetuate it with the ignorant, and threats of exposure and public
shame rivet the shackles on the more knowing. The former suffer for
their darkness; the latter are held the faster in proportion to their
previous respectability.
One has said that this church is established; in every city it
maintains its incestuous marriage to the state. It controls real
votes by the thousands and provides false ones by the tens of
thousands. It is a church that may be considered to exercise the old
ecclesiastical right of trying its own offenders in its own courts.
When the magistrates have not begun as slavers, when they own no
poor, but highly rented, houses, leased for prostitution, when they
do not even accept tithes from the traffic, it is still largely the
traffic that elects and can defeat them. What the Black Church owes
to the political powers for their protection, the political powers
owe to the church for its ballots.
It was this condition that made possible the impunity of such a deed
as the Austrian Mirka had done upon Hermann Hoffmann, the bar-keeper;
that made certain the assailant's escape, and that made of the entire
matter merely a question as to which of several handy means should be
employed to free the slaver in the eyes of the law. About those
means there had, however, been some debate, and so it befell that,
early on the Sunday evening following the shooting, Rafael Angelelli
sat in a recognized New York meeting-place of the church's
proselyting order, engaged in pleasant converse with Wesley Dyker,
candidate for a magistracy. This place was the back-room of a
saloon. It was filled with cigarette-smoking young missionaries, who
talked shop, and quoted prices, and discussed the prospects of a good
season in precisely the businesslike way that men in a
livestock-dealers' club talk shop, and quote prices, and discuss the
prospects of a good season. Dyker had not at all wanted to come
there, but O'Malley had ordered, and so, making peace with the
tolerant Angelelli, he had been forced to obey. A special counsel
for the sheriff of New York had once been a member of the legal corps
of the missionaries and so had two State Senators: O'Malley,
remembering Dyker's previous career, could see no reason for present
pride.
The room was clouded with smoke. Waiters hurried about serving beer
from brass platters and swabbing the small tables with damp rags.
There was a buzz of conversation broken by that peculiar form of
laughter which responds only to obscenities, and now and then, out of
the general clamor, there arose oaths almost technical, descriptions
of women that sounded like auctioneers' announcements in a
horse-market, and fragments of stories in which the teller bragged of
a sharp deal he had effected in capturing a slave or in bargaining
with a proprietress.
"I understand," said Dyker, with his eyelids characteristically
lowered, "that you want to see me in regard to something about this
shooting-affair of your friend Mirka."
Angel's oily head bobbed a ready assent.
"Where's the fellow that was hurt?"
"In Bellevue."
"Is he going to die?"
"Naw; eet was only a leetle one in hees shoulder."
"Anybody else in the bar when it happened?"
"Naw."
That was better. Wesley took a sip of beer.
"Mirka was alone, too?"
"Yas."
"Did the bar-keeper see him?"
"Naw; hees back was rounda to da door."
"There'd been a quarrel beforehand, though?"
"Ah, some small word only."
"And nobody saw Mirka come back or leave the place the second time?"
Nobody had seen him.
Then how was it that the injured man, in the hospital, had said that
Mirka had done the shooting?
Angel explained that Hermann based his accusation partly on an
uncertain and partial glimpse of Mirka caught in the bar-mirror at
the instant that the shot was fired, but largely on the preceding
quarrel.
"This Hoffmann couldn't swear to Mirka's identity from that mere
glimpse?"
The Italian thought not.
"Well, then," said Wesley, "it all ought to be easy enough. Every
bar-keeper knows a lot of drunks that might want to hurt him."
Rafael shrugged.
"You can feex eet," he said. "Meest' O'Malley say you feex eet easy."
"But," replied Dyker, "I don't see how I can act as Mirka's lawyer,
unless it is all done quickly. You know, I'm about to be elected
magistrate."
"Poof!" said Angel, blowing a thin spiral of blue cigarette-smoke.
"We gotta da lawyer."
"Oh!" Dyker looked up quickly, and quickly down again. "Then you
want me--I see."
"Good."
The prospective magistrate began making rings on the table with his
wet glass.
"But I should think there were other ways. The man hasn't been
arrested yet?"
"Naw."
"Then why need the police find him?"
"Thees O'Malley say eet looka better."
"He might jump his bail."
"Naw."
"It's often done that way."
"O'Malley say 'naw'."
"Or he might go up for trial. There's no real evidence against him:
nobody saw the shot fired. And besides, even if we couldn't fix
things in court, which is always easy enough, we could get him a
pardon as we did for Pud Morley or Frank Da Silva."
But Angel would have none of these propositions. Michael O'Malley
was, it seemed, inexorable. There had been enough bail-jumping,
queer verdicts, and pardons for a few months. The case must come
before the new magistrate, and the new magistrate must declare that
the testimony was not sufficient to warrant holding the prisoner for
court.
"Where is Mirka now?" asked Dyker.
"Een Philadelph'," said Angel.
"Loafing?"
"Naw. He tooka one of heesa girls along. I am takin' care of dees
other one."
"Can't we get hold of the Dutchman and make him see who's back of all
this?"
"Naw; dees Dutch' ees a fool."
"Won't even be bought?"
"Naw."
"And can't be scared?"
"Naw; I tell you dees Dutch' ees a damn fool."
Wesley did not like the plan; he did not like it at all; but he was
already harnessed fast, and he had learned that it was best to follow
without protest the directing rein. He achieved a smile.
"All right," he agreed.
The Italian's face lighted with gratification.
"You do eet?" he asked.
"I'll arrange it; don't worry."
"Good! Good! That's good!"
Angel's pleasure was so pronounced that Dyker for a moment
feared--though it would have made small difference--lest the cadet
make to the entire company a public announcement of his promise. He
need not, however, have worried. Rafael was wholly used to these
legal fictions and to the etiquette that imposed their formal
observance; his delight took the shape of an order for another pair
of drinks, and, those dispatched, he leisurely got upon his little
feet.
"Now," said he, "I go. I hava da businesses."
He smiled wisely at the concluding word.
Wesley also rose.
"I'll have to be getting along myself," he remarked.
"Ah, but you can stay eef you feel like," said Angel. "I maka you
know deesa mens."
"Thanks. I do know most of them," replied Dyker, nodding to two or
three of the nearby cadets as he spoke. "But I have some business,
too. These are busy times with me."
They both made their way to the saloon's side door.
"Goin' so soon?" chorused some of the habitués as Angel moved among
them.
He nodded, smiling cheerfully.
"Goin' to kop out a new skirt?" inquired one.
"Yas," responded Rafael, now with a frank, satisfied chuckle.
"Then here's luck!" cried another.
As the health was being drunk, Dyker passed through the door and
turned, alone, into the cool night air of the street.
Notwithstanding his natural bias, his severe schooling, and his
honestly cynical and cynically limited view of this portion of his
little world, he was ashamed of what he had just seen and heard and
done, and he was disgusted. He walked down the avenue in the
deepened shadows, for the first time in a long while more than half
inclined to ask himself whether what he was to get was worth the
price that he had already begun to pay for it; and for the first
time, by way of answer, frankly facing the fact that the position of
a corrupt magistrate was not much worse than that of a corrupt
lawyer, and that neither position was much worse, and both certainly
better paid, than the position in which his task had been to render
anonymous assistance to the no less dubious course of more esteemed
corporation attorneys.
He was too occupied with these reflections, disquieting and
consolatory, to observe well the persons that passed him. He
continued his way along the curb rather because he had started upon
it than because he at all cared about whither it led him, much as he
was continuing his progress in the political maze in which his lot
was cast. He kept his head bent, and so he did not see a pale-faced,
large-eyed woman that, turning a hasty corner, almost collided with
him and then suddenly drew back and crossed the street.
There were changes in the woman's face, which might have precluded
recognition. He had last seen her on the eve of a surgical operation
and she had looked ill, but now, the cumulative effect of that and
many other crises sat upon her, and it was only in her habitual gait,
the swaying languid pace of an unstudied young animal, that he might
have found enough to recall her to his memory. But Dyker's eyes were
directed inward and so, when she turned aside to avoid the man that
she fancied she had wronged, he did not realize that he had almost
touched elbows with the woman he had once rescued, fresh from her
dismissal from the sacred precincts of Mrs. Ferdinand Chamberlin's
home.
She had started away from Washington Square in the same dull pain in
which she had previously left the Ninth Street boarding-house
presided over by the stony-breasted Mrs. Alberta Turner; she had been
only a wounded dog, whose sole desire was to find a dark corner in
which she could suffer unobserved; but slowly there reasserted itself
in her torpid brain that new impulse toward a questioning of life
which had so appalled Philip Beekman. The whole she could not see;
her own case bulked so far in the foreground that little else of the
picture was visible to her. But she knew that an ill-constructed
world was against her; she concluded that all legitimate doors were
closed upon her, and she felt gradually kindling a wrath that would
end in general reprisal.
How she chanced into Rivington Street she did not know. She had no
clear idea as to where she was to go, except that she must not return
to burden Katie Flanagan. Yet, almost before she was clearly
conscious of her whereabouts, she found herself accosted by a voice
that proved to come from the lips of Marian Lennox.
"Mary Morton! How do you do? Where are you going? Where on earth
have you been? Come in here; I'm just getting back from a walk. I
am so anxious to hear how you are getting on, and I have been so
disappointed because you never let me hear from you."
The rivulet of cheerful words poured from the calm-faced woman with
unheeding force. Each one of them fell upon her auditor with an
unintended shock. Mary, who had almost forgotten the pseudonym under
which she had been presented at the Settlement, could say nothing.
She was carried up the steps and into the house, up the stairs and
into the deserted sitting-room on the second floor; and there she
sank limply into a wicker chair beside a magazine-littered table,
tête-à-tête with her former benefactress.
Marian, all good intentions, rested her delicate chin upon her white
hands.
"Now," she said, "I am anxious to hear all about you."
Mary, with a perplexed frown, looked hard at the floor.
"Why, there isn't much to tell, Miss Lennox," she replied.
"Nonsense. Of course there is, my dear. You must understand that I
am interested in everything about you--in everything."
Mary's eyes sought, for a moment, the pure, cameo-like face. They
could see no evil there, and they could see much kindliness.
"Well, then," she hesitated, "I don't know exactly where to begin."
"At the beginning, of course. How do you like your place?"
"Which place, Miss Lennox?"
"The place we sent you to."
"I'm not there no more."
"Not there?" Marian raised her perfectly arched brows. "But, my
dear Mary, why not? Didn't you like it?"
"I didn't mind."
"Then you have found a better place?"
Again Mary studied her questioner.
"Miss Lennox," she said, "I guess you people here have all sorts of
girls comin' around, don't you?"
There was a surprise in this departure, and Marian's deep eyes
mirrored it. The questioner had become the questioned.
"A great many kinds," she replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Girls that work at all sorts of things?"
"To be sure."
"And you want to help 'em?"
"We try to help them all."
"Yes; I thought so. Can you help 'em all, Miss Lennox?"
"When they let us, I think we can."
"Then what do you do about them that hasn't been straight?"
Marian softly caught her breath.
"Oh," she said; "I----" She had learned, since their last meeting, a
little about the girls concerning whom Mary was inquiring, and she
had learned much regarding the Settlement's attitude toward them; but
she had learned, also, that the work of the place most lay with the
flowers that bloomed among the weeds, and so, "Well, you see," she
lamely continued, "Well, we do the best we can."
"What's that, please, Miss Lennox? I've got a particular reason for
wanting to know."
Marian understood. She spoke softly, and softly laced and interlaced
her long white fingers, resting in her lap.
"We do the best we can, Mary," she repeated, more confidently. "When
we have investigated the case and are sure such a girl is sorry, or
wasn't entirely to blame, and that she means to do what is right in
the future, we make her our personal friend. We encourage her to
come here and talk to us and get all the help possible. We have her
around to all the entertainments----"
"Can she learn?" asked Mary.
"Learn?" Marian's voice was puzzled.
"Can she go to the clubs and the classes they talked about when I was
here first?" explained Mary.
Marian shook a doubtful head.
"You see that wouldn't do, right away, Mary," she said. "We have to
think of the other girls, and we have to protect the girls that _are_
straight as well as help those that haven't been. These are their
clubs, after all, and they wouldn't like it, if they knew. It
wouldn't be just for us to deceive them, and they have the first
claim on our protection."
"Why?"
It was the hardest question that Marian Lennox had ever had put to
her. She tried to form an answer, but though she could think of many
that seemed to her logical, she could think of none that seemed kind.
Sympathy sprang to her eyes. She put out her hands.
"Mary!" she said.
But Mary had received her reply.
"It don't matter, Miss Lennox," she said, and she said it so calmly
and so coldly that Marian involuntarily drew back in her chair. "I
just wondered, that was all."
She stopped an instant. Her hostess tried to speak and could not,
but presently the girl pursued:
"I wasn't square with you, that night you gave me the recommedation
to Mrs. Turner, Miss Lennox. I suppose I ought to've told you all
about myself, but I had to get work, an' I knew if I told you I
wouldn't get no job. I'd been--I'd been in a house. I wanted to get
away, an' a man had just got me out a little more'n a month or so
before."
"It was not exactly honest of you," said Marian.
She was sorry as soon as she had spoken, but Mary, showing no sign of
hurt or resentment, was continuing before reparation or explanation
could be made.
Very simply she told the hard outward facts of her story. She did
not give the history of her capture, because her experience with Mrs.
Turner, with the homely little woman that had called at the
employment-agency, and with Philip Beekman had shown her that this
could not lessen the extent of her contamination. Honestly rejecting
her deception of Marian, goaded by that glimpse of Wesley Dyker into
an impulse to make, at any cost to herself, the amend of truth for
what fault she had committed, she was still more powerfully moved by
a determination to accept without reservation the part that the world
had now assigned her, and to fight under no colors save her own.
Marian, her fine face drawn with pain, heard the narrative in a
silence broken only when Mary had concluded with her departure from
the hospital. The girl had mentioned no names.
"And even this one man," murmured Marian at last, "even this man who
had the courage to rescue you--even he was a visitor at such a place?"
"Why, of course," said Mary, as yet unused to the idea of any blame
attaching to the mere male patronage of slavery. "How else could I
have got him for help?"
"But you said he was in love with that woman who conducted
the--house."
"With Miss Rose?"
"What did you call her?"
"Mrs. Rose Légère she called herself, but I guess that wasn't her
name. Yes, he was kind of in love with her. He was one of her
favorites anyhow, but that was just because he had a pull with the
politicians, you see. She let him love her so's she could work him,
an' when I put him wise to that, he was glad to help me."
Marian clinched her fist.
"The abominable cur!" she said.
"Oh, no! Not that," protested Mary. She had failed this man by
retracting her affidavit, but she meant to be loyal to him
wheresoever she could. His name slipped from her with no thought of
consequences. "It took a lot of nerve an' goodness to do for me what
Mr. Dyker done."
Marian's gaze became fixed. She was a woman whose whole training had
shaped her against sudden betrayal of emotion, but she needed every
precept of that training now. She did not start, she did not flush,
but her hands moved to the arms of her chair and gripped them hard.
"Did you say Mr. Wesley Dyker?" she asked.
Her voice did not betray her to the woman opposite, but Mary feared
lest her own desire to defend her deliverer had betrayed him.
"That's who it was, Miss Lennox," she admitted, adding anxiously:
"But I didn't go to mention it.
"You won't tell it to no one that could use it against him, will you?"
"Oh, no!" Marian laughed a short, hard laugh and rose to hide
whatever might be seen of her confusion. "Oh, no," she said; "I
shan't speak of this to any enemy."
Her movement had seemed to Mary as a sign that the interview was
ending, but the laughter chilled her. She also rose, and stood
before her hostess.
"You don't know him?" she tremulously inquired.
"I think," said Marian, "that I used to know somebody by some such
name, but I do not know him now. He need not disturb himself, and
when you see him you need not disturb him by saying that you spoke of
this to me."
"Oh, I won't see him," Mary assured her. "It ain't likely I'll ever
see see him again."
Marian's eyes searched her, but they detected nothing disingenuous.
"You have quarreled?" she demanded.
"No, only he wanted me to testify against Miss Rose, an' I was too
scared. I just hid myself."
There was a simple appeal in the bare words that brought their hearer
to her better self. Within her there burned a new and mounting fire,
but her face was cool and her actions were reasoned.
"Mary," she said, determined to sink herself and to be true to her
code, "I am very sorry to have heard all this. I am sorry that I
seemed harsh when I said you had not been quite honest with us."
"But I hadn't been, Miss Lennox."
"It was not altogether your fault if you weren't, Mary. I begin to
see that it must be rather hard, sometimes, to be quite honest."
"It is, sometimes."
"But you have been honest now with me, and I want to help you. I
want you to come around here in the way I described. I want you to
come often."
She paused, and then, as Mary did not respond, she added:
"Will you?"
Mary's eyes were on the floor.
"Do you think you can get me a job?" she asked. "Do you think anyone
can?"
Marian had thought nothing about it.
"Why, really, I don't know, Mary. But I suppose so. Anyhow, I'll
see what I can do--though of course I shouldn't feel justified in
procuring you a position under false pretenses. You understand that?"
"Yes," said Mary, "I understand."
"And, at any rate, you will come around to-morrow?"
Still Mary did not look up.
"You will come?" repeated Marian.
"Yes, Miss Lennox," said Mary.
"Very well, then: to-morrow afternoon."
Something in the girl's attitude made Marian uneasy. She insisted on
her point, but again Mary was slow to answer, and again Marian asked:
"Will you?"
"Yes, Miss Lennox."
"At five o'clock, Mary."
"I'll try, Miss Lennox."
"Promise."
Mary stepped to the door. She looked up and put out her hand, but,
although Marian saw this, and started to respond, the
settlement-worker's hand fell back to her side. Mary seemed first to
observe and then not at all to have observed it.
"I promise," she said quietly, and left the room and the house.
Inside, Marian was looking at her hand as if, because it had refused
to seek that of the woman who, she concluded, had shared Rose
Légère's intimacy with Dyker, it had been scorched by the new passion
aflame in her own heart. Outside, Mary, tramping the evening street,
saw, in her memory of that hand withheld, a hand pointing her
definitely away from the keeping of her promise, pointing her onward
down the street as the place where, for the future, she must live and
work.