the little room. Bread I eat with lard on it. It costs little. Of the
six dollaire I save much. Ah, _oui_! Hist! Not for me I save it. Ah,
_non_! To the priest I give it. To the good priest. And the poor childs
what are sick--he send 'em to the farm--to have some outdoors. But I
don't sleep the night because I think the dollaire come so slow--and so
many poor childs are sick.”
He picked up his rake and pike and went back to his labor.
The man under the tree did not lose his smile.
“Yonder is a brand of altruism that cannot be hypnotized or modified
like Knight Chick's, I fear,” he muttered. “You'd have to hit it on the
head--kill it with sticks! And my definition of philanthropy has always
been, 'giving away something you don't want in order to get yourself
advertised.' Etienne is interesting. He is the only philanthropist I
have even found who will eat lard instead of butter so as to save more
for his philanthropy.” Now his smile grew hard. “Don't dare to open your
eyes, Altruism,” he commanded. “I saw the lids quiver a minute ago while
that old man was talking, but remember you're hypnotized.”
He saw the rack-tender lay down his pike so as to give both hands to his
big rake.
He was pulling at something heavier than the ordinary flotsam--something
far below the surface of the water. At last it broke through the black
surface of the turbid flood. To Walker Farr, glancing carelessly, it
seemed like a bedraggled bundle of rags with something white at the end.
“You come help, m'sieu',” called old Etienne. “It is a dead woman.”
Together they pulled the rake's dread burden slowly up the bars of the
rack.
“You seem pretty cool about this,” gasped the young man.
“It is no new thing. Many drown themselves--they drown in the canal so
they will be found. Women and girls, they drown themselves. So! Help me
carry her.”
Farr gazed down on her after she had been laid on the canal bank. She
was young, but thin and work-worn.
“Weaver,” commented old Etienne, laying back on her breast one of the
hands he had lifted. “There's the marks on the fingers where she have
tie so many knots so quick.”
There was a key on her breast; it was secured by a cord that passed out
of sight between the buttons on her waist. Farr stooped and pulled on
the key. A folded paper came with the key; the other end of the cord was
tied around the paper.
“You must not--it is for the coroner,” protested Etienne. “I know the
law--I have drag up so many.”
“My besetting sin is curiosity,” declared the young man, his calm
impertinence unruffled. He pulled the wet paper from the noose of the
cord. “We'll read this together.”
“I cannot read,” confessed the rack-tender. “You shall read it to me.”
His little black eyes gleamed now with curiosity of his own. “I shall be
glad to hear. The coroner he never read to me.”
The water had spread the ink and spotted the paper, but Farr was able to
decipher the missive. He read aloud:
“'My head has grown bad since my husband died. It is grief, the awful
heat, the work at the looms. They said if I would give my little girl
away she could go to the country and grow well. But I could not give her
up for ever. I could not earn the money to send her to board. I could
not earn the money except to buy us bread here in the tenement block.
And my bad head has been telling me it's best to kill myself and take
her with me. So I kill myself before my head grows so bad that I might
take away my little girl's life. It belongs to her and I hope she may
be happy. Will somebody take her and give her happiness? It is wicked to
kill myself, but my head is so bad I cannot think out the right way to
do. This is the key to the room in Block Ten.
“'MRS. ELISIANE SIROIS.
“'Her name is Rosemarie.'”
Walker Farr finished reading and stared into the glittering eyes of the
old man.
Etienne Provancher swore roundly and furiously--the strange, hard oaths
that his ancestors had brought from the Normandy of the seventeenth
century.
“So you shall see--it is as I have say.” He shook his fists again at the
mill. Its open windows vomited the staccato chatterings of the
myriad looms. “It chews up the poor people. Hear its dam' teeth go
chank--chank--chank!”
“The Gallic imagination is always active,” said Farr, joggling the key
at the end of the cord and eyeing it with peculiar interest. “But in
this case it seems to picture conditions pretty accurately. I wonder
just what a visitor would find inside the door that this key fits!”
“You shall go tell them at the office of the mill,” commanded Etienne.
“Tell them they have killed another. They will telephone for the
coroner. I will give the paper and the key when he come.” He held out
his hand. “It is the law.”
“I have a natural hankering--sometimes--to break the law,” affirmed the
young man. “I feel that fatal curiosity of mine stirring again, Friend
Etienne. I will send the coroner. But coroners love mysteries. If we
give him the letter it will take all the spice out of this affair. Let's
make him happy--he can drag out the inquest and give his friends a long
job on the jury.” He smiled and started away, shaking his head when the
old man protested shrilly. “Better say nothing about this letter and
the key. You'll get into trouble for letting a stranger come in here and
carry away evidence. Better keep out of the law, Etienne.” He grabbed
the “No Trespassing” sign for a hand-hold and climbed over the fence.
“I'll come back and tell you, Etienne. But keep mum,” he advised.
“It is his smile--it makes me break the law,” mumbled the old man.
VIII
THE KEY TO A DOOR IN BLOCK TEN
Walker Farr gave the first policeman--a fat and sweltering individual--a
piece of gruesome news and in return casually asked the location of
Block Ten.
The policeman grudgingly growled the information over his shoulder while
waiting for the station to answer the call from his box.
The young man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an
interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and
squalor, bearing the mark of corporation niggardliness in their cheap
lumber and stingy accommodations.
The hallway that Farr entered was narrow and stifling--stale odors of
thousands of dead-and-gone boiled dinners mingled there, and a stairway
with a greasy handrail invited him. The key bore a number. He hunted
till he found a room, far up, flight after flight. Through open doors he
saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of
dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.
“Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin,” Farr
informed himself; “that's why they aren't in the mill.”
Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.
No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.
He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.
It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and
the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above
the average, was compelled to bow his head.
A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner,
hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the
intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror
that grasps the frightened child. Pathetically poor little playthings
were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and
cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from
a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw
all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this
child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the
mother had toiled. Here now the child waited patiently for--for that
water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the canal
bank waiting for the coroner.
And when he realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely,
patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with
those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into
his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul--it
was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity.
She still stared at him, terrorized. Probably she had never seen any
face come in at that door except her mother's.
His pity must have given Walker Farr a hint of how to deal with this
frightened child. He did not speak to her. He made no move toward her.
He smiled!
But it was not the smile he had given the fat plutocrat in the
automobile, nor yet the jocular radiance he had displayed to old
Etienne. It was such a smile as the man had never smiled before--and he
realized it. He did not want to smile. He wanted to weep. But he brought
that smile from tender depths in his soul--depths he had not known of
before--and tears came with the smile.
Before that time the lines in his face had fitted the smile of the
cynic, the grimace of banter, of irony and insolence. But the strange
glory that now glowed upon his features came there after the mightiest
effort he had ever made to control his feelings and his expression.
He smiled!
In that smile he soothed, he promised, he appealed. Then when he saw the
tense expression of fear fade away he smiled more broadly--he provoked
reply in kind. And slowly upon the child's face an answering smile began
to dawn--little crinkles at the corners of the drooping mouth, little
flickerings in the blue eyes, until at last the two beaming faces
pledged--on the part of the man tender protection, on the part of the
child unquestioning confidence.
But he said no word--he dared not trust his voice.
He went down on his knees cautiously, her smile welcoming him now.
He held out his hands. She hesitated a moment and then gave into them
her chiefest possession--her rag doll. It was as if she had pledged her
faith in him. He danced the doll upon his broad palm, and the child's
eyes, dancing too, thanked him for the courtesy he was paying to her
dearest friend.
But Walker Farr realized that something strange and disquieting in the
case of a man who believed himself a cynic was stirring within him.
That hostage of the doll was not sufficient to satisfy the sudden queer
craving. The knowledge of the hopeless helplessness of that little girl
throbbed through him. The memory of the spectacle of what he had left on
the canal bank made the pathos of this little scene in the garret doubly
poignant as he looked into the child's eyes. Never, in his memory, had
he invited a child to come to him.
Now he put out his hand--and it trembled. She snuggled her warm little
fist into his grasp. And then she scrambled up and came and nestled
confidingly against him. She couldn't see his face then, and he allowed
the tears of a strong man who is overcome before he has understood--who
wonders at himself--he allowed those tears to streak his cheeks and did
not wipe them away.
Walker Farr was too perturbed to soliloquize just then in his
philosopher's style, but he did realize that some part of his altruism
had come out of its trance.
And after he had knelt there on the floor for a time he rose and took
the child in his arms and sat down in a creaky rocking-chair and crooned
under his breath, and was astonished to find that she had gone sound
asleep. He stared into the dusk that was gathering outside the dormer
window and wondered what ailed him.
He had heard many feet thudding on the stairs below. The workers were
returning. The beehive was filling. There were many voices, clatter of
dishes, chatter of patois.
He wondered how well the woman Sirois was known in the house--whether
she had relatives--how soon somebody would come and beat upon the door.
He wondered just what disposition was made of children left in this
manner.
If the woman had relatives who were forced to take the child it meant
more of this horrible tenement life. The child in his arms was pale and
thin; her bones seemed as inconsiderable as a bird's.
He did not know much about children's homes, orphanages, institutions
for the reception of the homeless, but it seemed to him that such a
tiny, frail little girl would be very, very lonely in such a place.
The skies grew dark without. He was cramped because he had sat for hours
in one position, fearing to waken her. But when he moved she did not
waken--he did not understand how soundly childhood can sleep. He laid
her on the foot of the narrow bed and looked about the room, shielding
a match with his hands. He had resolved to carry her out of that fetid,
overcrowded babel of a tenement. Where? He did not know. He hunted to
find her belongings. He found a few clothes. There was no receptacle in
which he could pack them. He folded them and crowded the articles in his
pockets. He stuffed in the doll and the rude playthings and hooked the
basket doll-carriage upon his arm. She did not waken when he picked her
up. He tiptoed down the stairs and nobody noticed him, In his own dizzy
mind he could not determine whether he felt most like a thief or a
lunatic. At any rate, he found himself walking the streets of the mill
city at ten o'clock at night, carrying a little girl in his arms and all
her earthly possessions in his pockets.
It came over him at last that the longer he kept her the more uncertain
he became as to what disposal he should make of her, or else he was more
loath to part with her; he didn't exactly know which.
Then she woke and spoke for the first time. “Me is te'bble hungry--and
firsty,” she mourned.
“Good Lord! What's the matter with me?” grunted the young man. “If I had
found a cat or a dog, the first thing I would have done would be to give
'em something to eat. I reckon I must have thought I had picked up an
angel.” To her he said, smoothing her hair with his free hand. “We'll
have sumpin for baby's tummy mighty quick.” He flushed at sound of that
baby prattle from his lips. But it had popped out in the most natural
manner possible.
He headed for the nearest night lunch-cart. He entered with his burden.
He elbowed aside men who were eating sandwiches and pie at the counter.
With complete and rueful knowledge as to the extent of his resources,
he ordered a bowl of bread and milk--“the best you can do for a hungry
kiddie for ten cents,” he added.
“Anything for yourself?” inquired the waiter.
He shook his head and paid for the child's supper with his whole
capital, two nickels. He held her on the end of the counter and,
awkwardly but with tender carefulness, fed the bread and milk to her
with a spoon. A healthy man's hunger gnawed within him and the savor of
coffee from the big, bubbling urn tantalized him. He tipped the bowl to
her lips and she drank the last of the milk with a happy little sigh,
and he went out into the night again, carrying her in his arms.
He understood all the suspicions that policemen entertain in the case
of night prowlers, and knew that they would be particularly and
meddlesomely interested in one who prowled with a child in his arms. The
child began to whimper softly. Her interest in the stranger who had
won her with a smile, her slumber in his arms, her feast in strange
surroundings, had kept her child's mind busy and pacified till then. Now
she voiced childhood's unvarying lament--“I wants my mamma!”
He soothed her as best he could, promising, giving her all manner of
assurance regarding her mother, wondering all the time what was to be
done. Why had he interfered? Why had he taken upon himself the custody
of this mite, so trifling a weight in his arms, but now resting--a giant
of a burden--on his responsibility? He did not know. He owned up to that
ignorance frankly. But he walked on, carrying her, and put away from his
thoughts the sensible alternative of placing her in the hands of those
duly appointed to care for such cases.
He told himself that, as a stranger in the city, he would not be able
to find a refuge--an institution that time of night--and he knew that he
was lying to himself, and wondered why.
The impulse that directed his course toward the canal was rather grim,
but he remembered the tree which had been sanctuary for him that day. He
carefully lowered the little girl over the fence and climbed after her.
And she did not call any more for her mother because this strange new
scene seemed to impress her and fill her with wonderment. She stared up
into the dim, mysterious, rustling foliage of the tree for a long time.
She patted her hands upon the grass as if it were something she
had never seen or felt before. She seemed to be making her first
acquaintance with Mother Nature--claiming the heritage of outdoors that
children so intensely covet. The sloped ceiling and the walls of the
attic room had been sky and landscape for her. She peered into the still
waters of the canal and saw the stars reflected there, and cocked her
ear to listen when sleepy birds stirred above and chirped in their
dreams. And then she fell asleep again and he tucked her within his coat
to keep from her the dampness of the faint mist rising from the canal.
The dawn flushed early and she woke when the birds did, and found so
much to interest her--ants who ran up and down the tree, funny bugs that
tumbled, robins who bounced along the sward on stiff legs--that she did
not ask for her mother nor seem to find at all strange the companionship
of this tall man whose face was so kind.
And so Etienne Provancher found them when he came with his rake and
pike-pole at six o'clock, the hour when the great turbines began to
grunt and rumble in their deep pits.
“It is Rosemarie--I found her in the room,” said Walker Farr.
The old man came close and gazed down on the pallor and pathos of this
little snipped who still stared at the new wonders of outdoors.
“Anodder one, hey? You found her lock up?”
“Yes, and I brought her away--and I don't know just what the matter is
with me, Etienne. I have not been inclined to put myself out for anybody
in this world--man, woman, or child--of late years. I had made up my
mind to let the world run itself.”
“It is the way the rich man say--he do not care. But the poor man should
care--he should try to help odder poor man. He should care.”
“Oh, there are things that can happen to make a man stop caring. But I
brought her away, just the same. I--I woke up--or something. I have
been awake all night--I have been thinking--I had nothing else to do.
Insomnia has made me insane--one night of it!” He laughed when the old
man blinked at him. “I'm so crazy that I want you to help me find some
good woman who will take this child to board in a comfortable home.”
“Who'll pay?”
“I'll pay. Oh, I am completely crazy--I'm going to work--earn money to
pay her board.”
“I know a good woman near by--she have leetle house, cat, plant in
window.”
“That's the kind.”
“I will tell you where she live. You shall say you come from Etienne
Provancher and it will make you good for her.” He paused, raised a brown
finger, then went on. “But you shall not know where she live onless
I may pay half the board money for the poor little one. We have been
togedder in it--I tell some lie to the coroner--we must be togedder in
help the childs.”
There was firm resolve in old Etienne's face and tones.
“Partnership it shall be, my old boy,” agreed the young man, heartily.
“I'm no pig--I won't keep a good man out of a real picnic.” He rose and
swept the child into his arms. “Give me the address and hand her over
the fence to me. I'll have to quit being nurse and find a real job.
By the way, Etienne, I heard a fat man weeping yesterday because he
couldn't get men to dig dirt for the Consolidated Water Company. He
seemed to take a great fancy to me. Where's their office?”
He received both the information and the child after he had climbed the
fence. Etienne was able to point out the little house of sanctuary from
where he stood--and he waved his rake reassuringly from a distance when
the good woman came to the door, answering Farr's knock. He danced
into the house with the child, behind the good woman, who had answered
Etienne's signal with a return flip of her apron; he was trying to bring
a smile to the little face.
“You'll have to lie to her more or less about her mother, good woman.
Etienne and I will tell you all about it when there's time. When she
asks about her mother just give her something to eat and lie a bit.”
He set the child upon the table where the good woman was making fresh
cookies. He piled the little toys about her. “I'm going to market, to
market to buy a fat pig, and I'll be home again, riggy-jig-jig,” he
declared in a singsong that fetched a chuckle from the waif, and she
followed him with a smile as he hurried out. “That smile will sweeten
a day's work in the trench,” he assured himself. “I sure am some
foster-father when I get started!”
A listless clerk at the Consolidated office gave him a ticket to be
delivered to the foreman of construction--the foreman sent him out with
other men on a rattling jigger-wagon. By being very humble, and with the
aid of his smile, he succeeded in begging a corned-beef sandwich for
his breakfast from a workman on the jigger who was carrying his lunch to
work. He ate it very slowly so as to make the most of it.
The new trench was in a suburban plot which had just been opened up by a
real-estate syndicate. It was a bare tract, flat and dusty, and the
only trees were newly planted saplings that were about as large as
fishing-poles. How the sun did beat into that trench! But Walker Farr
threw off his coat and used again his ready asset--his smile. He smiled
at the boss who sneered at the style of “fiddler's hair” worn by a
dirt-flinger--smiled so sweetly that the boss came over later and hit
him a friendly clap on the shoulder and said, “Well, old scout, here's
hoping that times will be better!”
“I'll take her out on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime
and we'll have a lark,” reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot
trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden
devotion to a freakish notion. He seemed to know at last.
IX
THE GIRL FROM TADOUSAC
When the noon hour came Farr went and sat under a spindling tree and
began to read in one of his little books, dismissing thoughts of hunger
with the resoluteness of a man who had suffered hollow yearning of the
stomach and knew how to conquer it.
But he could not escape the keen eyes and kindly generosity of the
fraternity of toilers.
“A topper down on his luck a bit--see his clothes,” said the foreman,
and he took tithes from willing men who were eating from pails that were
pinched between their knees; he carried the food to the young man.
Farr accepted with gratitude, ate with thrifty moderation, and hid what
remained in the pockets of his coat; it would serve for his supper.
He ate that supper after his day's work was done and after he had laved
his face and hands in the overflow from a public fountain in a little
square.
Then he hurried to the house of the good woman.
She was busy with her dishes in the kitchen and Rosemarie was on the
knees of a young woman who sat and rocked in one of the sitting-room
chairs.
Farr entered by the kitchen door and stood there, looking in with some
confusion on the girl and child.
“It is only Zelie Dionne; she is my boarder,” the woman informed him.
“She is a good girl and she has the very nice job in the cloth-hall of
the big Haxton mill. She lives with me because I was neighbor of her
good folks in the Tadousac country, so far away from here in our Canada.
Come! I make you acquaint. You shall see. She is a good girl!”
Zelie Dionne rose and acknowledged the introduction with a French girl's
pretty grace. A bit of a flush lighted the dusky pallor of her cheeks
when Farr bent before her. The bow in her hair was cocked with true
Gallic chic and her gown was crisply smart in its simplicity. Her big,
dark eyes were the wonderful feature of her face, and Farr looked into
them and seemed to lose a bit of his cool self-possession; he faltered
in speech, groping for words in the first commonplaces.
“You must talk together. I must work,” said the good woman. She hurried
back into her kitchen.
The child ran to Farr and climbed upon his knees.
“You have been good to Rosemarie. I thank you,” he said. “I suppose the
good woman has told you how it has happened.”
“Yes, when I came at noon.” Her tones were peculiarly sweet and
compassionate. A touch of accent gave piquancy to what she said. She
looked at him meaningly. “I have been talking to our little Rosemarie
and she will not cry any more for her good mamma who has gone up to
the green hills because she is sick and must rest. So Rosemarie will be
patient and live here and I will be play-mamma.”