Mary was too ill to go to work that night, and on the night following
she was no better. The shock, the spasm of success, the recoil, not
moral but physical, after the satisfaction of a supreme desire--these
things were, of themselves, enough to leave her prostrate. But, in
addition to these, she had, while standing at that open door,
contracted one of those heavy colds to which she was now rendered
especially susceptible. Through long hours of the day and the
darkness she tossed among the hot sheets of her bed, sometimes with
her teeth clicking in a chill, again with her body burning in a
fever, but always revolving in her seething brain the details of the
vengeance that she had wrought.
Her physical sufferings mattered little to her. There were hours
when she was wholly incapable of feeling them. When the inertia of
the state of reaction began at last to wear away, it left her with a
glow of recollection so great that there seemed no place for lesser
sensation. She had accomplished her great work, she had achieved her
mission. What she had done had been done solely for her own heart's
sake; there had been no delusion of a celestial command, no distorted
thought of a social duty; yet, the impulse, however utilitarian, had
been supreme, and its end filled her with a sense of triumph that,
for want of the proper title, she was sure was happiness.
A wiser head and an unwounded heart would have known enough of life
to see that even Max Grossman was not entirely to blame. A better
brain could have looked back into the past. It could have seen Max
as the type of all his kind, the symbol of every one of the great
company of slavers, the inevitable result of a system blind both to
its own interests and to the interests of the race. It could have
seen the child, one of half a dozen born to a woman that could not,
properly, have cared for three. It could have seen that child
neglected, dirty, forgotten, locked, by day, in the bedroom where the
whole family tried vainly to sleep by night, learning the highest
facts of life from the worst of teachers: the cramped childish
brain--and going out, at last, upon the street, with passions
prematurely developed and perverted. It could have seen the social
order shape that child into society's enemy: the starved
boy-pickpocket sent to the monstrously misnamed "reformatory"; the
same child branded as a criminal, with none to shelter or to trust
him, and with a knowledge, gained in the state's own institution,
which fitted him to be only a crafty gorilla to harass the state. It
could have seen the fatal line of least resistance as clearly in the
resultant man as it is seen in the life of him that does no more than
wreck a bank or steal a corporation, and, hideous as its course is in
the one instance, it would have seen that the line was the same in
all.
But Mary never doubted her justice, and never regretted it. One only
thought troubled her: she was afraid that, by telling Max, she might
have given him a warning sufficiently early to defeat her own
ultimate purpose. It was a large part of her plan that he should
know whose hand had struck him, and, for a man in his business, the
only way in which she could make that knowledge certain was the way
that she had followed. Yet what if he were in time to profit by her
information? What if, even were he too late, he should guard and
doctor himself with proper caution? She turned the questions over
and over in her mind, but she had always to end in the faith that the
worst had happened.
Sometimes, in the moments of exhaustion from the mad round of these
inquiries, she reverted for relief to matters that touched her less
nearly, and endeavored to occupy herself with the affairs of others.
She thought of Dyker, and without resentment. She knew that he would
use her written retraction to regain Marian's confidence, and she
hoped that he would be successful. Again she fell to speculating
upon the fate of Carrie Berkowicz and to wondering what had become of
Katie. But upon her own past and present she did not permit herself
to dwell, and always, with the certainty of a machine, her brain
recurred to Max and her vengeance on him.
On the third evening, however, her landlady, entering with supper,
reminded her, without mincing matters, that the rent was due, and
Mary recalled that her little stock of money was exhausted.
"Can you wait till to-morrow morning, Mrs. Foote?" she asked.
Mrs. Foote was an ample woman, with round cheeks and robust frame,
whose only dissipations were an over-indulgence in ritualism, babies,
and the hospital. She had a high-church cleric to whom she confessed
the sins of her neighbors; a wraithlike husband whose sole occupation
appeared to be that indispensable to the regular increase of her
family--and whom she would otherwise have failed altogether to
tolerate--and such a passion for being ill that she could never quite
believe in the illnesses of others.
"I can wait just that long, Miss Morton," she said; "but I'm
sufferin' so from rheumatism in my fingers that I just know my old
gastric trouble is comin' on ag'in, an' that'll mean another of them
hospital-bills."
Mary raised her aching head.
"You won't have to wait any longer," she answered.
"I'm glad of it, Miss Morton," responded Mrs. Foote, "for there was a
young lady lookin' at this room to-day an' she offered me a dollar
more a week for it, an' I wouldn't like to lose you."
"You won't lose me," said Mary, to whom even sustained conversation
was physical pain. "I'm goin' out to-night, an' I'll have plenty for
you by the mornin'."
"You're sure?" asked the landlady.
"Of course I am. It'd be a pity if I couldn't earn that much."
Mrs. Foote looked at Mary's face and seemed to doubt the foundation
for her assurance.
"Well," she sighed, "I certainly hope you can."
For some minutes after the door closed, Mary lay still. She had
again been brought face to face with the most poignant of tragedies,
the tragedy of living.
An hour earlier, had she questioned herself, she would have said that
she was careless of life, that neither this earth nor the quitting of
it interested her, that continued existence was a matter of
indifference. Then she was in that state of exultation above things
mundane which is produced only by great sorrow, great joy, or the
great revenges that are both grief and triumph. But now the words of
the landlady had brought her back from the indulgence of
contemplation to the necessity of action. Mary's insidious,
implacable disease had completed what her business had begun, and
what her business alone would have completed far more slowly. The
few emotions that she was now capable of feeling were the more
intense because of their rarity, but their intensity was equaled by
their brevity and, when the moment had gone, it left her even more of
a moral weakling than it had found her.
She knew Mrs. Foote and her tribe too well to deceive herself as to
what must happen should the morning dawn upon an empty stocking.
Life held nothing for which Mary greatly cared, but the instant of
death contained all of which she was afraid. She did not greatly
want to harm others by plying her trade in her present condition, but
she could not think of others. Each step would be a separate wound
to her tortured body and her throbbing head, but she understood that
the landlady had to wring out the rents by the means that conditions
had forced upon her; and so the worst of fears, the fear of poverty,
which is the fear of death, took this sick woman from her bed,
dressed her in her best frock, and sent her out into the street.
Along Sixth Avenue, where fortune had often, theretofore, been kind
to her, she met no significant glances. A passing girl or two,
having missed her for the last few evenings, proffered a casual
sympathy; but that was all. Through the open doors of the Haymarket,
she turned in, but there even the women at first disregarded her.
Several men that she recognized in the boxes of the gallery around
the little hall nodded, but immediately looked away. The one man
that she happened to know better than any of the others did not
appear at all to remember her, and his neighbor, who had frequently
accompanied her, signaled elsewhere.
She was lonely. She approached two women who were circling the
floor, arm in arm. She addressed them with the familiarity of the
craft.
"Hello," she said.
The one woman smiled, but her companion, a formidable, tailor-made
personage, swelled with dignity.
"You better beat it," she declared.
Mary flushed.
"What's eatin' you?" she demanded.
"You don't belong here," the woman answered. She made a lofty survey
of Mary's finery, and then added: "Goin'?"
Mary's heart sickened, but she stood her ground.
"No," she said, "I ain't."
The floor-manager was passing. The social arbiter turned to him.
"Will," she asked, and her shrill voice seemed to carry over all the
room; "what's this place comin' to? Throw that Fourteenth Street
woman out o' here!"
This was enough. Mary left the place, and, still aching in every
limb, turned through a narrow cross-street to Broadway. Her eyes
swam as she lingered before shop-windows in the hope that someone she
passed would accost her. Her throat was dry and it hurt her when she
hummed into the ears of careless pedestrians. Nobody seemed to heed
her. The night was cold, and she shook like a recovering drunkard.
She mastered all her strength to speak plainly to a complacent man in
a great ulster.
"Hello!" she said, trying to smile. "What's your hurry?"
The man looked at her and swore.
"You must think I'm blind," he ended.
She knew that she looked ill, but she knew that she must find money.
She pleaded with age, because she knew it to be æsthetically
tolerant; she ogled youth, because she knew it to be inexperienced;
and she stationed herself at last near a saloon in a poorly lighted
quarter, because she concluded that the men leaving such places were
the only men to whom she was just then fitted successfully to appeal.
It was one o'clock in the morning before she could induce even one of
these to give way to her, and he, staggering with drink so that she
had to support him with all her ebbing powers, insisted on stopping
in an alleyway when, for the first time, she picked a pocket. A
dollar and a half was all that she had as she left him, and the next
dark figure that she stopped--she did not look at his face or care
what sort of face it was--answered her with sharp laughter.
"A two-spot?" he cackled. "You have a few more thinks comin', old
girl!"
"A dollar?" suggested Mary, tremulously.
"I got just a half--an' you ain't worth a cent more."
She took it--what would she not have taken?--and she worked on into
the dawn, on with a mounting fever and a sick determination, knowing
now that her chances grew with the approach of morning and finding
herself, when at last the morning came, with scarcely a dollar beyond
the sum due for rent.
During all the months that followed she skirted the dire edge of
starvation, more than half the time too ill to rise from her bed and
aware that she was at no moment fit to rise. As her cold grew
steadily better her deeper illness steadily increased. It thrived on
every exertion and seemed to gain each atom of strength that she
lost. Things might thus continue for almost any period, but she knew
that her manner of life forbade absolute cure, and that, at the end,
there waited a slow and loathsome death. Anticipation made her
faint; the melancholia and terror, which are symptomatic, sometimes
nearly maddened her. The last vestiges of the moral sense, so early
injured by previous experience, were almost wholly destroyed; there
was no social consciousness; the appeal of the individual widened
until it occupied her entire horizon; there was room for nothing but
the craven passion for life.
Fat Dr. Helwig, when she went to see him, blinked at her out of his
deep-set eyes, and told her that she was not taking sufficient rest.
Mary twisted her helpless hands.
"How can I afford to take it?" she asked.
"Save your money," said he, patting her thin shoulders, and chuckling
prosperously. "You girls never put aside a cent."
"We don't earn enough."
"Poof! That's what you all say. I know--I know. We men aren't such
fools as you take us for."
But Mary, as each evening she made up before her little mirror, noted
the gradual depreciation of her wares; each week she found it harder
to pay rent and retain enough money for food. Mrs. Foote seemed to
come every day, instead of every seventh, and yet each night business
grew more difficult. Whenever Mary missed a few evenings, or
whenever she changed her hunting-grounds, the police needed fresh
payments. She surrendered one uptown cross-street after another. At
last she deserted Broadway and patrolled only that Fourteenth Street
which the woman at the Haymarket had so scornfully referred to and
which had so wonderfully burst upon Mary's sight when she first
stepped from the Hudson Tunnel upon the surface of Manhattan.
Spring, summer, and autumn passed, and a lean winter followed them.
Mary caught another cold and was ill for a week. She went to work
too soon and had to go back to bed for several days and remain idle
for several nights. At last, with the ancient fear of the white
race--the fear of that poverty which is death--gnawing at her vitals,
she struggled to her feet and tramped once more along Fourteenth
Street from Sixth Avenue to Third.
But now the sword descended. Even the Fourteenth Street saloon best
known for her purposes gave no fish to her net, and Eighth Street was
little better. She was too tired to go farther; she had, the next
morning, to offer Mrs. Foote only a third of what was due.
The landlady, whose bulk seemed to crowd the hall-bedroom, leaned
heavily against its frail door. Mary thought the woman's slow, brown
eyes more than commonly suspicious and her round face implacably
hard. The tenant, with all explanation frozen upon her lips, handed
over the clinking bits of money. They fell into the big, extended
palm as a few drops of water might fall into a basin. Mrs. Foote
began slowly to count the coins.
Mary watched, in fascinated silence, the counting of those few pieces
of silver, each one of which seemed stained with her blood. She saw
the landlady's expression change to one of incredulity. She saw the
counting repeated.
Mrs. Foote again thrust out her grimy fingers.
"What's this?" she demanded.
"It's----" Mary looked at the floor. "It's the rent," she
concluded, in a whisper.
"_What's_ the rent?"
"That's all I have--just now. I thought--I thought, considerin' how
long I've been here, you might wait a day for the rest, Mrs. Foote."
The landlady opened her hand, and Mary's little store of coin dropped
to the bed.
"I can't take this," she said.
"You mean," asked Mary, with a quick gasp of hope, "that you'll let
me keep it till I get the rest?"
"No, I don't mean nothin' of the sort," said Mrs. Foote. "I mean
I've got to have the whole bill--right now."
Mary's heart sank.
"That's all I have," she said.
She had sunk to a seat on the tumbled bed, beside her scattered
coins. Her thin hands were locked across her knees; the dirty pink
kimona slipped lower from her shoulders at every frequent cough, and
her eyes sought those of Mrs. Foote in dumb appeal. Her russet hair
fell dully disordered about her hollow cheeks, and the rouge on her
lips was purple.
"I'm sorry," pursued Mrs. Foote, who was too used to such incidents
greatly to concern herself; "but I've got to make my living like
anybody else does."
"I was expectin' some money this evenin'," said Mary.
"Hump!" sniffed the landlady.
"You don't believe that?"
"I don't care, Miss Morton; I can't care."
"But I"--Mary's fingers knotted tighter about her knees--"I was
promised it," she lied, "an' I'm dead sure to get it then."
"I've heard that so many times," said Mrs. Foote, "that I knowed it
by heart three year' ago."
"I could pawn somethin'," suggested Mary.
The landlady swept the bare room with a critical glance.
"What?" she asked.
There was no adequate answer to be made. Mary had tried to pledge
her coat a few days before, and had been offered only an inadequate
twenty-five cents for it.
"Then you won't--you can't wait?"
"No, I can't. I'm a sick woman myself; my rent's due, Miss Mary, an'
the honest truth is that there's such a lot of women wantin' rooms
that I'd only be doin' a injustice to my children not to take in a
lady that could pay prompt--for a while."
Mary said nothing more. She packed her few belongings into her
trunk, left it in the hall to be called for, and, as the chill
evening fell, went away from the house with no idea where she was to
find a lodging for the night. For an hour, though she was still
weak, and the time was as yet so early, she walked up Broadway and,
in the Forties, turned eastward for a few blocks, and so south again.
Not far from the Grand Central Station she saw a little crowd
gathered at a corner, and she stopped, rather for the luxury of
standing still than from any curiosity.
The place was a church. Colored lights streamed from its rich
stained-glass windows. Through its swinging doors there stole the
scent of flowers and the sound of delicate music. A long row of
carriages, the coachmen walking up and down to keep warm, stretched
far around the corner.
Mary, shivering, worked her way quietly through the group of men and
women on the sidewalk. In order to avoid a particularly entangled
portion of the press, she started to walk along the steps by the
tower-entrance, and then, seeing a side-door open, she listlessly
turned toward it and looked in.
Far away up the vaulted nave the altar stood, white with damask and
yellow with candles. The chancel was a garden, the whole building
heavy with scent. Acolytes in scarlet were grouped about the robed
priests. The choir had risen and, preceded by a lad that bore aloft
a great brass cross, were forming into a singing procession, which
slowly filed down the center aisle.
With a subdued scuffle and swish, the congregation also rose as the
double line of choristers moved between them. Women craned their
necks and men, pretending to look stolidly ahead of them, looked
really out of the corners of their eyes. The choir, at the main
door, divided and stood still. High overhead a deep-toned organ was
playing the wedding-march from Lohengrin, and through the respectful
line of white-clad boys there moved a man of regular features with
lowered lids that hid his eyes, and a crisp brown mustache, which
concealed his lips, and, on his arm, in the costume of a bride, a
tall, graceful, pure woman, whose face was like a Greek cameo and in
whose hand was a huge bunch of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley.
The fingers of a policeman touched Mary's arm.
"You'll have to get back," he said. "The people'll be comin' out in
a minute."
But Mary did not wish to move.
"I've got a right here," she answered.
"You?" The policeman looked at her, and then laughed. "What right?"
he asked.
"Isn't that Miss Lennox?"
"It was."
"And Judge Dyker?"
"Sure."
"Well, I gave him his marriage-license."
The policeman's good-nature was amused, but he forced her back to the
street.
"No use," he said.
"An' I guess," said Mary bitterly--"I guess I paid for the bride's
bouquet."
He did not reply, nor would she have heard him had he spoken, for in
the stream of lesser guests now flowing from the rear of the church,
which had been assigned to them, she was met by Katie Flanagan.
Not the piquant Katie of that photograph which used to adorn the
bureau in the shabby tenement of bachelor Hermann Hoffmann, or the
saucy girl of the second-hand clothing-store, or yet the frightened
clerk that had at first evaded and at last defied the whiskered Mr.
Porter. Those days were patently passed; Katie, like many another
strong soul, had faced temptation and conquered it; and in the stead
of the old days had come new days that brought a maturity and a
dignity with which Katie was consciously satisfied. Her blue eyes
were as glad as Mary remembered them, but their happiness was calm;
her black hair was gathered in a formal knot, and her gown, though a
better gown than that she used to wear, was of a simplicity almost
severe.
Nevertheless, when she saw Mary, who sought evasion, Katie came
frankly forward with outstretched hand. She recognized with regret,
the change in her former acquaintance, but, knowing, as she must have
known, its cause, she decided to ask no questions concerning it, and,
if she offered no assistance, she at least proffered no advice.
"I just come to see the last o' Miss Marian," she explained. "Near
the half of old Rivington Street's been tucked in here among th'
swells to give the good word to her--Jews an' Irish--an' if the
rabbis won't mind for the sheenies to come to such a heathen church,
I thought Father Kelly might manage to forgive me."
Mary's brain was just then too dull to make any but a commonplace
answer.
"You're lookin' well," she said.
"I ought to be, though there's a youngster expected. I tell
Hermann--we was married a few weeks after last election--I don't know
how we'll keep a family; but he just whistles an' says we'll make out
some way, an' I guess we will."
"I'm glad," said Mary, "that you're married."
"Well, so am I--most of the time. Of course, the man has some queer
ideas, but I'm doin' me best, with Father Kelly's help, to get 'em
out of the head of him, an' nowadays, when he goes to one of them
Socialist meetin's by night, I make him make up by goin' with me to
early mass next mornin'."
She paused and surveyed again the pale woman before her. Essentially
Katie had not changed. She had still, and would always have, the
big, kind heart and the ready hand of her earlier days. But her
condition had altered, and Mary's had evidently again fallen; she
looked through an alien atmosphere, and her gaze was distant: the
responsibilities and adjustment of young married life shackled her,
and must continue to shackle her until they were no longer new. She
did not know how to suggest any assistance, did not even believe that
it was desired; but, though she still felt that she must refrain from
intimate inquiry, one effort she tried to make.
"An' you," she asked--"how're you gettin' on, Mary?"
Mary bit her lip.
"Fine," she answered, huskily.
"Are you----? There ain't----?" Katie floundered in a maze that she
would, a few months previously or a few months in the future, have
cut her way through with a strong directness. "There ain't nothin' I
could----?"
Mary's head shook, almost mechanically. It was not entirely that she
felt unable to accept assistance from her former protector; it was
rather that she felt only that she must run away.
"Oh, no," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm doin' grand."
The gala crowd was sweeping about them. It jostled both girls and
threatened momentarily to separate them. After all, there was
nothing more to be said.
"I--I got to go," murmured Mary. "I got an appointment----"
"But you'll come to see us sometime, won't you Mary?" asked Katie,
and she gave her address. "We'll have a fine party at the
christening an' I'll want you to see the baby."
"Oh, yes," said Mary; "yes, of course."
But Katie was hesitant.
"You're sure I can't do nothin'?" she asked.
"No, no. I----" Mary caught and pressed with what warmth there was
left in her fingers, the Irish girl's hand. "Good-by," she
concluded, and then, in order to keep up the farce of an appointment,
she got upon a passing car.
Even if panic had not possessed her, she could not have accepted
anything that Katie might offer. The most that could have been given
her would have been but temporary, and what she must have was a means
of earning a living.
She rode well downtown, and then walked farther southward. She
slipped along the broad, yellow-lighted Bowery, gathering one or two
quarters on her way, and wandered into the narrow, serpentine,
fevered alleys of Chinatown. When an ugly rain began to fall, the
open door of a mission attracted her, and she went in to rest.
It was the typical mission-room, very different from the uptown
church where she had seen the wedding. This new place was mean; it
had a low ceiling and was none too clean. The lights were flaring
and the dull walls were enlivened by boldly lettered Bible texts.
The air was close; on the platform, at the front of the place, a
well-fed man was pleading, in sweat and tears, the cause of his
religion; nearby, his double was making ready the reed-organ.
Crowded into the unsteady benches were pimpled boys with lolling
mouths and preternaturally knowing eyes; youths already old in
disease and drink and crime; full-grown men, frog-eyed or blear-eyed,
who needed only the faculty of firmness and the chance to cultivate
it; old men, who had lost their hold upon work in a country still too
barbarous to pension its aged; and, though there were no young girls,
here and there Mary saw a few women, bedraggled, sodden, hideous,
because men had at some time thought them _chic_, dainty, beautiful.
One of the "workers" attached to the place--a bland, prosperous man,
with a pleasant smile--approached Mary and shook her hand as if he
were an old acquaintance. He had fat red cheeks, firm teeth, and
kindly eyes.
"I'm glad to see you, sister," he said. "Are you saved?"
Mary's childhood had heard some of the phraseology of evangelicalism.
She understood, but she had come to receive worldly, not spiritual,
warmth.
"No," she said, "I ain't."
The "worker," however, was accustomed to that reply. He patted her
shoulder.
"Don't you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked.
"Well," said Mary, "I never thought much about Him."
She looked at the floor. She was cold and hungry and afraid.
"Then," responded the man, with genuine earnestness, "you ought to
begin to think. No man knoweth the hour of His comin'. He is ready
with the Free Gift. Don't you want to come to Him?"
Mary's life had been one in which there had been small time for the
cultivation of religious emotion, and no time at all for the
cultivation of religious thought. At her home she had learned as
much by rote as she had had to learn, but what she got she held only
as so many tasks performed. The words were lessons to be mastered;
if they had any relation to facts, those facts were things not to be
faced until an age of discretion, and, pending the arrival of that
age, the lessons had been stored away with a bland, childish
practicality. What followed later had driven out all that preceded
it. The shock of her capture; the wild, new order of existence; the
endeavor to escape; the battle of service among new conditions; and,
at last, the dulling of all the finer sensibilities and the final
fight for a mere chance to continue alive--these were circumstances
neither propitious to theology nor favorable to faith.
She glanced at the mission-worker, and then glanced away.
"I dunno," she said. "I guess I ain't the kind of woman religion can
do much for."
"Don't say that," protested the man. His eyes shone with zeal and
his voice was tender. "His grace is free for all who come. His
mercy is from everlastin' to everlastin'. I've been a sinner
myself"--the speaker's voice swelled with a real pride--"a terrible
sinner, an' I know what I say, praise the Lord. The meaner an' viler
we are, the more Jesus needs us. Just open your heart. Just accept
Him, an' you'll never know no more trouble in this world nor the
next."
"Would I get a job?" asked Mary.
The man shook his head, sadly.
"That ain't no way to think about salvation," he declared. "What's
freely given ought to be freely received. Now is the appointed time."
"But I gotta make a livin'."
"I know it, I know it. We've all got to do that, but ain't it better
to make one an' be saved than to make one an' be sent to hell-fire?"
She assented. "Only," she added, "I don't want to starve, even if I
am saved."
It was his old difficulty.
"I know," he repeated; "an' we'd only be too glad to get you work if
we could, but times are hard an' we've got a waitin'-list of fifty at
this very minute. Here's some meal-tickets, sister, fer we want to
do what we can, an' we know it's hard to save souls on empty
stomachs. You just think it over an' see if I'm not right about
religion."
She took the tickets and used them at a five-cent eating-house during
the next day. That night she managed to secure a bed in a room over
a saloon--a narrow, stuffy room that she shared with three other
women of her own sort; but the next night she earned nothing, and she
had been compelled to pawn her coat for food. She sought a bench in
Union Square, where two tattered men made room for her. They gave
her, to wrap about her chest, newspapers that they had gathered from
the gutter; and she dozed until the sharp command of a policeman
scattered her comrades, when they made their way to the rear of the
Flatiron Building and stood, for warmth, over a grill that sent up
occasional blasts of heat from the basement.
The rapidity with which one may descend from bad to worse is to be
believed only by those who have been penniless and friendless in the
larger cities. During the nights that followed, when Mary's clothes
grew speedily ragged, dirty, and odorous, and when she earned just
enough money to postpone starvation, she became a familiar of
Chinatown, learned something of its blind paths and the tangled
passages of its fetid tenements. The almond-eyed Orientals
tolerantly received her. She came to know the heavy odors of the
opium, to chat with clay-white American girls, morphine-eaters, and
cocaine and chloral victims, whose Chinese lovers were kind to them,
and who never wanted to breathe the open air. She was borne with,
but the market was over-supplied there, and she found no regular
keeper. She came to envy the drug-enslaved women who had first
sought the Mott Street district as missionaries, even the little
Mongolian girls over whose slavery, so much lighter than her own, the
city, from time to time, grew ludicrously excited. Her illness
progressed, but, thanks to her hardy birth and the exercise of what
care was at all possible, it progressed with a step so tardy as to
give no indication of reaching its tragic end, other things being
equal, for two years or more. She did not again go to see the
doctor; she did not have to. The only things that he could have
advised were the things that she was in no position to do. Beyond a
certain limited amount of routine care, she was helpless.
One night, wet and exhausted, she met a sailor in Chatham Square, and
drank long with him.
"Where you goin' to sleep to-night?" he asked, as they were about to
part.
He was a short, black-browed man, who walked with a bow-legged roll.
The short sleeves of his jacket displayed sinewy, bronze wrists with
anchors tattooed upon them. His neck rose out of his low-cut
mariner's shirt like the neck of a brown, fighting bull, and his
black eyes, set deep under bushy, frowning brows, were red, like
those of a bull that is dangerous. He had been taken with a drunken
passion for her, and though, when he kissed her, his upper lip
scraped her face like a file, though his incessant grip of her hands
hurt her, and though his heavy foot, seeking hers beneath the
saloon-table, nearly crushed her own, she had to answer him with the
professional smile.
"I dunno where I'll sleep," she said. "I guess Lee Hung's Letty'll
put me up."
The sailor chucked her pointed chin so roughly that she thought her
neck would crack.
"Why don't you come along o' me?" he inquired.
"Where's that?"
"To one o' our places. I know a beauty, an' I'll take good care o'
you, an' afterward you can stay on."
"One of your places? What's those?"
"Places we visit. Places for seafarin' men. I tells you I knows a
daisy--Big Lou's keepin' it--an' they needs a new gal there, for I
stopped in as I come ashore this evenin' an' they tole me the one I
knew after last voyage was buried only yesterday."
Mary shuddered.
"Is it all right?" she asked.
"All right? Course it's all right. But mind you,"--his black eyes
leaped into a sudden threat--"I'm takin' you to-night. No
philanderin'. For this night y'er my gal."
She looked away.
"Mind you that," he drunkenly repeated. "I'm mostly as gentle as
Nathan's lamb, but when I'm tricked I'm ready with my hands. It's
all right. It's a good place for a good time. Plenty to drink an'
the best o' company. Better come. I can fix it so's you can get a
steady job there."
She shivered again, but she could not see why she should shiver.
After all, she was glad to learn of any place where she would be sure
of food to eat and a roof to cover her--and so she came to
Summerton's.