Chapter I: Pitch My Tent (4)

"I vish," said Isadore, "I could pay my board in vind--vith a little song. Now, I can sing so the Count he would give me all he is vorth to sing so like I sing; but I am not a count--efen on this side."

However this was, Pushkin paid the girl enough attention to turn the poor thing's head, and made her treat harshly my reporter, Kalender, who was deeply in love with her, and spent all his salary on her for flowers, and lavished theatre tickets on her.

The evening before I left I had to call Pushkin down, who had been drinking a little, and I must say, when I called, he came promptly. It was after dinner in "the smoking room," as the apartment was called, and he began to ridicule poor Victoria cruelly, saying she had told him her hair was yellow like that of the girls of his own country, and he had told her, no, that hers was natural, while theirs was always dyed, and she swallowed it.

"She is in loaf mit me. She swallow whatefer I gif her--" he laughed. The others laughed, too. But I did not. I thought of Lilian Poole and Peck. Perhaps, I was thinking of my money, and I know I thought of the account of the ball which took place the day I arrived. I told him what I thought of his ridiculing a girl he flattered so to her face. He turned on me, his eyes snapping, his face flushed, but his manner cool and his voice level.

"Ha-ah! Are you in loaf mit her, too, like poor Kalender, who spent all hees moneys on her, and what she laugh at to make me amused? I gif her to you, den. I too not want her--I haf had her, you can take her."

He made a gesture as if tossing something contemptuously into my arms, and put his cigarette back in his teeth and drew a long breath. There were none but men present, and some of them had stopped laughing and were looking grave.

"No, I am not in love with her," I said quietly, standing up. "I only will not allow you to speak so of any lady in my presence--that is all." I was thinking of a girl who lived in a sunny house, and had once taken a lot of little dirty-faced children to feed them, and once had smiled into my eyes. I only knew her name, but her violets were in my pocket near my heart. I was perfectly calm in my manner and my face had whitened, and he mistook it, for he blurted out:

"Oh! I vill nod? I vill nod speaks in your presence. You vill gif me one little lesson? You who know te vorl so vell. I tank you, Millot!"

He bowed low before me, spreading out his arms, and some of the others tittered. It encouraged him and he straightened up and stepped in front of me.

"I vill tell you vat I vill does," he proceeded. "I vill say vat I tam please before you about anybodies." He paused and cast about for something which would prove his boast. "Tere is nod a woman in tis town or in America, py tam! that vill nod gif herself to fon title--to me if I hax her, and say, 'tank you, Count.' Ha, ah?" He bent his body forward and stuck his face almost into mine with a gesture as insulting as he could make it, and as I stepped back a pace to get a firm stand, he stuck out his tongue and wagged his head in derision. The next second he had turned almost a somersault. I had taken boxing lessons since Wolffert thrashed me. I saw the bottom of his boots. He was at precisely the right distance for me and I caught him fairly in the mouth. His head struck the floor and he lay so still that for a few moments I thought I had killed him. But after a little he came to and began to rise.

"Get up," I said, "and apologize to these gentlemen and to me." I caught him and dragged him to his feet and faced him around.

"You haf insulted me. I vill see about tis," he spluttered, turning away. But I caught him with a grip on his shoulder and steadied him. The others were all on my side now; but I did not see them, I saw only him.

"Apologize, or I will fling you out of the window." He apologized.

The affair passed. The Count explained his bruises by some story that he had been run down by a bicycle, to which I learned he afterward added a little fiction about having stopped a runaway and having saved some one. But I had left before this little touch occurred to him. Mrs. Starling must have had some idea of the collision, though not of the original cause; for she was very decided in the expression of her wishes to have possession of "the dressing room" that night for the "gentleman," and I yielded possession.

The curious thing about it was that one reason I could not pay Mrs. Starling again in advance was that he still had my money which he had borrowed the day after I had arrived.

From Mrs. Starling's I went back to my old boarding-house, kept by Mrs. Kale, as a much cheaper one, in a much poorer neighborhood, where I was not asked to pay in advance, but paid at the end of the month by pawning my scarf-pins and shirt studs, and gradually everything else I had.

I was brought up to go to church, my people having all been earnest Christians and devoted church people; but in my college years I had gone through the usual conceited phase of callow agnosticism; and partly from this intellectual juvenile disease and partly from self-indulgence, I had allowed the habit to drop into desuetude, and later, during my first years at the bar, I had been gradually dropping it altogether. My conscience, however, was never quite easy about it. My mother used to say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced, I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and more. Lilian Poole, however, had no more religion than a cat. She wished to be comfortable and to follow the general habit of the feline class to which she belonged. She went to the Episcopal Church because it was fashionable, and whenever she had half an excuse she stayed away from church unless it were on a new-bonnet Sunday, like Easter or some such an occasion, when she made up by the lowness of her genuflexions and the apparent devoutness of her demeanor for all omissions. I must confess that I was very easily influenced by her at that time, and was quite as ready to absent myself from church as she was, though I should have had a much deeper feeling for her if she had not violated what I esteemed a canon of life, that women, at least, should profess religion, and if she had not pretended to have questionings herself as to matters as far beyond her intellect as the Copernican system or Kepler's laws. I remember quoting to her once Dr. Johnson's reply to Boswell, when the latter asked if Poole, the actor, were not an atheist: "Yes, sir, as a dog is an atheist; he has not thought on the matter at all."

"Dr. Samuel Johnson?" she asked. "You mean the one who wrote the Dictionary?" and I saw that she was so pleased with her literary knowledge in knowing his name that she never gave a thought to the matter that we were discussing, so let it drop.

As David said, that in his trouble he called upon the Lord, so now, in my solitude and poverty, I began once more to think on serious things, and when Sunday came I would dress up and go to church, partly in obedience to the feeling I speak of, and partly to be associated with people well dressed and good mannered, or passably so. The church I selected was a large stone edifice, St. ----'s, with a gilded cross on its somewhat stumpy spire, toward which I saw a richly clad congregation wending their way Sunday morning.

The rector, as was stated in gilded letters on a large sign, was the Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Capon. I cannot say that the congregation were especially refined looking or particularly cordial; in fact, they were very far from cordial, and the solemn verger to whom I spoke, after turning a deaf ear to my request for a seat, took occasion, as soon as he had bowed and scraped a richly dressed, stout lady up the aisle, to look me over on the sly, not omitting my shoes, before he allowed me to take a seat in one of the rear pews.

The preacher--"The Rector," as he spoke of himself in the notices, when he occasionally waived the rather frequent first personal pronoun--was a middle-aged gentleman with a florid complexion, a sonorous voice, a comfortable round person, and fair hands of which he was far from ashamed; for he had what, but for my reverence for the cloth, I should call a trick of using his hand with a voluminous, fine cambric handkerchief held loosely in it. His face was self-contained rather than strong, and handsome rather than pleasing. He was so good-looking that it set me on reflecting what relation looks bear to the rectorship of large and fashionable churches; for, as I recalled it, nearly all the rectors of such churches were men of looks, and it came to me that when Sir Roger de Coverley requested his old college friend to send him down a chaplain, he desired him to find out a man rather of plain sense than much learning, of a good aspect, a clear voice, a sociable temper, and, if possible, a man who knew something of backgammon. His sermon was altogether a secondary consideration, for he could always read one of the Bishop of St. Asaph's or Dr. South's or Dr. Tillotson's. Possibly, it is something of the same feeling that subordinates the sermons to the looks of rectors of fashionable churches. However, I did not have long to reflect on that idea, for my thoughts were given a new and permanently different, not to say pleasanter, direction, by the sudden appearance of a trim figure, clad in a gray suit and large gray hat, which, as it moved up the aisle, quite eclipsed for me "the priest and all the people." I was struck, first, by the easy grace with which the young girl moved. But, before she had turned into her pew and I caught sight of her face under the large hat which had hidden it, I knew it was my young lady, Miss Leigh, whom I had helped up on the train and afterward into her carriage. It is not too much to say that the Rev. Dr. Capon secured that moment a new permanent member of his congregation. Before the service was over, however, I had been solemnized by her simple and unaffected devoutness, and when, in one of the chants, I caught a clear liquid note perfectly sweet and birdlike, I felt as though I had made a new and charming discovery.

The rector gave a number of notices from which I felt the church must be one of the great forces of the city for work among the poor, yet, when I glanced around, I could not see a poor person in the pews except myself and two old ladies in rusty black, who had been seated near the door. I was struck by the interest shown in the notices by my young lady of the large hat, from whose shapely little head with its well-coiled brown hair my eyes did not long stray.

"I have," he said, "in addition to the notable work already mentioned, carried on, through my assistant in charge, the work of St. Andrew's chapel with gratifying success. This work has reached, and I am glad to be able to say, is reaching more than ever before, the great ignorant class that swarms in our midst, and exhibits a tendency to unrest that is most disturbing. This is the class which causes most of the uneasiness felt in the minds of the thoughtful."

I observed that he did not mention the name of "the assistant in charge," and my sympathy rather went out to the nameless priest, doing his work without the reward of even being mentioned.

As to the sermon, I can only say that it was twenty minutes long, and appeared aimed exclusively at the sins of Esau (whom I had always esteemed a quite decent sort of fellow), rather than at those of the doctor's congregation, whom he appeared to have a higher opinion of than of the Patriarchs. I recall the text: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." He made it very plain that to be pious and prudent was the best way to secure wealth. He held up a worldly motive and guaranteed a worldly reward. Such a sermon as that would have eased the most uneasy conscience in Christendom.

When the congregation came out I dawdled in the aisle until my young lady passed, when I feasted my eyes on her face and finely curved cheek, straight nose, and soft eyes veiled under their long lashes. My two old ladies in black were waiting in the end of a pew and, as I observed by their smiles when she approached, waiting like myself to see her. I had already recognized them as the old ladies of the bundles, whom I had once helped on the street. How I envied them the smile and cordial greeting they received in return! I made the observation then, which I have often had confirmed since, that tenderness to the aged, like that to the very young, is the mark of a gentle nature.

I heard them say, "We know who has done the work out at the Chapel," and she replied, "Oh! no, you must not think that. My poor work has been nothing. Your friend has done it all, and I think that the Doctor ought to have said so," to which they assented warmly, and I did the same, though I did not know their friend's name.

As I had nowhere to go in particular, I strolled slowly up the street, and then walked back again. And as I neared the church, I met the rector who had just left his robing-room. He was a fine-looking man on the street as well as in the chancel, and I was prompted to speak to him, and say that I had just heard him preach. He was, however, too impatient at my accosting him and so manifestly suspicious that I quickly regretted my impulse. His, "Well, what is it?" was so prompt on his lips and his suspicion of me was so clear in his cold, bluish eyes, that I drew myself up and replied: "Oh! nothing. I was only going to say that I had just heard you preach--that's all."

"Oh! Ah! Well, I'm much obliged. I'm very glad if I've helped you." He pulled out his watch.

"Helped me! You haven't," I said dryly and turned away.

A quarter of an hour later, as I strolled along the street lonely and forlorn, I saw him hurrying up the steps of the large house which had been pointed out to me as Mrs. Argand's, the great philanthropist.

XVII

THE GULF

As I saw more of the city, its vastness, its might and its inhumanity grew on me. It was a world in itself, a world constructed on lines as different from that in which I had lived as if it had been Mars; a city as different from the smaller cities I had known as if it had been Babylon or Nineveh. The contrasts were as great as they could have been in the capitals Sardanapalus built--structures so vast that they must have dwarfed the towers of Sardis--so rich and splendid that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been outshone--reared their stupendous bulk into the smoky air and cast into perpetual shade all that lay near them. Hard beside their towering mass lay a region filled with the wretched tenements of the poor, and a little further off the houses of the well-to-do. And there was not a greater contrast between the vastness of the one and the pitiful squalor of the other than between the life of the owners of the former and that of the denizens of the closely packed tenements which dwindled in their shadow. Splendor and squalor were divided often only by a brick wall. The roar of the tide that swept through the teeming streets drowned the cry of wretchedness, and only the wretched knew how loud it was. I had never seen such wealth, and I had never dreamed of such poverty.

The vulgar make the parade; the refined pass so quietly as scarcely to be observed. The vulgarity of the display of riches began to oppress me. I discovered later the great store of refinement, goodness and sweetness that was hidden in the homes alike of an element of the wealthy, the merely well-to-do and the poor. But for a time it was all eclipsed by the glare of the vulgar and irresponsible rich. Arrogance, discontent, hardness, vulgarity, were stamped in many faces, and spoke in every movement of many of those I saw, even of the most richly dressed.

I think it was more the vulgarity and insolence of those I saw decked in the regalia of wealth than anything else--than even my own poverty--that changed my views and turned me for a time from my easy indifference as to social conditions toward a recognition that those conditions are ridiculously antiquated, a bent I have never quite got over, though I was later drawn back to a more conservative point of view than, under the hatred of sham and the spur of want, I was driven to occupy for some time. They have no traditions and no ideals. They know no standard but wealth, and possess no ability to display it but through parade. They feel it necessary to prove their novel position by continual assertion. They think that wealth has exempted them from decency. They mistake civility for servility and rudeness for gentility. Their best effort is only a counterfeit, a poor imitation of what they imagine to be the manners of the upper class abroad whose indifferent manners they ape.

"Misery loves company," and when I wanted comfort I left the section of splendor and display, of riotous extravagance and glittering wealth, and went to those poorer than myself; a practice I can commend from experience.

When I got so desperate that I could not stand it any longer, and was afraid I might fall down dead or do myself violence, I used to turn my steps in another direction and walk through the poorer part of the city--not the worst part--where there was nothing but dirt and squalor and filth: that sickened me, and I had never had much sympathy with the class that lived there. They always appeared contented enough with their surroundings and rather to enjoy themselves in their own way. And not the successful workman's quarter. There was an assurance and assumption there that offended me. The assumption bred of sudden success, no matter in what class, is everywhere equally vulgar after its kind. It was the part of the city where the people were respectable, but where they could just hold on with all their struggling and striving, that I used to go into; the part where there were patches, not rags; and sometimes an effort to keep down the dirt, and where a bit of a plant in a little pot or a little cheap ornament in a window told of the spark of sentiment that could yet live amid the poverty and hardness about it. They always place them in the windows, partly, no doubt, to get the light, and partly, perhaps, to show passers-by that there is something within better than might be looked for next door. These people on their holidays always make toward the open country; they try to get away from their robuster, more successful brothers, and get back near to Nature--the old mother that cares nothing for success; and repays only according to the love her children bear her. Here I often walked as I grew more wretched.

In this section I used to see people with whom I felt in touch: a man with the badgered look in his eye that made me know that he was at bay; or a woman with that resigned air which hopeless struggling stamps in the face and binds on the shoulders. These drew me nearer to my kind, and made me feel that there were others in a harder case than I, and gave me a desire to help them. I came to know some of them by sight and the houses in which they lived, and sometimes I spoke to them and exchanged a word or two, and the effort to take a cheerful view with them helped me, and sent me back to my little lonely cubby-hole cheered and in some sort comforted and resolute to hold out a little longer. But it was hungry work.

This element composed the great body of the population, but deep down below them lay a yet lower element weltering in an infinite and hopeless misery to which even the poor class I speak of were alien. They were generically spoken of at times as the criminal classes. They were not this at all, though among them were many criminals--driven to crime by necessity--because there was no means for them to subsist, no possible means nor hope outside of their casual and occasional violation of the statute law by which they secure enough for empty bellies and freezing bodies merely to keep alive. They live among and on the poor, and one of the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty--poverty beyond hope, for they have nothing--not work, nor the hope of work--not even the power to work, if it should be offered them. As the well-to-do look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot, from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless mirth. The eye of the mangy and starving wolf from his thicket gleams dully at the glittering pageant of heartless irresponsibility and waste. Should the pack ever find a leader bold enough to spring, what will be the end?

At present they are hungry enough, but they have not organized; they are not yet a hunting pack, but only scattered bands, slinking about hungrily, fighting and preying on each other, the larger bands with the bolder leaders driving off the weaker and unorganized. But let them all organize once and the end will not be yet.

Day after day I saw my last few dollars leak away, and, though I replenished my thin purse at times by pawning everything pawnable I had, yet this, too, gradually oozed away. Fortunately I had plenty of clothes, which I had bought in my flush days, so I could still make a respectable appearance.

As money got low all sorts of schemes used to present themselves to me to replenish my pocket. One was to go out as a laborer on the streets, clean bricks, or do anything. I was not lazy. I would have walked around the world for a case. I do not think I was ashamed of it, for I knew it was respectable, but I was afraid some one I knew might pass by; I was afraid that Pushkin or Mrs. Starling might see me, and--yes, that that young girl from the colonial house might recognize me. I had often thought of her violets since I had dropped them into my pocket-book. And now, when this idea came to me, I took them out and looked at them. They still retained a faint fragrance. What would be the result if she should pass by and see me cleaning bricks--me a laborer, and Pushkin--the thoughts came together--should see me? I would win on my own line if it took me all my life.

The idea of Pushkin suggested another plan. Why not gamble? Gambling was gentlemanly--at least, gentlemen gambled. But did they play for a living? I had gambled a little myself in the past; played poker, and, like most men, prided myself on my game, though I generally lost in the long run; and when I was making good resolutions after my failure, I had made up my mind never to play again anywhere. And I had always held to the opinion that, as soon as a man played for his living, he crossed the line and ceased to be a gentleman. Now, however, it began to appear to me as if this were the only plan by which I could make anything, and as if I should have a good excuse for breaking my resolution. I resisted the temptation for some time; but one night, when I had pawned nearly everything and had only three or four dollars left, I went out, and after a long but half-hearted battle gave up, as such are always lost, and turned into a street across an alley from my office where I knew there was a gambling place over a saloon kept by one Mick Raffity. I went boldly up the stairs. Even as I mounted them I felt a sort of exhilaration. I stopped at the door and my old resolution not to play again stirred and struggled a little. I caught it, however, with a sort of grip almost physical, and gave it a shake till it was quiet. I knew I should win. The blaze of light within cheered me, and, without hesitating an instant, I walked across the room to where a crowd stood watching the play of some one seated at a table. It was a large and richly decorated room, with a few rather daring pictures on the walls and much gilding about the ceiling. The hot air, heavy with tobacco smoke and fumes of one kind and another, met me in a blast as I entered, and involuntarily I thought of a sweat-shop I had once seen in my earlier days. But the sensation passed and left me warm and exhilarated. As I passed along, a man looked at me and half nodded. I knew he was the proprietor. I made my way in and caught the dealer's expressionless eye, and taking out a note as carelessly as if my pockets were stuffed with them, I glanced over the board to select my bet. At one end of the table sat the large, heavy-browed, middle-aged man I had run into one night on the stairway leading from the alley to the building where I had my office. He was somewhat tipsy and evidently in bad luck; for he was heated and was betting wildly. Near by sat a big, sour-looking fellow, flashily dressed, whom I recognized as having been one of my fellow-travellers on the side-tracked train, the one who had talked to the trainmen of their wrongs. He still wore his paste diamonds, his silk hat and patent-leather shoes. But I took little notice of these. Casually, as I dropped my note, my eye fell on the player at the middle of the table. He was surrounded by stacks of chips. As I looked he raked in a new pile; at least a hundred dollars, and he never changed a particle. He was calmer than the dealer before him. He was in evening dress and success had given him quite an air. I caught up my note without knowing it and fell back behind a group of young men who had just come up. Curious things happen sometimes. I found my note doubled up in my hand when I had got out of doors, a quarter of an hour later. All I remember is my revulsion at seeing that gambler sitting there raking in money so calmly, with my money for his stake in his pocket, and I turned out for him: an adventurer who said all American women were at his bidding. It recalled to me the girl I had seen on the train and had handed, later, into her carriage, and the good resolutions I had formed. And it strung me up like wine. I felt that I was a coward to have come there and as bad as Pushkin.

Just as I turned to leave the place a party of young fellows entered the room. They had come from a dinner at Mr. Leigh's, as I understood from their talk, and were "going on" to a dance unless the luck should run to suit them. They were in high spirits, "Mr. Leigh's champagne" having done its work, and they were evidently habitués of the place, and good patrons, I judged, from the obsequious respect paid them by the attendants. The leader of them was a large, rather good-looking young fellow, but with marks of dissipation on a face without a line of refinement in it. The others all seemed to be his followers. They greeted familiarly and by name the eager attendants who rushed forward to take their coats, and the leader asked them casually who was in to-night.

"The Count's here, I think, sir," said one whom they called Billy.

"The Count! Coll McSheen's staked him again," said the young leader. "And he swore to me he'd never let him have another cent, with oaths enough to damn him deeper than he will be damned anyhow. Come on, I'll skin him clean."

I lingered for a moment to see him "skin" Pushkin.

They sauntered up to the table and, after a greeting to the Count, began to toss bills on the board as though they grew on trees. The least of them would have kept me going for months. I had never seen money handled so before and it staggered me.

"Who is that young man?" I asked of a man near me, nodding toward the leader. "He must be pretty rich."

"Rich! You bet. He's Jim Canter. Got all his daddy's money and going to get all the Argand and Leigh piles some day. He'll need it, too," added my informant.

"I should think so." I recalled his name in connection with Miss Leigh's name in the account of the ball, and I was feeling a little bitter.

"Why, he'd just as lief try to corner water as to bet a hundred dollar bill on a card. This is just play to him. He'd give all he'd win to-night to any one of his women."

"His women?"

"Yes. He's one of the real upper class."

"The upper class!" So this was the idea of the upper class held by this man and his kind! My soul revolted at the thought of this man standing as the type of our upper class, and I was turning away when Pushkin shoved back his chair. As I turned he looked up and I saw him start, though I did not catch his glance. The dealer saw him, too, and as he looked at me I caught his eye. He motioned to me, but I took no notice. As I walked out the man near the door spoke to me.

"There's supper in the next room."

"Thank you. I don't want it."

"Come in again. Better luck to-morrow."

"For you, I hope," I said, and I saw his mystification.

I had of late been having an uncomfortable thought which was beginning to worry me. The idea of doing away with myself had suggested itself to me from time to time. I do not mean that I ever thought I should really do it; for when I reflected seriously, I knew I should not. In the first place, I was afraid; and in the next place, I never gave up the belief that I should some day achieve success. When I analyzed my feelings I found that the true name for my unhappiness was egotism. But the idea would come up to me and now began to pester me. I had a pistol which I could never bring myself to pawn, though nearly everything else was pledged. I put the pistol away; but this did not help matters; it looked like cowardice. So that evening I had taken the pistol out and put it into my pocket when I went into the street. If I could only catch some burglar breaking into a bank, or some ruffian beating a woman, or some scoundrel committing any crime, it would attract attention, and I might get work. I often used to think thus, but nothing ever happened, and I knew nothing would happen that evening when I walked out of the gambling house. So presently the pistol began to be in my way, and my mind went to working again on the ease with which I could go to my office and lock myself in. Still I kept on, and presently I found myself near the river, a black stream that I had often thought of as the Styx. It was as black and silent now, as it slipped on in the darkness, as the River of Death.

I was sauntering along, chewing the cud of fancy, wholly bitter--and sinking lower and lower every step in the slough of despond, working over what would come if I should suddenly chuck up the whole business and get out of life--pondering how I should destroy all marks by which there could be any possibility of identification, when the current of my thoughts, if that moody train of dismal reflection could be dignified with such a name, was turned aside by a small incident. As I wandered on in the darkness, the figure of a woman standing--a shadow in the shadow--at a corner of an alley arrested my attention. Even in the gloom the attitude of dejection was such as to strike me, and I saw or felt, I know not which, that her eyes were on me, and that in some dim, distant way they contained an appeal. I saw that she was young, and in the dusk the oval outline of a face that might have both refinement and beauty challenged my attention. Was she a beggar or only an unhappy outcast, waiting in the darkness for the sad reward which evil chance might fling to her wretchedness? I put my hand in my pocket, thinking that she might beg of me, and I would give her a small portion of my slender store, but she said nothing and I passed on. After a little, however, still thinking of her dejected air and with a sudden sympathy for her wretchedness, I turned back. She was still standing where I left her. I passed slowly by her, but she said nothing, though I felt again that her eyes were on me. Then my curiosity or possibly, I may say, my interest, being aroused, I turned again and walked by her.

"Why so sad to-night?" I said, with words which might have appeared flippant, but in a tone which she instantly recognized for sympathy. She turned half away and said nothing and I stood silent watching her, for her face must once have been almost beautiful, though it was now sadly marred, and an ugly scar across her eye and cheek, as if it might have come from the slash of a razor, made that side drawn and distorted.

"Do you want money?"

She slowly shook her head without looking at me.

"What is it, then? Maybe, I can help you?"

She turned slowly and looked at me with such indescribable hopelessness in her face that my heart went out to her.

"No, I'm past help now."

"Oh, no, you're not." My spirits rose with the words, and I felt suddenly as if I had risen out of the slough which had been engulfing me, and as though I had gotten my feet on a firm place where I could reach out a hand to help this despairing and sinking sister.

"Yes, past help now."

"Come and walk with me." And as she did not stir, I took her hand and drew it through my arm and gently led her forward along the street. I had a strange feeling as I walked along. I somehow felt as though I had escaped from something which had been dragging me down. It was a strange walk and a strange and tragic story that she told me--of having left her home in the country, inspired by the desire to do something and be something more than she was, a simple farmer's daughter in another State, with some little education such as the country schools could give; of having secured a position in a big shop where, for a small sum, she worked all day and learned to see and love fine clothes and beautiful things; of having fallen in with one or two gay companions in this and other shops who wore the fine clothes and had the beautiful things she admired; of having been put forward because she was pretty and polite; and then of having met a young man, well dressed and with fine manners; of having fallen in love with him and of having accepted his attentions and his gifts; and then, of having been led astray by him; and then--of such an act of base betrayal as, had I not had it substantiated afterward in every horrid detail, I should never have believed. I had known something of the wickedness of men and the evil of an uncontrolled life in the city, where the vilest passions of the heart are given play, but I had never dreamed of anything so revolting as the story this girl told me that night. She had been deliberately and with malice aforethought lured not only to her destruction but to a life of slavery so vile as to be unbelievable. The man who had secured her heart used his power over her to seize and sell her into a slavery for which there is no name which could be used on the printed page. Here, stricken by the horror of her situation, she had attempted to escape from her captors, but had been bodily beaten into submission. Then she had made a wild dash for liberty and had been seized and slashed with a knife until she fell under her wounds and her life was in imminent danger.

From this time she gave up and became the slave of the woman of the house: "Smooth Ally," she said they called her; but she would not give me her name or her address. She would have her killed, she feared, if she did so. Here she gradually had yielded to her fate and had lived in company with her other slaves, some willing, some as unwilling as herself, until finally her place was needed for one more useful to her owner, when she had been handed on from one owner to another, always sinking in the scale lower and lower, until at last she had been turned into the street with her choice limited only to the river or the gutter. Long before she had finished her story I had made up my mind that life still held for me something which I might do, however poor and useless I knew myself to be. The only person I could think of who might help her was Miss Leigh. How could I reach her? Could I write her of this poor creature? She could not go back to her home, she said, for she knew that they had heard of her life, and they were "good and Christian people." She used to write to and hear from them, but it had been two years and more since she had written or heard now. Still she gave me what she said was her father's address in another State, and I told her I would find out how they felt about her and would let her know. I gave her a part of what I had. It was very little, and I have often wished since then that I had had the courage to give her all.

I was walking on with her, trying to think of some place where she might find a shelter and be taken care of until her friends could be informed where she was, when, in one of the streets in front of a bar-room, we heard mingled laughter and singing and found a group of young men, ruffians and loafers, standing on the sidewalk, laughing at the singers who stood in the street. As we drew near, I saw that the latter were a small group of the Salvation Army, and it appeared to me a providence. Here were some who might help her. At the moment that we approached they ended the dirge-like hymn they had been singing, and kneeling down in the street one of them offered a prayer, after which a woman handed around something like a tambourine, asking for a collection. The jeers that she encountered might have daunted a much bolder spirit than mine, and as each man either put in or pretended to put something in, one a cent, another a button or a cigarette-stump, she responded, "Thank you and God bless you." I was ashamed to make an appeal to them there for the poor girl, so I walked with her a little further on and waited until the blue-clad detachment came along and their tormentors retired to warm themselves, without and within, in the saloon in front of which they had been standing. I accosted the woman who had taken up the collection and asked her if she could take care of a poor girl who needed help badly, and I was struck by the kindness with which she turned and, after a moment's glance, held out her hand to the girl.

"Come with us," she said, "and we will take you where you will find friends."

Even then the young woman appeared too frightened to accept her invitation. She clung to me and seemed to rely upon me, asking me to go with her, but partly from shame and partly from what may possibly have been a better motive, I told her my way led elsewhere, and, after persuasion, she went with the Salvationists, and I walked home happier than I had been in some time.

I even took some steps to call public attention to the horrible story the poor Magdalen had told me of her frightful experience, and actually wrote it up; but when I took it to a paper--the one that had published my first article--I was given to understand that the account was quite incredible. The editor, a fox-faced man of middle age, with whom my paper secured me the honor of an interview, informed me that the story was an old one, and that they had investigated it thoroughly, and found it without the slightest foundation. If I wanted further proof of this, he said, he would refer me to Mr. Collis McSheen, one of the leading lawyers in the city, who had conducted the investigation.

XVIII

THE DRUMMER

I believe Mrs. Kale would have let me stay on free almost indefinitely; for she was a kind-hearted soul, much imposed on by her boarders. But I had been playing the gentleman there, and I could not bring myself to come down in her esteem. I really did not know whether I should be able to continue to pay her; so when my time was up, I moved again, to my landlady's great surprise, and she thought me stuck up and ungrateful, and was a little hurt over it, when, in fact, I only did not want to cheat her, and was moving out to the poorest part of the city, to a little house on which I had observed, one afternoon during one of my strolls, the notice of a room for rent at a dollar a week. I think a rose-bush carefully trained over the door decided me to take it. It gave me a bit of home-feeling. The violet, of course, is in color and delicacy the half-ethereal emblem of the tenderest sentiment of the heart. "The violets all withered when my father died," sighed poor Ophelia. And next to violets, a rose-bush, growing in the sun and dew, has ever stood to me for the purest sentiment that the heart can hold.

I heard shortly afterward of the engagement of Miss Lilian Poole to the man she used to laugh at; but after a single wave of mortification that Peck should have won where I had lost, I did not mind it. I went out to look at the sunny house with the trees and the rose-bushes about it and wonder how I could meet Miss Leigh.

The room I took when I left Mrs. Kale's was only a cupboard some nine feet by six in the little house I have mentioned; but it was spotlessly clean, like the kind-looking, stout, blue-eyed Teuton woman who, with skirt tucked up, came to the door when I applied for lodging, and, as the price was nearer my figure than any other I had seen, I closed with Mrs. Loewen, and the afternoon I left Mrs. Kale's sent my trunk over in advance. It held the entire accumulation of my life. There was something about the place and the woman that attracted me. As poor as the house was, it was beyond the squalid quarter and well out in the edge of the city, with a bit of grass before it, and there were not only plants in the windows well cared for; but there was even a rose-bush beside the door making a feeble attempt to clamber over it with the aid of strings and straps carefully adjusted.

The only question my landlady asked me was whether I was a musician, and when I told her no, but that I was very fond of music, she appeared satisfied. Her husband, she said, was a drummer.

I asked if I might bring my dog, and she assented even to this.

"Elsa was fond of animals," she said.

When I bade good-by to Mrs. Kale and my friends at the boarding-house, I was pleased at the real regret they showed at my leaving. Miss Pansy and Miss Pinky came down to the drawing-room in their "best" to say good-by; Miss Pinky with her "scratch" quite straight. And Miss Pansy said if they ever went back home she hoped very much I would honor them by coming to see them, while Miss Pinky, with a more practical turn, hoped I would come and see them "there--and you may even bring your dog with you," she added, with what I knew was a proof of real friendship. I promised faithfully to come, for I was touched by the kindness of the two old ladies who, like myself, had slipped from the sphere in which they had belonged, and I was rather grim at the reflection that they had been brought there by others, while I had no one to blame but myself--a solemn fact I was just beginning to face.

When I walked out of the house I was in a rather low state of mind. I felt that it was the last day when I could make any pretension to being a gentleman. I had been slipping down, down, and now I was very near the bottom. So I wandered on in the street with Dix at my heels and my pistol in my pocket.

Just then a notice of a concert, placarded on a wall, caught my eye, and I gave myself a shake together as an unmitigated ass, and determined suddenly that I needed some amusement and that a better use for the pistol would be to sell it and go to the concert. I would, at least, be a gentleman once more, and then to-morrow I could start afresh. So I hunted up a pawnshop and raising from the villain who kept it a few dollars on my pistol, had a good supper and then took Dix home and went to the symphony. As it happened, I got one of the best seats in the house. It was a revelation to me--a revolution in my thoughts and feelings: the great audience, gay with silks and flowers and jewels, filling up all the space about and above me rising up to the very top of the vast auditorium. I did not have time at first to observe them, I only felt them; for just as I entered the Director came out and the audience applauded. It exhilarated me like wine; I felt as if it had been myself they were applauding. Then the music began: The "Tannhauser Overture." It caught me up and bore me away: knighthood, and glory, and love were all about me; the splendor of the contest; the struggle in which a false step, a cowardly weakness might fling away the world; the reward that awaited the victor, and the curse if he gave way, till I found myself dazzled, amazed, and borne down by the deluge of harmonious sound--and could do nothing but lie drifting at the mercy of the whelming tide, and watch, half-drowned, whatever object caught my eye. The first thing I took in was the tall old Drummer who towered above the great bank of dark bodies with swaying arms. Still and solemn he appeared out of the mist, and seemed like some landmark which I must hold on to if I would not be swept away. No one appeared to pay much attention to him, and he appeared oblivious of all but his drums. Now he leant over them and listened to their throbbing, now he beat as if the whole world depended on it. I held on to him and felt somehow as if he were the one to whom the Director looked--the centre of all the music and pomp and mystery, and I must keep him in sight.