"It's me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his
well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little
sleeper. I been ringing here--"
"How did you get in?"
"Rang up the janitor--if _that_ matters. Lis'n: you betta hustle into
your clothes quick 's you can if you wanta get home in time to say
good-bye to the old woman."
"Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What--what's the matter--?"
"Dyin'," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she
wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car's waitin', and I dassent
leave it alone. Hustle--y' understand?"
"Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I'll hurry, Butch--"
"See you do, then!"
The boy swung about smartly and disappeared down the well of the
stairway.
Joan closed the door, and leaned against it, panting. Suppose he had
wanted to come in!...
For the moment, this was her sole coherent thought.
Then, rousing, she crept stealthily back to the darkened bedroom,
gathered up her clothing with infinite precautions against noise, and
returned to the sitting-room to dress in feverish haste....
There was an open taxicab waiting in front of the door. As she came out,
Butch bent over and cranked the motor. Straightening up, he waved her
curtly into the body of the car.
"Jump in and shut the door," he ordered briefly, climbing into the
driver's seat.
"But--Butch--"
"Doncha hear me? Get in and shut that door. We got no time to waste
chinnin' here."
Abashed and frightened, the girl obeyed.
Immediately Butch had the cab in motion, tearing eastward at lawless
speed through streets whose long ranks of yawning windows, seen
fugitively in the formless dusk of early morning, seemed to look down
leering, as if informed with terrible intelligence.
She shut out the sight of them with hands that covered her face until
the swift rush of cool air steadied and sobered her, so that she grew
calmer in the knowledge that, in veritable fact (and this was all that
really mattered) "nobody knew"....
Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed
the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet,
aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was
stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement.
Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open.
"You go on up," he ordered. "I'll be around before long--gotta run this
machine back to the garage."
Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door.
"All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her
brother's eyes: "Thank you, Butch."
He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the
power again and drew swiftly away down the street.
For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize
anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since,
it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the
ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights.
Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the
call-button beneath the Thursby letter box.
The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the
shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a
keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her
youth had been shaped toward womanhood.
As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted
to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more
than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left
that mean and sordid place.
Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged
bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night
the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not
a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed
her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and
sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that
inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow.
There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a
little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels
of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby
looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his
daughter's finery.