He was up the river same time as me, an' gettin' plenty to cry for,
too. But what in what made you try to do anything for one o' them?"
"He said he was an American citizen," answered Miss Pilgrim; "and Mr.
Selby wouldn't help him; so he was qualified. What made it difficult
in his case was that somehow I never found out what he'd done; and
the Chief of Police was queer about him too. I remember once that he
told me that if he were to let the man go, he'd be afraid to sleep at
nights, for fear he'd hear children's voices weeping in the dark. I
couldn't get anything else out of him. And the next time I went,
they'd found out that the Mormon wasn't an American at all; he'd just
been in the States for a couple of years and then come back to
Russia. So there wasn't any more I could do."
Waters put his empty glass upon the square iron tray by the samovar.
He reached under his chair for his cap.
"That's so," he agreed. "You couldn't do nothin' for that feller.
Maybe you'll land with the next one."
He smiled at her across the little table. He understood now why the
gaunt room reflected nothing of her. It was a city of refuge she had
built and the refugees had failed to come; it was a makeshift temple
of her patriotism and her pity. He caught her small answering smile,
noting with what a docility of response her lips shaped themselves to
it. No doubt she had smiled just as obediently at the "Mormon."
"It's a great idea, too," he went on. "Maybe Selby's all right as far
as he goes, but he certainly don't go very far. This here" he
gathered the room into his gesture "starts off where he stops. It's
great!"
It was good to see her brighten under the brief praise.
"Then you see now what I meant when I told you to come here to me?"
she asked. "Because I'll do everything I can, and the Chief of Police
will always listen to me. And you will come, won't you, if you should
happen ever to need help or or anything?"
"Why, you bet I will," he promised heartily. "I reckon I got a right
to. You're my vice-vice and we don't want to waste a room like this."
Watching her while he spoke, he had to hold down a smile which
threatened to show. She needed somebody in trouble and she was
relying on him.
She left open the door for him while he went down the winding
staircase, that he might have light to see his way. When he was at
the bottom, he looked up, to see her head across the handrail,
silhouetted above him and still oddly recognizable and suggestive of
her. Her voice came down to him, echoing in the well of the stairway.
"Good night," it said. "You won't, you won't forget?"
He was smiling as he went forth through the long hollow of the arch
to the dim street; the huddled dvornik with his swiveling eyes saw
him, his face lifted to the light of the numbered house-lamp, still
with the shape of a smile inhabiting his lips. The night wind, bitter
from the water, met him as he went, driving through the meagerness of
his clothes, and still he smiled, cherished his mood like a treasure.
And below his mirth, cordial as a testimony of friendship, there
endured the memory of the barren and lifeless room, waiting for its
fulfillment.
In the lodging which he discovered for himself, he lay that night
upon his crackling mattress, hands under his head, smoking a final
cigarette and staring up at the map of stains upon the ceiling. It
had been a day tapestried with sensations; there was much for the
thoughtful mind of a connoisseur of life to dwell upon; but, as he
lay, in that hour of his leisure, the memory that persisted in him
was of the inner door in the dull room where he had drunk tea and
talked with the girl, and all the suggestion and enticement of it. He
wished that for a moment he could have looked beyond it and viewed
just once the delicate and fragrant privacy which it screened. The
outer room had a purpose as plain as a kitchen; the girl in it had
shown him of herself only that purpose; the rest of her was shut from
him.
He pitched the end of his cigarette from him, turning his head to
watch it roll to safety in the middle of the bare floor.
"I'll go after a job in the morning," he said half aloud to the
emptiness of the mean chamber, and turned to sleep upon the
resolution.
It was nearing noon of the next day when, following the trail of that
redeeming job, he went towards the Mathieson yards. While he was yet
afar off he could see between the roofs the cathedral-like
scaffolding clustering around the shape of a ship in the building;
the rapid-fire of the hammers and riveting guns at work upon her,
plates was loud above the noises of the street. But he went slowly;
he had already been some hours upon his quest, and there was a touch
of worry and uncertainty in his face. It seemed that the world he had
known so well had changed its heart. The gatekeeper at the wharves
where he formerly had driven a winch had refused to admit him, and at
the Russian foundry he had been curtly ordered away. Policemen had
hailed him familiarly and publicly, and twice passing istvostchiks
had swerved their little clattering vehicles to the curb to jeer down
into his face as they rumbled by. The smudged impress of a
rubber-stamp upon his passport and three lines of sprawling Russian
handwriting recording his conviction and punishment had marked him
with the local equivalent of the brand of Cain; henceforward he was
set apart from other men. He pondered it as he went in an indignant
bewilderment; it was strange that others should find him so different
when he knew himself to be the same as ever.
The Scottish foreman-shipwright in the yard office looked up from his
standing-desk, lifting, to the light of the open door a red
monkey-face comically fringed with coppery whiskers, and stared at
him ferociously with little stone-blue eyes. He listened in fierce
stillness while Waters put forward his request to be taken on.
"It's you, is it?" he said then. "I know ye. When did they let ye
out?"
"Yesterday," answered Waters wearily. "Say, boss, it was only for
beatin' up an istvostchik, and I got to have a job."
The fiery monkey-face, pursed in sourest disapproval, did not relax a
line. "Yesterday an' now ye come here! Well, we're no' wantin' hands
just now, d'ye see? An' if we was, we'd no' want you. So now ye
know!"
The angry mask of a face continued to lower at him unwaveringly; it
was almost bitter and righteous enough to be funny. Waters surveyed
it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere
grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but
continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin
shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the
gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to
admit him in future.
Passing again along the cobbled street, he halted suddenly and gazed
about him like a man seeking. Everything was as it had been before,
from the folk moving in it to the pale sky over it. The little shops,
showing idealized pictures of their wares on painted boards beside
their doors for the benefit of a public that could not read; the
cluster of small gold domes on a church at the corner; the great
bearded laboring men in their filthy sheepskins; the Jews, sleek and
furtive; the cabman who doffed his hat and crossed himself as he
drove by a shrine there was not a house nor a man that he could not
identify and classify. He had come back to them from the pain and
labor of his imprisonment confident of what he should find; and it
was as if a home had become hostile and unwelcoming.
"Guess I'll have to be movin' outta this town," he told himself.
"Seems as if I'd stopped here long enough!"
He had time to confirm this judgment in the days that followed. The
approach of winter was bringing its inevitable slackness to all work
carried on in the open air, and the big works could afford to be
scrupulous about the characters of the men they engaged; and the
little tradesmen feared the ban of the police. His slender store of
money came to an end, and but for occasional jobs of wood-splitting
as the supplies of winter fuel came in, it would have been difficult
merely to live. As it was, he dragged his belt tighter about the
waist of the old linen blouse and showed to the daylight a face whose
whimsicality and vagueness were darkened with a touch of the
saturnine. He showed it likewise to Miss Pilgrim when one day she
passed him at the noon hour, hurrying past the corner on which he
stood, wrapped to the eyes in her greatcoat.
She recognized him suddenly and stopped.
"Good morning," she said. "It's, it's a cold day, isn't it?"
Waters had his back to the wall for shelter, and though he stood thus
out of the wind, the air drenched him with its chill like water. He
smiled slowly with stiff lips at the brisk outdoor pink in her
cheeks.
"This ain't cold," he answered. "You won't call this cold when you've
been through a winter here."
"No," she agreed. "I suppose I won't." She shifted diffidently,
looking at him with her frank eyes. "Are you getting along all
right," she asked.
He smiled again; in her meaning there was only one kind of "all
right" and "all wrong." "Why, yes," he replied. "I'm all right, Miss
Pilgrim; an' if I wasn't, I'd know where to come."
She nodded eagerly. "Yes; I don't want you to forget. I I'll always
be glad to do everything I can."
"Sure; I know that," he replied. "An' you? You makin' out all right
too, Miss Pilgrim? That Vice-vice-Consulate o' yours keepin' you
pretty busy?"
The brisk pink flooded across her face in a quick flush, and her
mouth drooped. But her eyes, as always, were steady against his.
"There hasn't been anybody yet," she answered, with a look that
deprecated his smile.
He hastened to be sympathetic. "Too bad!" he said. "With a room like
that all ready an' waitin' too. But maybe it's only that things is
kind o' slack just now; somebody'll be cuttin' loose pretty soon and
you'll get your turn all right."
She made to move on, but paused again to answer.
"The room will always be there if you if anybody wants it," she said.
"Even if nobody ever comes, it shall always be ready, at least.
That's all I can do."
She bade him farewell, with the little nod she had, and passed on,
muffling her chin down into her great cloth collar. Waters looked
after her with a frown of consideration. He was forgetting for the
moment that he was cold, that he had fed inadequately upon gruel of
barley, that he was all but penniless in an expensive and hostile
world. There was astir in his being, as he watched the slight
overcoated figure of the girl, that same protective instinct which
had galvanized even Selby into generosity; it never fails to make one
feel man enough to cope with any array of ills. There crossed and
tangled in his mind a moving web of schemes for aiding and consoling
her.
Each of them had for a character vagueness of method and utter
completeness of result, but none amounted to a programme. Waters, for
all his brisk record, was not a man of action; he was rather a
mechanism jolted abruptly into action by the impulses of a detached
and ardent mind. It was chance, the ironic chance whose marionettes
are men and women, and not any design of his, which turned his feet
that evening towards the room that was always to be waiting and
ready.
He was returning towards his lodging after an afternoon of looking
for work, tired, wearing a humor in tune with the early dark and the
empty monotony of the streets by which he went. The few folk who were
abroad in them went by like shy ghosts; the high fronts of the houses
were like barricades between him and all the comfort and security in
the world. There was mud in the roads and his boots were no longer
weather-proof. Life tasted stale and sour.
An empty droschky, going the same way as himself, came bumping along
the gutter behind him, the driver singing hoarse and broken snatches
of song. He moved from the edge of the pavement to be clear of
mud-splashes as it passed him, and heard, without further concern,
the vehicle draw up level with him and the whistle and slap of the
whip as the istvostchik light-heartedly tortured his feeble horse.
"Her eyes are cornflowers," proclaimed the istvostchik melodiously;
"her lips are-" He was abreast of Waters as he broke off. Five feet
of uneven and slimy sidewalk separated them. Waters looked up; a
house-lamp was above, dull and steady as a foggy star; and it showed
him, upon the box of the droschky, his enemy, the mainspring of all
his troubles. He halted short.
The istvostchik had recognized him likewise. He was something short
of drunk, but his liquor was lively in him, and he wrenched his poor
specter of a horse to a standstill. Upon his seat, padded hugely in
his gown, he had a sort of throned look, a travesty of majesty; his
whip was held like a scepter.
They stared at one another for a space of three or four breaths.
Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles,
was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy
yell.
"Wow!" he howled. "My Amerikanetz, the Foreigner, the jail-bird! Look
at him, brothers!" He waved his whip as though the darkness were
thronged with auditors. "Look at the jail-bird!"
From the gate below the dull lamp a dvornik poked his head forth.
Waters had a sense that every door and window in the street was
similarly fertile in heads.
"Stop that!" he called to the istvostchik. "That's enough, now."
The man upon the little cab rolled on his seat in a strident ecstasy
of eloquence, brandishing arm and whip abroad above the back of the
drooping horse.
"He tried to fight me, and first I beat him terribly oh, terribly!
and then I made a protocol and sent him to prison. See him?" he
bellowed. "See the jail-bird? See the dog?"
Waters swore helplessly. A month before, upon a quarter of such
provocation, he would have flashed into fight; but cold, hunger and
friendlessness had damped the tinder in him. He made to go on and get
away from it all; he started quickly.
"Come back, jail-bird!" howled the istvostchik.
"I haven't done with you, my golubchik, my little prison-rat. Come
back here to me when I bid you. What, you won't? Get on, you!"
The last was to the horse, accompanied by a rending slash with the
whip. The wretched animal jerked forward, and Waters backed to the
wall as his enemy clattered down upon him again.
"That'll do you," he warned as the cabman dragged his horse to a
standstill once more. "I'm not lookin' for trouble. You be on your
way!"
The immense ragged-edged voice of the istvostchik descended upon him,
drowning his protest.
"He runs away from me, this Amerikanetz! He runs away, because when I
find him I beat him I beat him whenever I find him. See now,
brothers, I am beating him!"
And out of the tangle of his gesticulations, the whip-lash swooped
across the sidewalk and cut Waters heavily across the neck.
In the mere surprise of it and the instance of the pain, Waters made
a noise like a yelp, a little spurt of involuntary sound. And then
the tinder lighted.
"Beating him!" intoned the istvostchik, mighty in his moment. "Beat."
It was the last coherent syllable which he uttered in the affair.
With a rush Waters cleared the sidewalk and was upon him, had him by
the pulp of clothes which enveloped him and tore him across the wheel
to the ground. They went down together across the curb, legs in the
gutter among the wheels, a convulsive bundle of battle that tore
apart and whirled together again as the American, with all the
long-compressed springs of his being suddenly released and vibrant,
poured his resentment and soul-soreness into his fists and found balm
for them in the mere spite of hitting somebody.
It was a short fight. The istvostchik, even under his padding, was a
biggish man and vicious with liquor; he grappled at his antagonist
earnestly enough, to drag him down and bite and worry and kick in the
manner of his kind. But the breast of the worn linen blouse ripped in
his clutch and a pair of man-stopping punches on the mouth and the
eye drove him backwards towards the wall. It was then he began to
squeal.
There were spectators by now, dvorniks who came running and
passers-by upon the other side who appeared from nowhere as though
suddenly materialized. There was a sparse circle of them about the
fight when it ceased, with the istvostchik down and flattened in the
angle of the wall and the pavement, making small timid noises like a
complaining kitten. Waters, with the mist of battle clearing, from
his eyes, saw them all about him, dark, well-wrapped figures,
watching him silently or whispering together. He sensed their
profound disapproval of him and his proceedings.
"That'll keep you quiet for a while," he spoke down to the wreck of
the istvostchik.
Only moans answered him; he grunted and turned to go. From the
nearest group of spectators a single figure detached itself and moved
towards him, blocking his path. It revealed itself at close quarters
as a stout, middle-aged man, prosperously fur-coated, with a spike of
dark beard the inevitable public-spirited citizen of the provinces.
"You must explain this disturbance," he said to Waters importantly.
"You must wait here and explain yes, and show your papers. You cannot
walk away like this!"
His companions pressed nearer interestedly. Waters could not know the
figure he cut, with his torn blouse which even in the gloom showed
stains of the mud and blood of the combat.
"Get out of my way!" was all his answer.
"Your papers," persisted the stout man. "I," he puffed his chest, "I
am in the Administration; I require to see your papers. Produce
them!"
The pale oblong of his fat face wagged at Waters peremptorily; he
quite obviously felt himself a spokesman for order and decency and
the divinely ordained institution of "papers."
"I said get out o' my way," said Waters clearly. He put the flat of
his hand against the stout man's fur-coated chest, shoved, and sent
him staggering back on his heels among his supporters. Without
looking towards him again, he passed through them and continued his
way. He heard the chorus of their indignation break out behind him.
It followed him, a cackle of outraged respectability, with here and
there an epithet distinguishable like a plum in a pudding. "Ruffian,"
they called him, "assassin," "robber," and so forth, the innocuous
amateur abuse of men who have learned their bad language from their
newspapers. It was not till he had gone a hundred yards, and the
noise of their lamentation had a little died down, that there emerged
out of the blur of it a voice that was quite clear.
"Hi, you there!" It rang with the note of practiced authority. "Halt,
d'you hear? Halt!"
The tones were enough, without the fashion of the words, to tell him
that a policeman had arrived on the scene. He looked back and saw
that the group of citizens was flowing along the sidewalk towards
him, a black moving blot. He could not distinguish the policeman, but
he knew that the others must be escorting him, coming with him to see
the finish.
There was a corner some thirty or forty yards farther on. Waters
jammed his cap tighter on his head, picked up his heels and sprinted
for it.
"Halt, there!" shouted the policeman. "Halt-I'll shoot!"
Waters was at the corner when the shot sounded, detonating, like a
cannon in the channel of the street. Where the bullet went he did not
guess; he was round the corner, running in the middle of the street
for the next turning, with eyes alert for any entrance in which he
might find a refuge. But the firing had had its intended effect of
bringing every dvornik to his gate, and there was nothing for it but
to run on. He heard the chase round the corner behind him and the
policeman's 'repeated shout; the skin of his back crawled in
momentary expectation of another shot that might not go wild; and
then, with the next corner yet twenty yards away, came the idea.
The mere felicity of it tickled him like a jest in the midst of all
his stress; he spent hoarded breath in a gasp of laughter.
Around the corner that lay just ahead of him, for which he was
racing, was the street in which Miss Pilgrim lived, with her outer
room that was always ready and waiting. Without design or purpose he
had run towards it; an inscrutable fate, whimsical as his own humor,
had herded him thither. Well, he would go there! The matter was
slight, after all; she would explain the whole matter to her Chief of
Police, how the istvostchik had been the assailant and so forth; he
would be released, and her self-appointed function of "vice-vice"
would shine forth justified and vindicated. It all fell out as
dexterously as a conjuring trick.
"Halt!" yelled the policeman. "I know you, halt!"
But he did not shoot again; those southern policemen lack the fiber
that will loose bullet after bullet along a dark street; and Waters
had yet a good lead as he rounded the next corner and came into
cover. The house he sought was near by; as he cleared the angle, he
dropped into a swift walk that the new row of dvorniks might not mark
him at once for a fugitive, and strode along sharply under the wall
where it was darkest. He passed Number Seventeen without a sign from
its dvornik, and in the gate of Number Fifteen two dvorniks were
gossiping and did not turn their heads as he passed. The arch of
Number Thirteen, the house he sought, was close at hand when the
pursuit came stamping round the corner behind him; he heard their
cries as he slipped in through the half-open gate of the arch. The
chance that had brought him hither was true to him yet, for there was
no dvornik on watch; the man had chosen that moment of all others to
step over to gossip with his neighbor of Number Fifteen.
He paused in the blackness of the courtyard to listen whether the
pursuit would pass by, and heard it arrive outside the gate, jangling
with voices. It had gathered up the dvornik on its way. Waters, with
a hand upon the door that opened to the staircase, heard the brisk
voice of the policeman questioning him in curt spurts of speech, and
the dvornik's answers. "Of course, he might have gone in. There is an
Amerikanka here, from the Consulate, and he might have gone to her."
Then the policeman, cutting the knot: "We'll soon see about that!" He
waited no longer, but entered and darted up the stair; he must at all
costs not be caught before he got to Miss Pilgrim.
It was the thought of her and the expectation of her welcome to the
barren room that made him smile as he climbed. Muddy, penniless and
hunted, he knew himself for one that brought gifts; he was going to
make her rich with the sense of power and benevolence. He was
half-way up the second flight, at the head of which she lived, when
he heard the policeman and his following of citizens enter below him
and the stamp of their firm ascending feet on the lower steps. He
took the remaining stairs three at a time. Upon the landing, the door
of the flat stood ajar.
Gently, with precautions not to be heard below, he pushed it open,
uncovering the remembered view of the furniture-cluttered passage,
with the doors of rooms opening from it and the kitchen door at the
end. The kitchen door was closed now; there was no sound anywhere
within the place. Nearest to him, on the left of the passage, the
door of the room in which he had drunk tea was open and dark.
He tapped nervously with his nails upon the door, hearing from below
the approaching footsteps of the hunters.
"Miss Pilgrim," he called in a loud whisper along the passage. "Miss
Pilgrim!"
The bell-push was a button somewhere in the woodwork and he could not
find it. He tapped and whispered again. The others were at the foot
of the second flight now; in a couple of seconds the turn of the
staircase would let them see him, and he would be captured and
dragged away from her very threshold. He had a last agony of
hesitation, an impulse swiftly tasted and rejected, to try a rush
down the stairs and a fight to get through and away; and then he
stepped into the flat and eased the door to behind him. Its patent
lock latched itself with a small click unheard by the party whose
feet clattered on the stone steps.