The search for Polly was like going down through the open gates of Hell.
Miss Hobbs left her fire burning, and her door half-opened. Then we went
out through the gloomy court into the street.
In the gleam of flickering electric lights, my old feeling of the
unreality of all I saw came back to me. We were in a broad thoroughfare,
where night after night is played the tragedy of a great city’s sin. The
actors passed and re-passed. The scene shifted. We saw the leering faces
of men, and heard the evil laughter of women. The sights and sounds
faded, then came again, but the curtain never fell. Even closed eyelids
could not shut the horror out.
I shrank back and would have given up the search, but the old man’s face
was always before my eyes, begging me to go on; and the woman at my side
knew no fear. She walked with charmed feet. Ruffians on the street
kicked each other out of the way to let her pass; the carousers in every
dance hall and saloon fell back that she might enter; drunken women rose
when she touched them, and followed her home to the fresh beds that she
had made ready for all who would come.
Polly was nowhere here. She must have drifted still lower. We went from
the glaring lights down where, under the tracks of an elevated road, the
streets narrowed and darkened and closed in upon us. We were near the
wharves and the bridges.
Here is cast up a whole city’s refuse. Tides of foul life, subsiding,
leave here on the street, or in dive and den, the sodden-faced women who
have shared the flood of passion in its fury, and must suffer its ebb.
There is nothing lower. There is nothing beyond, except the river, which
runs foul and slimy here along the dirty wharves.
We found a girl waiting on a street corner, alone. Under the little
shawl tied over her head I saw tears on her cheeks. I held out my hand
to her, and she came with us. In one saloon a pink-eyed, foolish woman
clung to us, and followed of her own will when we came away.
But we could not find Polly. There was no one on any street, or in any
drinking-den who looked like the woman that my old friend had called his
“little girl.”
At last, with hope almost given up, we turned toward the Chinese
quarter.
The odour of incense floating from joss-houses, the fumes from
opium-joints, made us faint and sick. But we went on, searching through
thin-walled, whitewashed houses, and climbing narrow ladders to rooms
that Miss Hobbs, in her work of mercy, had earned the right to enter.
Again and again, outside closed doors, Miss Hobbs stood calling “Polly!
Polly!” No answer came. We heard the pattering feet of Chinamen, who
swarmed around us like rats; we saw their sneering faces, and heard
their chuckling laughter....
At last we came away, discouraged.
Nearly all night our weary pilgrimage lasted. When, in the early
morning, my companion said that we must give up the search, we found
ourselves down close by the water. It was dark and sullen: the great
bridges overhead looked black and unholy. Even the moonlight seemed
stained with sin. I reflected with bitterness that it was Easter
Eve,—Easter Eve in a world that was only one great, hideous carousal.
Then, glancing up, I saw the look on Miss Hobbs’s face, and my ears rang
with triumphant music:—
“Christ ist erstanden!
Freude dem sterblichen,
Den die verderblichen
Schleichenden, erblichen
Mängel umwanden”....
We came home in the glimmering dawn, through a city white with Easter
lilies.