To those familiar with the brazen and relentless methods of a certain
type of hawk of the underworld, which picks fledglings from the
nest and springlings from the fields and finds life itself only a
hunting-ground in which those mentally or physically weaker than
itself may be enslaved, this description will seem neither strained
nor inadequate. Fagins of sex, creatures who change their women as
they would their coats, they make an easy if reprehensible bed of their
lives, and such of their victims as have known them well testify that
for a while at least in their care or custody they were not unhappy.
So it was with Madeleine and her lover. With amused and laughing
tolerance toward her natural if witless efforts to build up a home
atmosphere about their presumably joint lives, to build for a future
in which they should jointly share, he saw in them only something
trivial or ridiculous, whereas to her it was as though the heavens had
opened and she was surveying a new world. For in his love and care
there was to be peace. Latterly, if not now—for already he complained
of conditions which made it impossible for him to work—the results of
their several labors were to be pooled in order to prepare for that
something better which would soon be achieved—a home, an ideally happy
state somewhere. Even children were in her mind.
The mere fact that he shortly complained of other temporary reverses
which made it necessary for him and her to keep close watch over their
resources, and that for the time being, until he “could arrange his
affairs,” she must find some employment which would pay much better
than her old one, gave her no shock.
Indeed, it was an indescribable joy for her to do for her love, for
love had come, that great solvent of all other earthly difficulties,
that leveler of all but insurmountable barriers. Even now love was to
make her life flower at last. There was an end to loneliness and the
oppressive indifference of the great sea of life.
But, as in the first instance, so now the awakening was swift and
disconcerting. Realizing the abject adoration in which she held his
surface charms and that his thin, tricky soul was the beginning and the
end of things for her, it was all the easier to assure her, and soon
insist, that the easiest and swiftest way of making money, of which she
was unfortunately aware, must be resorted to, for a great necessity
had come upon him. The usual tale of a threatening disaster, a sudden
loss at cards which might end in imprisonment for him and their
enforced separation, was enough.
Swiftly he filled her ears with tales of rescues by women of many of
his men friends similarly circumstanced, of the “fools” and “marks”
that filled the thoroughfares to be captured and preyed upon by women.
Why hesitate? Consider the meagre, beggarly wages she had previously
earned, the nothingness of her life before. Why jeopardize their future
now? Why be foolish, dull? Plainly it was nothing to love, as he saw
it. Should it be so much to her? In this wise she was persuaded.
But now it was not the shame and the fear of arrest that troubled her,
but the injury which love had done and was doing to her, that cut and
burned and seared and scarred.
Love, as she now began dimly to realize once more, should not be so.
More than anything else, if love was what she had always dreamed,
should it not protect and save and keep her for itself? And now see.
Love was sending her out again to loiter in doorways and before windows
and to “make eyes.”
It was this that turned like a wheel in her brain and heart. For in
spite of the roughness of her emotional experiences thus far, she had
faith to believe that love should not be so, should not do so.
Those features which to this hour, and long after, like those features
of her first love, seemed so worship-worth, those eyes that had seemed
to beam on her with love, the lips that had smiled so graciously and
kissed hers, the hands and arms that had petted and held her, should
not be part of the compulsion that sent her here.
No, love should be better than that. He himself had told her so at
first—that she was worth more than all else to him—and now see!
And then one night, fully a year and a half later, the climax. Being
particularly irritated by some money losses and the need of enduring
her at all, even though she might still prove of some value as a slave,
he turned on her with a savage fury.
“What, only...! Get to hell outa here! What do you think I am—a sucker?
And let go my arm. Don’t come that stuff on me. I’m sick of it. Don’t
hang on my arm, I tell yah! I’m tired, damned tired! Get out! Go
on—beat it, an’ don’t come back, see? I’m through—through—yuh hear me?
I mean what I say. I’m through, once an’ fer all. Beat it, an’ fer
good. Don’t come back. I’ve said that before, but this time it _goes_!
Go on, now quick— Scat!—an’ don’t ever let me see yah around here any
more, yah hear?—yah damned piece o’ mush, yah!”
He pushed her away, throwing open the door as he did so, and, finding
her still pleading and clinging, threw her out with such force that she
cut her left eye and the back of her left hand against the jamb of the
door.
There was a cry of “Fred! Fred! Please! Please!”—and then the door was
slammed and she was left leaning disconsolately and brokenly against
the stair-rail outside.
And now, as before, the cruelty and inscrutability of life weighed
on her, only now, less than before, had she hope wherewith to buoy
herself. It was all so dark, so hopeless. Often in this hour she
thought of the swift, icy waters of the river, glistening under a
winter moon, and then again of the peace and quiet of the House of
the Good Shepherd, its shielding remoteness from life, the only true
home or sanctuary she had ever known. And so, brooding and repressing
occasional sobs, she made her way toward it, down the long streets,
thinking of the pathetically debasing love-life that was now over—the
dream of love that never, never could be again, for her.