I hesitate to tell the story of Polly. She is not fit to enter the
presence of these friends of mine. Moreover, I do not know her, for I
never saw her after her disgrace. I remember her as a chubby,
curly-headed child; I remember her as a girl of twelve.
But her fate came to me as an awful confirmation of some facts that the
Anarchist had told me about conditions of work in our large city shops.
I had refused to believe them: they were too sensational. I have learned
since that they are sensational enough to be true.
The day before Easter I was in the office alone, examining reports. The
door opened. Looking up, I saw a feeble old man, who walked unsteadily
as he entered the room.
“I come to see,” he said solemnly, “if you knowed anything about Polly.”
“Polly?” I said inquiringly. Then I recognized the wrinkled face before
me, with its fringe of beard, and I stretched out my hand to my guest.
He had been my host for two summers, long ago, on his farm in Vermont.
“Polly’s gone wrong,” said the old man.
I saw that grief had settled in every line and wrinkle of his
weather-beaten face.
He told me the story very simply. Polly had been restless. They had
grown poorer every year upon their rocky farm, and Polly rebelled
against her narrow life. She had come to the city to work in a shop, and
after three years had given up the struggle and had gone away with a man
who did not marry her.
“I ain’t never been able to understand it,” said her father, looking at
me pleadingly with his pale blue eyes. “It ain’t in the family. I don’t
know how she come by it. I’ve always thought there must be something to
account for it.”
“There are many things that might account for it,” I answered. “She may
have been deceived, or perhaps she was actually starving, and saw no
other way of escape.”
But her father shook his head.
“No, ’twan’t that. She had good pay, a dollar and seventy-five cents a
week at Hempin and Morton’s. She sent considerable money home.”
I groaned. Less than two dollars a week; a dollar to pay for a room;
poverty crying out in the old home; slow starvation, and the inevitable
end.
“She could not live on that in the city!” I cried. “She could not keep
body and soul together. Hempin and Morton’s is a great cheap, gaudy
shop. Hempin and Morton’s women clerks are kept on starvation wages, and
are told, yes, are told by members of the firm, when they rebel, that
pretty girls are not expected to live upon their pay.”
I was quoting the Anarchist.
“You must forgive her,” I went on. “I am sure she suffered more than we
can tell. I am sure she fought bravely before she gave up.”
“I ain’t never blamed her much,” he whispered, his cold blue eyes
gleaming with tears. “Her mother was for lettin’ her go. But every year
since it happened I’ve come up to the city for a spell to look for her.
I heard of your place here, and su’mised you might know something about
her.”
I took the old man to my home. He was too feeble to come with me in my
search. Then I went to the only woman in the city who could find Polly
for me.
That was Miss Hobbs, the little missionary. She lives in a wretched
court, in the wickedest part of the city, down where the great Jewish
thoroughfare of the East End runs across the Italian and the Portuguese
quarters, on its way to Traffic Street.
She is alone except for one girl whom she has taken from the streets.
Together they do what the city charities call ‘rescue work.’ Night after
night they search through the dives and dens and opium-joints of the
city for the women who are stranded there. For every one saved from that
life, twenty drift back to it. Yet the rescue work never stops.
“Polly?” said Miss Hobbs, her homely face lighting up under her
Salvation Army bonnet, “Polly Nemor? That is the name of a beautiful
girl I have been hunting for for weeks. We will look for her everywhere
to-night. You must go with us, for perhaps you can induce her to come
away.”