Front matter (continued 3)

She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker's entrance into her waiting limousine with almost no delay whatever.

"There," she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their drive; "I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon."

Dyker laughed shortly.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I esteem your father so much that I should like him to like me."

"But you think that he doesn't like you?"

"I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest men."

"And may they?" bantered Marian.

"Well," he lightly accepted the challenge, "I shall take the specific case. There is no doubting your father's sincerity; there is no doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him, to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks at last."

"And on the other hand," said the girl, "I suppose I must generously refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?"

"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed."

"Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon."

"Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to another human being—and you should know that I am not to be suspected."

There was a ring in his voice that touched her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime."

"I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles."

"He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors."

"But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?"

"He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing—something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long—and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it."

Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued.

"If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a very terrible thing."

"Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work."

Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.

"Of course you're joking," he said.

"I am in cold earnest," she assured him.

"But that's absurd. You've—why you don't know what settlement-work means!"

"I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters."

"And you really mean——"

"I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is music to listen to."

Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.

Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.

He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in the entr'actes, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was "Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored.

His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.

One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week's work to his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that contractor learned of Wesley's service. At the ensuing trial the client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his patron's district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.

For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father's fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to marry her with as little delay as possible.

Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he meant to play his first lead.

He did play it—played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to the mood best suited to his own.

"May I talk now?" he asked ruefully.

She smiled.

"You mean to ask if you may argue," she answered. "No, you may not argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a man of your sort should want to."

"I don't intend to argue," he protested, leaning the merest trifle toward her. "I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite fixed."

She bowed her splendid head.

"Quite fixed," she said.

"So that argument would not shake it?"

"So that no argument could shake it."

"Nor any persuasion?"

His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the change.

"Nor any persuasion," she replied.

"Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but a condition?"

"But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me. You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty."

A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously sweet.

"What I understand," responded Dyker, "is that there is one situation in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that crowds all others from the board."

His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.

"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it—none even for the poor and suffering."

In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.

"Marian"—his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash—"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to answer me!"

He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.

But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.

"I am not unprepared," she answered. "I did know. But I know too that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better emotion."

The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play, and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she was more in love with renunciation.

The man, however, shook his head.

"No," he said, "love is something ultimate. You can't paint the lily; you can't part it and share it; you must either cherish it or kill it. Which do you mean to do?"

The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway's. He could not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her voice as she answered:

"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of."

"But that's folly, Marian!"

He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that youth most resents.

Marian withdrew her hands.

"It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor."

"I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help these people without training——"

"I can get training."

"Without knowing them?"

"The only way to know them is to go to them."

"But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways."

He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience that the settlement would supply her.

"Then you mean," he asked, "that you do care—that you care at least a little?"

He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them.

"I mean," she answered, "that we must wait."

XI UNDER THE LASH

It was on the day following her eavesdropping upon Rose that Violet was awakened early—as early as eleven o'clock in the morning—by a sudden cry. The sound was one of some pain and more terror, beginning in the high note of horrified amazement and ending in an attenuating moan of despair.

Violet had been living in a highly charged atmosphere: she sat up in bed, sleep immediately banished from her brain. She remained still and listened. She heard Rose's now familiar footstep. She heard a door open and close. She heard that cry frightfully begin again, and then she heard it more frightfully stop in mid-power, cease in abrupt and hideous silence.

There came a discreet tapping at her own door.

"Are you alone, my dear?"

It was the deep, contralto voice of English Evelyn, and, as Violet replied in the affirmative, the woman softly entered.

Her tall, almost thin, figure was draped in a soiled pink kimona; her yellow hair seemed merely to have been tossed upon her head and to have been left precisely as it happened to alight; her blue eyes were dull, and her hard, narrow face, with its spots of high color over the cheek-bones, showed more plainly than common, the usually faint little red veins that lay close below its white skin.

"My Gawd," she sighed, as she sank upon the bed and curled up at its foot, "there are some things I can't get accustomed to, and that"—she nodded in the direction whence the cry had come—"that's one of them."

She spoke in a weary voice, a voice with almost no animation, but with a curious mixture of the cockney of the New Yorker and with a rising inflection that saved what she said from monotony.

"What was it?" asked Violet.

"You ought to know. It was another of them."

"You mean——" The question trailed into nothingness on Violet's whitening lips.

"Yes," said Evelyn, seizing a pillow and snuggling her broad shoulders against it. "Got a cig?" And then, as her hostess produced a box from under the mattress: "It does so get upon my nerves. Why, sometimes they come here young enough to play with dollies. This time there was no more sleep for boiby. Had to run downstairs and rig a B. and S., and then come up to girlie here for company."

"How—how did this happen?"

"How the deuce do you suppose? One story is pretty much all of them, my dear, and one about as narsty as the others."

"But this?"

"Oh, this broke me up just because I had the bad luck to hear the details, though I must say I've heard the same details often enough before. Her people lived in a tenement in Essex Street, where it's so crowded that the men have to come outside every evening while their wives cook the dinners—three nine-by-seven rooms, no barth and no privacy; four children from eighteen to ten in one room; pa, ma, the boiby, and the seven-year-old in the second, and the cot in the kitchen-living-room rented to the lodger. The lodger was the wiggly snake under the apple-tree."

"He brought her here?"

"Gave her, as you might say, the general directions. But she'd have come along of her own self sometime."

"How could she?"

"How couldn't she, you mean! Those tenements are not for living in—there isn't room for that—they're just to eat in, when you've got enough, and sleep in, when you can sleep, and die in, when you have to."

"So this girl had to live outside?"

"On the doorsteps and the roofs when it was hot, and walking up and down the street when it wasn't."

Violet remembered her own home, and reflected that her excuse was less, because her surroundings had been better.

"That must have been pretty bad," she said.

"It was bad, but it wasn't so bad as being indoors, my dear. That's what most girls think about it anyway, and that's why they never go home before ten or eleven. How else do the moving-picture shows keep running and how else do the dance-halls make their cakes and ale?"

"The dance-halls?" The word was new to Violet.

"Yes, my dear, I said the dance-halls—where you pay five cents to dance in the dust, with the windows nailed fast to start a thirst, and then buy you bad beer of the kind proprietor. That's where the lodger took this girl, and that's where she learned to drink."

"Too much?"

"Chuck it, dearie, chuck it. Among all the wasters I've known, I've never found one drunkard: they all called themselves moderate drinkers. Well, this girlie played double for a bit, and then met a nice young man that wanted to marry her next day. She woke up here."

"Did they drug her?"

"Did they drug you? They don't have to drug you: you know that. The minute a girl tells me she was drugged, I say to myself: 'You're the kind that walk in and won't take "No" for an answer.' No, you catch flies with syrup; you don't shoot them with machine-guns. Narsty business, no?"

Violet was hearing for the first time how life made the net in which it had taken her. She passed her hand across her burning eyes.

"You seem to have seen a lot," she said.

"Haven't I just? I had my own little flat—to myself, too—once upon a time, and I kept my eyes about me. There was the Dago woman that owned a fruit-stand on my corner. She lived in an alley off Houston Street, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter who worked twelve hours a day rolling cigarettes.—Chuck me another, there's a good girlie. Thanks, awfully.—That girl hated her work—can you blame her?—met a man that told her she wouldn't have to work any more, and good-by."

"She went with him?"

"Parsed out of sight completely, my dear. Mother nearly crazy. Went to the police. Police added the girlie's name to their three columns of other missing girls for that year, and said they couldn't guess where she was. An uncle tried to go on an inspection-tour of his own, and had spent about all the family cash when he got to a flat on West Fortieth Street and had its girls in for the usual drinks. He saw his niece, but the bouncer knocked him down, and when he woke up in the arey, the happy family had moved."

"And that was all?"

"That was all till, some two years later, the girl sent for her mother to come to Bellevue to see her die. As soon as she was used up, they'd turned her out without one of the pennies she had earned for them.—Narsty, eh?"

There was a brief pause.

"I guess," said Violet, "there ain't much chance for you unless you're good."

"My dear," answered the Englishwoman, "if you're good, you haven't a chance at all. It's just a question of whether you have or haven't enough to live on. The best guardian of a man's virtue is the worst enemy of a woman's—and that's an empty pocketbook, my dear."

But Violet was in no mind for generalizations.

"It's a business, then, ain't it?" she asked.

"A regular business," nodded Evelyn,—"fifty cents up—and now that they've smashed the lotteries, policy, and the races, it's more of a business than ever. There are hundreds of young chaps all over the country who make their living by selling girls to places like this—and worse than this; and there are more who make better livings by making one, or two, or even three girls walk the street for them. Just now, in New York, the street's the main thing."

"An' people like Miss Rose——?"

"They buy the girls and pay a percentage on their work, my dear, till the debt's cleared. Sometimes they give their girls nothing but brass checks for every job, but whether we get brass checks or real cash, it's all the same: board and lodging and clothes are so high that we never get out of debt to the madam. Trust her for that!"

She had a thorough knowledge of her subject, and she ran on as if her only interest in it were economic. She talked of Denver, with its two-room houses in which the front seemed one large window where the sole inmate displayed her wares; of Chicago with the curtained doors through which was thrust only a hand to receive the varying price of admission, even a quarter of a dollar occasionally sufficing; of the same city's infamous club maintained by politicians for their own debauches. She told of the proprietresses making a specialty of "sending out" for girls that worked at other and ill-paid tasks by day; of women conducting flats on a partnership basis; of those who rented, for high prices, houses that would otherwise be tenantless because of poor conditions or the opening of some street that must soon be cut through the premises. She said that young girls unsoiled would sometimes fetch their owners fifty dollars for their initial destruction, but that, as a rule, the sums were relatively small.

"And Miss Rose has to pay the police," asked Violet; "don't she?"

"She does just, little innocent. And the police have to pay the officers above them, and the officers above them have to pay the ward-bosses above them—and there you are. It's all the worse since the bosses can't make any money from gambling-houses, and it's all the worse since the business got organized and meant votes for the gang at every election.—Oh," Evelyn broke off—"I tell you it's the same in every city the world over, my dear, and you and I haven't even the comfort of being exceptions."

"Don't people know about it?"

"People don't want to know about it. People don't want to feel badly. People say that it isn't true, and that, if it is true, it isn't fit to mention."

"Did you ever go to a dance-hall?"

Forgetting her recent attitude of democracy, Evelyn raised her pointed chin.

"I should say not," she answered. "Only a year ago I had that apartment of my very own. An Africander took me out of the chorus at the 'Gaiety' over home,—and a good job, too—and, when he died and I came here, one of the best doctors in this town took care of me. He said he was going to marry me," she ended with a short laugh, "but when his old wife died, he forgot that, and forgot me, and married a society girl young enough to be his grandchild. Of course he died himself after a few months, but that didn't help me, my dear: I had to strike out, and now, from the best places I've come down as far as this."

Violet was still too young to feel keenly for another while herself in suffering, a fact that must have presented itself to Evelyn, because she turned from her own story with an easy shrug.

"After all," she pursued, "the thing's at least better run now that it has become a men's business. There are no jobs left at the top except the running of the houses: the men get the girls, the rents, and most of the profits."

"Fritzie said they got lots of immigrants."

"Well, rather. Most of the Dago ditch-diggers go home every winter, and any one of them will bring a girl back with him as his wife if you'll pay him a little over the price of the passage money. That's one way, but there are a jolly lot more, not to mention the make-believe employment agencies that catch the girls by regiments. The women are packed over here in the steerage like cattle, my dear, and ticketed like low-class freight. All they own goes into a small handbag and once they get here, they're herded ten in a room till the agency-runners call for them. Around Houston Street you can see streets full of those nifty little agencies: they ship the girls all over the States."

"I never thought such things could happen."

"Of course you didn't. Nobody does, my dear—and that's one reason they do happen. Not that the immigrants are unduly favored. All over the East Side you can see families of the Chosen People going into real mourning for cadet-caught girlies, just as if the poor things were really dead. The other races suffer quite as much, too, though the Yankees are less likely to get into the cheaper joints."

"That's where they give them the brass checks?" asked Violet.

"Yes. The man buys the checks downstairs, on a commutation schedule, just the w'y we used to buy our drink checks in a beer garden. The girls never see real money—except when they make a touch, and then it's not any use—because they cash in their checks to the madam, and she counts them against what her young l'idies owe her. Even at that"—Evelyn nearly sat upright in her animation—"even at that, they do s'y the men try to jew you down as badly as they do here. I've always noticed that the honestest man that ever lived will try to cheat a girl. But you'll learn it all in time, girlie. I'm only sorry that you'll never see the better plices."

Violet missed the innuendo, but she asked:

"Then there are better and worse?"

Evelyn laughed.

"Right-oh!" she said. "The horrid truth is, my dear, that we and Rose are hopelessly middle-class. I wish you could see the better, and as for the worse, wait till you live in a plice where there are sliding panels in the wall, and men are robbed every night."

If there had been any sympathy in the Englishwoman's tone, Violet might have appealed to her for whatever of real assistance she could give, but Evelyn's scarcely interrupted monologue soon made it clear that she had no help to offer.

"It's all rotten," she continued,—"all rotten because it has to be. Do you fancy that, if Rose wasn't sure of us, she wouldn't have her ear at that keyhole now? She can call in Angel half the time, and one cop or another's never far around the corner. Three weeks ago Phil Beekman, one of her best customers, tried to balance a lamp on his nose and broke it, and Riley was there to arrest him for disorderly conduct before the boy could get to his wallet. He had to pay twenty-five dollars—half went to Riley—for that fifteen-dollar lamp that Rose had insured for eighteen. We're all that w'y; we all have to be spies on the rest. I am, you soon will be, and that little Wanda—well, of course, Rose makes too much fuss over her."

"What do you mean?" asked Violet.

But Evelyn only shook her towsled yellow head.

"I mean, my dear," she said, "that there are some things, you know, that even I don't fancy discussing."

"She was an immigrant, wasn't she?"

"Oh, yes," Evelyn acquiesced, with a yawn. Already her restless heart was tiring of the conversation and her insistent thirst was crying for more alcohol. "Wanda came over here to be a housemaid. She landed in Philadelphia and went directly to an employment agency, like a good girlie. They took her money for their commission in getting her a job, and then they sold her right over here to a sailors' joint."

"For housework?"

"Housework? My dear, you overact your part. There's no housework done in those plices; but Wanda's won her w'y up in the world. Here she is at Rose's, if you please, though by what sort of housework I shan't tell you."

"I wish——"

"Not another word, my dear. Talking is a dry game. After all, drinking is the king of indoor sports. Come on down and rig a bit of fizz."

But Violet did not join in this predatory expedition. She forgot the plight of the new captive whose cries she had heard; she forgot even the details of Evelyn's just-related case; she remembered only so much of the general situation, now made clear to her, as bore upon her own position, and she came at last to a pitch of crafty courage that was far more promising of success than any of the hysterical determinations that she had previously experienced. Open revolt was futile; she would employ methods more circuitous, and would use whatever weapons were at hand.

It was, as Evelyn had said, a house of spies and eavesdroppers, and, at the next opportunity—which occurred that night—Violet sought again her secret place of vantage on the back stairs, and listened again to her jailer in conversation with the Italian. Her time, as it chanced, was brief, but she heard enough to know that Wesley Dyker was the subject of the conference, and that betrayal of some sort was its intent.

"Nothin' much," Rose was saying, in apparent answer to some question asked before the spy had taken up her breathless post in the darkened stairway. "I'll get more out of him later on."

"Yas," replied Angel, "but how mooch?"

"He said he thought he'd pull it off, all right, but wasn't sure of O'Malley. Said he'd got a bunch of kind words from up top, but was scared for fear O'Malley would knife him. He's a pretty wise guy for all he's a swell, and he's lookin' out for the double-cross from your crowd."

"He ast you to helpa keepa lookout?"

"Sure he did. Said if O'Malley's man put up a bluff at runnin' independent, I was to tip him off when O'Malley began registering votes here."

"That isa good. More?"

"Some. Said he wanted me to keep my ears wide for any news. Wanted me to pump you."

"He deed?" The voice grew threatening. "Say, now, you tella me why he knaw you knawa me?"

"I guess he has as good ears as most people."

"But how he knawa me an' you——"

"He don't know that, Angel. Keep your hair on. He don't know nothin' about it. If he did, do you think he'd stand for it, an' cough up all these here straight tips to me?"

"Na-aw," the Italian drawlingly admitted, in slow mollification. "Naw, maybe he woulda not."

"He certainly wouldn't. He don't know nothin' about it. What he's afraid of is that somebody might think he stood in too good here."

"He say that?"

"Yep."

"Alla right. Now, you tella him when he comes again, O'Malley means——"

The voice dropped to so low a whisper that Violet could hear no more, and, before it was raised, the doorbell had sounded and she had heard Celeste, upstairs, calling her. She tiptoed back to the upper hallway.

"Cassie say you' New York Central frien' ees askin' for you," volunteered the French girl as they met.

"All right," answered Violet. "I'll be right down. I was trying to swipe a bottle. And say, Celeste, how does that Wesley Dyker come to have such a pull with Miss Rose?"

"Oh-h! You don' know? That Wes' Dyk' 'e mabby be a magistrate nex' 'lection. 'E's one gran' man now for bail an' lawyer when trouble come.—'Es's frien's with so many politicians, too. But Meess Rose, she know 'e will be some more eef 'e be 'lected magistrate."

"Oh, I see. But doesn't she keep standing in, on the quiet, with the other people who want the place, too?"

Celeste nodded a cheerful agreement.

"But of a certainty," she said. "Meess Rose, she know 'er beezness. Whoever get that 'lection, Meess Rose, she will 'ave been 'ees frien'."

Violet asked no more. She had learned enough to put into her hands the best weapon just then available.

XII ON STRIKE

Katie Flanagan arrived at the Lennox department-store every morning at a quarter to eight o'clock. She passed through the employés' dark entrance, a unit in a horde of other workers, and registered the instant of her arrival on a time-machine that could in no wise be suborned to perjury. She hung up her wraps in a subterranean cloak-room, and, hurrying to the counter to which she was assigned, first helped in "laying out the stock," and then stood behind her wares, exhibiting, cajoling, selling, until an hour before noon. At that time she was permitted to run away for exactly forty-five minutes for the glass of milk and two pieces of bread and jam that composed her luncheon. This repast disposed of, she returned to the counter and remained behind it, standing like a war-worn watcher on the ramparts of a beleaguered city, till the store closed at six, when there remained to her at least fifteen minutes more of work before her sales-book was balanced and the wares covered up for the night. There were times indeed when she did not leave the store until seven o'clock, but those times were caused rather by customers than by the management of the store, which could prevent new shoppers from entering the doors after six, but could hardly turn out those already inside.

The automatic time-machine and a score of more annoying, and equally automatic, human beings, kept watch upon all that she did. The former, in addition to the floor-walker in her section of the store, recorded her every going and coming, the latter reported every movement not prescribed by the regulations of the establishment; and the result upon Katie and her fellow-workers was much the result observable upon condemned assassins under the unwinking surveillance of the Death Watch.

If Katie was late, she was fined ten cents for each offense. She was reprimanded if her portion of the counter was disordered after a mauling by careless customers. She was fined for all mistakes she made in the matter of prices and the additions on her sales-book; and she was fined if, having asked the floor-walker for three or five minutes to leave the floor in order to tidy her hair and hands, in constant need of attention through the rapidity of her work and the handling of her dyed wares, she exceeded her time limit by so much as a few seconds.

There were no seats behind the counters, and Katie, whatever her physical condition, remained on her feet all day long unless she could arrange for relief by a fellow-worker during that worker's luncheon time. There was no place for rest save a damp, ill-lighted "Recreation Room" in the basement, furnished with a piano that nobody had time to play, magazines that nobody had time to read, and wicker chairs in which nobody had time to sit. All that one might do was to serve the whims and accept the scoldings of women customers who knew too ill, or too well, what they wanted to buy; keep a tight rein upon one's indignation at strolling men who did not intend to buy anything that the shop advertised; be servilely smiling under the innuendoes of the high-collared floor-walkers, in order to escape their wrath; maintain a sharp outlook for the "spotters," or paid spies of the establishment; thwart, if possible, those pretending purchasers who were scouts sent from other stores, and watch for shop-lifters on the one hand and the firm's detectives on the other.

"It ain't a cinch, by no means"—thus ran the departing Cora Costigan's advice to her successor—"but it ain't nothin' now to what it will be in the holidays. I'd rather be dead than work in the toy-department in December—I wonder if the kids guess how we that sells 'em hates the sight of their playthings—and I'd rather be dead an' damned than work in the accounting-department. A girl friend of mine worked there last year,—only it was over to Malcare's store—an' didn't get through her Christmas Eve work till two on Christmas morning, an' she lived over on Staten Island. She overslept on the twenty-sixth, an' they docked her a half-week's pay.

"An' don't never," concluded Cora, "don't never let 'em transfer you to the exchange department. The people that exchange things all belong in the psychopathic ward at Bellevue—them that don't belong in Sing Sing. Half the goods they bring back have been used for days, an' when the store ties a tag on a sent-on-approval opera cloak, the women wriggle the tag inside, an' wear it to the theater with a scarf draped over the string. Thank God, I'm goin' to be married!"

In these conditions Katie found many imperative duties, but none quite so immediately imperative as the repression of Mr. Porter. She had not made her first sale at the main women's hosiery counter on the first floor, to which she had been assigned on her arrival—pretty girls always being favored with first-floor positions—when that tall, gray-whiskered gentleman, his duties in his underground office not at this hour holding him, majestically approached her.

"Good-morning, Miss Flanagan," he said, with a beneficent smile, as he placed his white hand upon her quailing shoulder.

Katie became very busy with the stock that was new to her.

"Good-morning, Mr. Porter," she answered.—"Say, Miss Isaacs, how much do these lisle ones sell at?"

"I thought," said Mr. Porter, fixing her with his apparently emotionless gaze, "that I would just come over and see if you were well taken care of."

"None better, Mr. Porter." Katie smiled sweetly as she said it, and still more sweetly as she significantly added: "Them's always taken good care of as are used to takin' good care of themselves."

Mr. Porter blinked, but his expression, or lack of expression, did not alter.

"No doubt," he responded, as he reluctantly made ready to go away; "but I shall be glad to be of help at any time I can."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"And I shall drop around now and then to see that all goes well."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"Because I was always interested in Miss Costigan—very much interested, and she was very pleasant to me—and I am naturally very much interested in her successor, too."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"And, by the way, Miss Flanagan," he added as his Parthian shaft, "I trust you won't worry over that little loan, you know; there's no hurry in the world about repayment."

Katie met his vacant glance with the innocent eyes of a grateful child.

"That's kind you are, Mr. Porter," she answered, "and since you say it, I shan't worry, sir."

But for all that, she did not by any means dismiss the man from her thoughts. Her true schooling had been received from the textbook of life, and she had readily observed in Porter's demeanor the tokens that announced the beginning of a chase. To one class of hunters there is no closed season, and Katie knew that this class considered her and her kind fair game.

There had been occasions when she had debated seriously, sometimes with herself and sometimes with a companion, whether it was worth while to continue the flight, whether from three to six years of captivity, of toil that must end in death, but that was at least assured of food, were not to be preferred to the continuance of a precarious dodging through the industrial forest with the possibility of starvation lurking behind every bush. But this question she had always, thus far, answered in the negative, at first because of her inherent disinclination to confess defeat in any struggle that engaged her, and at last because of Hermann Hoffmann.

To Katie's cheerful cynicism that blind optimist was an object of unfailing tenderness. She knew how he had been left, when his father's heart was broken after a long battle against an oppressive landlord system, with a gentle mother whom he worshiped and who thus became entirely dependent upon him; how he had sold the few remaining family belongings, escaped the threat of a compulsory military service that would have left Frau Hoffmann in destitution, and come, lured by the glittering promises of one of the immigration agents of a steamship company, to the land where he had been told there existed equality of opportunity for all men. And he had told Katie, in his convincingly simple English, how, a shred at a time, the fabric of his ideal had been torn away; how bitterly he had toiled only to keep his foothold; how the little mother had fallen beneath the stress, and yet how, to the last, he still retained his high hope, and still dreamed of a genuine democracy in a country where the men that worked would eventually become the owners of the wealth that their hands created.

She was thinking of this when, that night, she returned to her tenement and found waiting at her door her neighbor Carrie Berkowicz, the shirt-waist worker, who had told her of the chance of a position at the Lennox shop.

"Hello," said Katie. "Lookin' for me?"

"Yes."

"Come on in."

Katie led the way and lit the lamp, which threw a kindly light over the neat, bare room, with its stiff wooden chairs, its oilcloth-covered table, and the lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary tacked against the room door. A gas-stove, a cot, a bureau, and a screened-off sink completed the furnishings.

"I'm just gettin' a bite of supper," she said, before she asked the cause of Carrie's visit. "You'd better have some."

"No, thank you," replied the caller, with her careful night-school inflection. "I had mine early."

Katie looked at the speaker, whose round cheeks seemed drawn in a new determination, and whose jaw was swollen as if from a blow.

"How did you get through so early, Carrie?" she inquired.

The little Lithuanian's eyes sparkled.

"We've done it," she said.

"Done what?"

"Gone out."

"Struck?"

Carrie nodded.

"You know how it was," she explained; "all the girls around here do. We've had to work all day long from early morning till late night, Sundays too, and five dollars for the seven days is counted pretty good wages."

"But somebody said the firms' books showed your pay was higher."

"Oh, the books did show it. You see, they carry only a few of us on their salary list, and then each of the foremen hires helpers paid out of one girl's wages. You know as well as I do that most of us live on oatmeal and crackers, and rent one bed in somebody else's tenement."

Katie was acquainted with enough of the shirt-waist makers to be aware that this was true.

"That's so," she granted; "only I thought them things were all ended after the last row."

"Well, they weren't ended; they were only helped for a few months, and now it's summer and most of us would have been laid off. It's the worst time to strike—we know that—but things came to a point where we had to make a fight, or there wouldn't have been any of us left to fight when a better time did come."

"You're talkin' about the union?"

"Yes, that's the real point. The bosses started a union of their own."

"Among themselves?"

"No—they've always had that. I mean they got the new girls into what they called a beneficial association, with the bosses for officers. If you join that, you get all sorts of favors, but you can't join unless you leave the old union."

"Well?"

"Well, then, as soon as they get the beneficial association full enough, they discharge the union girls and, little by little, withdraw the privileges from the Association members, so that things go back to where they were before."

The girl spoke quietly, but Katie remembered many of the evils that Carrie had not mentioned. She recalled how each moment's pause in work meant a deduction from the worker's pay; how the elaborate system of fines taxed the girl whose fingers left her task to rearrange a straying lock of hair, and how the tears forced by overstrained nerves or over-exerted muscles cost the offender almost a fixed price apiece; how the girls that did piecework received no money unless they brought the little check for every article made, the firm thereby saving, through the inevitable loss of some of these checks, a proportion of payment as well known to them and as certain as the mortality rates of life insurance.

"An' so you went out, Carrie?" she said.

"Yes; they turned down our committee at three o'clock this afternoon, and at three-fifteen we had all left the shops. Oh, it was great! But they've got a lot of hands left, and they'll have some of their orders filled in Newark. I don't know how it will end."

"The bosses wouldn't budge?"

"Not an inch. The most they did was to get some of us aside, each away from the rest, and offer us seven dollars a week apiece if we'd fix things up so that our friends would go back to work without any more trouble."

Katie, who well knew what seven dollars a week must mean to this calm, hardworking Lithuanian girl, who had come to America alone and was saving to send her parents money enough to follow, shot a sidelong glance at the speaker; but Carrie's tone had not changed; she seemed unaware that she was narrating anything unusual.

"An' you turned down the offer?" asked Katie.

"Last strike," said Carrie, "one of those union girls was sent out to sell copies of a special edition of The Call for the benefit of the strikers. She hadn't had anything to eat for three days. One man gave her a five-dollar bill for a single paper. Nobody saw him give it; she didn't have to account for it; and she was nearly starved; but she came back and turned in that whole five dollars to the fund. That was one of the girls I was representing this afternoon. Do you suppose I could go back on such girls? Do you suppose I could help myself when I knew it was hurting the others?"

Katie did not immediately reply, but her blue eyes shone. Presently she asked:

"Picket-duty, now, for yours?"

"I began it right away. I spoke to one scab as she came out—just asked her wouldn't she join the union for her own good and ours—just laid my hand on her wrist—but they had the cops ready and their own strong-arm men, and had three of them beating me for my pains."

"Pinched?"

"Of course. The magistrate let me off with a lecture on the rights of every girl to work for starvation-wages if she felt like doing it and like making others starve.—But next time it will be a fine or the workhouse."

Katie had begun to busy herself with the preparations for her meal. She had warmed some coffee on the gas-stove and taken from the cupboard a roll and a few slices of dried beef.

"Look here," she said, stopping in the midst of this task; "how much money have you got?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thanks."

"Maybe you are, but you might as well be better. Now, the while the strike lasts, just you give up that room acrost the hall an' come over here with me."

Carrie's brown locks shook in doubtful refusal.

"You're the real goods," she said; "but I don't have to do that."

"Of course you don't have to, but I'd take it a real kindness. What's the use o' keepin' a whole room to yourself when you'll be spendin' parts of the time in jail?"

Carrie laughed.

"Will you let me pay half?" she asked.

"Sure I will."

"Then perhaps——"

"That's settled," ended Katie, and it was arranged that Carrie's few sticks of furniture should be moved into the Irish girl's quarters the next morning.

The details had just been settled when Hermann entered, his cheerful lips concluding the last bar of "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

"Hello!" said Katie, smiling. "Are you out of a job, too? Or are you just goin' to be late the night?"

Hermann pulled his cap from his blonde curls and, with blushing cheeks, grinned broadly.

"Needer," he answered. "I'm chust on my vay to de saloon." He twisted his cap between his awkward fingers. "I vanted only to ask you somesing, Katie."

"All right. Sit down an' ask it. You know Carrie. Don't mind her."

"Sure I know her, only——"

Carrie rose. She was aware of the pair's relations, and too firmly bound by East Side etiquette to think it well to make of herself that third person who constitutes a crowd.

"I've got to be going," she said.

"Don't you pay no attention to him," Katie objected. "Sit still. Have some coffee, Hermann-boy?"

But Hermann shook his head.

"No, thank you," he said. "I've got chust a minute."

"Then what was it you were wishin' to say?"

"Aboud dot girl I dalked to you aboud on our vay to Coney. You see now you have a tshob, it seemed like ve might do somesing for her."

Katie dropped all trace of banter.

"I'll tell you how it is, Hermann," she said, and she did tell him.

As soon as she had secured her place, she had determined to help. At present much financial assistance was impossible, and employment there was none. It would be dangerous, moreover, to all concerned—not least of all to Violet—for the girl to make a dash for liberty in any manner that would give to Rose a chance to secure vengeance through her friends the police. But Katie was decided, and Carrie at once agreed, that, could the escape be arranged, Violet might at least be sheltered in Katie's room until some work should be found for her.

"All I want to know, Hermann-boy," concluded Katie, "is however in the world we're goin' to get word to her."

"Dot's chust vat I vanted fer to tell you aboud," said Hermann. "You know Conrad Schultz. He's now got my route vith de brewery-vagon. De stable's chust two doors round de corner. I've explained to him, und he'll slip a note to Miss Violet the first dime he sees her."

"We'll write to-night," said Carrie.

"An' I'll hand it to him on my way to work in th' mornin'," added Katie. "Now you run along or you'll be docked."

Hermann assented, smiling. He turned to the door, fumbled with the knob, and dropped his cap. Katie, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, stooped to recover it just as Hermann himself bent forward. In the presence of a third person, the German felt a sudden thrill of courage.

"Ach, but you're a goot girl, Katie!" he cried. "Und here's a liddle revard fer it!"

He seized his cap, jerked her black head toward him, and imprinted a resounding kiss on her pink cheek.

Katie laughed and broke free. She spilled some of the coffee, but she administered a smart blow with her open palm on the offending mouth.

"You'd never dared to do it if you hadn't thought I had me hands full!" she called after her lover as he clattered heavily and happily down the stairs. "An' just in revenge for that," she added, still blushing, to Carrie, as she closed the door, "me an' you'll go out for a little spree of our own to-night."

"Where to?" asked the factory-girl.

"To a dance," answered Katie. "Me feet have got that lazy walkin' after a job that I'm afraid they'll forget all the dancin'-steps they ever knew, unless I hurry an' get some practicin' again."

"I don't know," said Carrie, doubtfully, "I've got to get up early in the morning."

"An' what about me? Besides, haven't I got me friend, the alarm-clock?"

"But my jaw's smashed from that fight."

"Who'll see it?"

"Let's make it a moving-picture show."

"An' pay the same for half an hour's headache that we could get a whole night's dancin' for?"

"I've got to be walking the picket-line all day to-morrow."

"Yes, an' I have to be standin' behind a counter. You haven't got nothin' on me there. Get your wraps together now an' come ahead, Carrie. I hear there's a new place opened on Grand Street."

Carrie knew how to dance—the poorest girl on the East Side knows that, because not to dance is to miss the one amusement obtainable by the very poor—and, like Katie, she was of that relatively small army that can frequent the dance-halls for perhaps as much as a year without contamination. Before she had taken her course at the night-school, she had even danced in the rooms that the Hebrew politicians provide behind their saloons near Houston Street, where she had seen cadets successfully ply their trade among bland-faced immigrant girls whose very language was unknown to them; and she was therefore wholly prepared for the picture that she confronted when, Katie having paid her ten cents for the two admissions, they entered the low-ceilinged basement of a saloon and tenement-house, and came upon the meeting-place of the Danny Delancy Social Club.

Through a veil of dust raised by stamping feet and swirling skirts, through a cloud of heat from a room with every window closed, through a blast of odors compounded of the fumes of alcohol, the scent of tobacco, and the miasma of sweating men and women, there rose, from somewhere, the cries of a beaten piano, struck and thumped into a shrieking likeness to the "Chocolate Soldier" waltz, which only now and then was made at all audible above the rhythmic hubbub. Although the evenings of Saturdays and Sundays were the most popular for dancing, the floor was so crowded that only the expertness of these trained dancers prevented collision and panic. The steam from the bodies of the performers joined with the dry dust in half obscuring the blue-burning gas. The strident laughter of the patrons helped the scraping of their feet in subduing the sounds of the piano. The men gyrated grimly in wet shirt-sleeves, and the women, affecting the most somber shades chosen for the longest wear, spun in their partners' arms with stolid, gum-grinding jaws and lips that were mirthless. Except for the youthful "spielers" admitted without charge, or even hired, to dance with the awkward or make wall-flowers sufficiently happy to insure their return, there were but two types of men among the patrons. There was the native of the quarter, heavy-faced, large-muscled, quick to anger and ready with the fists, a hard-drinking, hard-living sort, no more careful of his neighbor's morals than of his own, yet good-natured, easy-going, pliable. And winding in and out among these, slow and suave, like some sleek species of vulture, were the young men that came there not for pleasure, but for profit, always-smiling young men with manners offensively elaborate, whose shining black hair smelled of oil, whose skin was like decaying dough, and whose entire time was spent in making the acquaintance of new girls, giving dancing-lessons to new girls in crowded corners, and taking new girls into the adjoining back-bar for a drink.

To these types the attending women more or less corresponded. Most of them came alone, or in groups of two or three—a plain girl always befriended by one of more charm—because etiquette demanded that, if a man brought a companion, his companion must give him what dances he wanted, and so she would have few offers from his fellows, who observed a rigid code that forbade poaching upon a friend's preserve. There were some that could afford to wear gay dresses because they were frankly in a business that, of however brief duration, made gay dresses possible as a luxury and necessary as an advertisement, and this appearance of wealth was never absent from the hungry eyes of the young women about them. There were others, also few, who were plainly new either to the country or to this particular form of amusement. But the majority came from the factories and shops, lured by nothing worse than youth's natural craving for its right to pleasure, seeking to forget the exertions of the day in these new exertions of the night, drifting whither they neither knew nor greatly cared, the necessary factors of an industrial system too fatuous to conserve their efficiency.

On every chair along the reeking walls, now trodden underfoot on the floor, and now picked up like dry leaves and twirled about in the little eddies of warm air created by the romping dancers, were cards and handbills—"throwaways" the patrons called them—which, often in curious English, announced special balls and "grand receptions" shortly to be given in this or some similar club. Here one was "cordially invited" to the "third annual dance given by the two well-known friends, Greaser Einstein and Kid Boslair, at New Starlight Hall, Gents Twenty-five and Ladies Fifteen"; there one was cautioned not to miss the "Devil Dance" that would form a part of the forthcoming "reception of the Harry Cronin Association, Young Theo, floor-manager"; and again, one was told that the "Special Extra Event of the Season" would be the ball of the "Ryan McCall Social, Incorporated, Tammany Hall, ticket admit gent including wardrobe, Thirty-five cents; ladies free."

Katie and the shirtwaist-maker got seats near the door, waved and called to half a dozen acquaintances and strained their eyes to see through the swirling mist.

"It looks like old times," said Carrie.

"Smells like 'em," Katie amended; "only I've been away from these places for awhile an' I notice that, new place or old, the faces change pretty quick. Who's the woman in red, with the yellow hair, Carrie?"

She pointed to a figure spinning about the center of the room, her crimson skirt flying far behind her like the trail of a comet.

"I know her," said Carrie. "A year ago she came to New York from the country to find work. When she was about starved, she rang a bell under the sign 'Helping Hand Home'—she didn't know what that meant except that it meant charity. The superintendent told her his place couldn't do anything for her; she might be spoiled by associating with the people he helped; his mission was for bad women that were sorry; not for good women that hadn't anything to be sorry about. 'But I'm hungry,' she told him. 'Can't help it,' he said; 'you're not qualified.' This girl went away, and came back a month later. 'I don't want to come in just yet,' she said; 'but I do want to tell you that I'm qualified now'—and she was."

Katie took the facts for what, amid surroundings where such facts are plentiful, they seemed worth.

"Hard luck," she said, though not without meaning.

"Yes, and look at her clothes."

"That's the trouble," said Katie; "we can't help lookin' at them—the likes of us—any more than she can help wearin' them. It's that or a tenement with two dark rooms an' the rent raised every year."

They danced, for among the soberer men there were many that knew them, and neither girl remembered the weariness of her work in the exhaustion of her dancing. Between dances, in the dressing-room, they talked with their acquaintances among the girls, gossiping of the men and the other women, and now and then, their throats dry and their faces streaming, they were taken into the dingy side-bar and were bought a glass of beer.

As midnight drew closer the dance became more stormy. Many of the working-girls went home, and their places were filled by women of the brighter dressed class. There were some that were plainly drunk, and these clumsily imitated the suggestive contortions of the salaried dancers now sent upon the floor to stimulate the amateurs. One girl, in a cleared space surrounded by laughing men and envious, though apparently scornful, women, performed a dance popularly supposed to be forbidden by the police. There were several fights, and in one especially nasty scuffle a lad was badly cut by the knife of a jealous partner.

"I guess that's about plenty for us," observed Katie, as she and Carrie shouldered their way from the crowd surrounding the wounded boy and his shrieking assailant.

Both girls were sufficiently familiar with such episodes to accept them with calm, but both were at last tired out.

"I suppose you're right," Carrie assented, "though I did have a good time."

"An' it was you didn't want to come!" grinned Katie as they went out upon the cool street.

"I know." Carrie's round face grew hard and puzzled. "I know," she admitted, "only sometimes——"

"Och, come on, an' cheer up! We must write our letter for the brewery-man before we get to bed, Carrie-girl."

They did write it, but Carrie, when she had gone into her own room for the last night she was to spend there, sat for some time motionless upon the edge of the cot.

"I know," she repeated as if to some invisible confessor; "I know both sides of it, and, honestly, I don't know which is worse. I know all that can be said, only—sometimes—I wonder——"

XIII JAIL-DELIVERY

Rose was ill—she had been drinking too much for the past week—and Violet, in her no longer fresh red kimona, was in the kitchen talking to Cassie when, one morning, the new driver of the brewery-wagon stopped at the door.

"Morning," he said with what at once struck Violet, who was now constantly on the watch, as a visible effort at nonchalance.

Conrad Schultz was a tall, raw-boned German-American, with a long nose and pale, sorrowful mustache, but with an eye in the cerulean depths of which there lurked the cold fire of reliable strategy.

"Come in," said Violet, "an' have a drop of something."

"Thanks."

He came in cumbersomely, and took an uneasy seat.

"Some chilly for this season," he remarked, with a cool glance in the direction of the ebony Cassie, hovering glumly in the background.

Violet thought she caught the meaning of the man, whom she knew was Hermann Hoffmann's successor.

"It is chilly for this time of year," she said. "What will you have? It better be something warming. There's whiskey here, or, if you don't mind waiting till Cassie goes for it, there's some good brandy in the cellar."

Schultz appeared to hesitate, and Violet, watching him, could not, for a moment, decide whether there was, after all, any foundation for the hope that his appearance had wakened.

"Well, if it ain't no trouble," he at last blurted, "I would like a taste of real brandy."

"Cassie," said Violet, "bring up a fresh bottle of brandy for Mr.—Mr.——"

"Schultz," prompted that individual.

"For Mr. Schultz, Cassie."

Cassie, however, seemed to have scented surrounding mystery.

"Ah reckon there's a bottle som'ares about yhere, Miss Vi'let," she demurred.

"No, there isn't."

"But, Miss Vi'let, there was one jes' half empty las' night."

"Miss Rose took that to bed with her. Don't talk so much. Go down an' get a fresh bottle for Mr. Schultz."

The girl left the room slowly and sullenly.

Schultz sat silent and motionless until a moment had followed the closing of the door. Then the cold flame was relighted in his eye.

"She called you Miss Violet?" he asked, though still in the most commonplace of tones.

"That's my name."

"Did you ever talk to the man that had my job before I had it?"

Violet, with the catlike quiet and ease that always characterized her movements, stepped to the door through which Cassie had just passed. She flung it quickly open. The black girl nearly fell headlong into the room.

Without an instant's hesitation, Violet did the one effective thing. She smacked the negress smartly across the face.

"I heard you!" she said, in tones that were all the more awe-inspiring because they were low. "What do you mean by spying on me, you black devil? Think I want to cheat the house? I'd not be so clumsy about it, if I did! Think I'm trying to skidoo? I'd walk out if I felt like it! I'll go right to Miss Rose about this, an' have you fired so quick you won't have time to pack your duds!"

The servant remained as she had sprawled.

"Oh, please don', miss!" she wailed. "Please don' tell Miss Rose! Ah wasn't tryin' to spy on youse. Ah jes' drapped somethin' yhere, an' ah was jes' tryin' to fin'——"

"Don't you lie to me," said Violet, her cheeks, now always so wan in the morning light, flushing to something like their former color. "Get up off your knees."

"Miss Vi'let, please don' tell on me."

The black girl's voice threatened to rise to a dangerous wail.

"All right," said Violet, quickly. "I'll let it go this time; but you hurry up and get that brandy, or I might change my mind. Pull the cork while you're at it, and fetch a decent glass from the dining-room."

Cassie, murmuring thanks with her thick lips, and wiping her eyes with the big knuckles of her right fist, scrambled to her feet, and started again upon her errand.

This time Violet left the door open. She waited till the servant was out of earshot. Then she opened the door to the back stairway, which she herself had twice used to excellent purpose, and, finding nobody there, returned to Schultz.

"Got something for me?" she whispered.

But no haste upon her part would speed his Teutonic caution.

"I asked you," he said, as if he had not observed the little encounter through which he had sat serene and unconcerned, "whether you knew the man who had my job before what I had it."

"Yes—yes, I knew him. Quick!"

"And your name is Miss Violet?"

"You heard the girl call me that. Can't you hustle?"

"I don't want to hustle. If you're the girl I want, you've kept me waitin' here three mornings already."

"Well, I'm the person all right. You know that now. Oh, won't you please hurry? Don't you see how things are here?"

"I seen enough to make me want to go slow."

"You're going slow all right. What more do you want to know? I talked to the man you're telling me about and he said he'd see what he could do."

Her replies came with the rapidity of musketry, but Schultz spoke with stubborn deliberation.

"Was that all he told you?"

"Sure it was."

"Nothin' more?"

"No.—Can't you hurry? Can't you believe me?—He didn't say no more.—Quick!—Oh, yes, he said he'd talk to his girl Katie about me.—Quick!—Hush-t! Here she comes!"

Cassie's step sounded only a few yards away, but Schultz, now apparently satisfied of Violet's identity, displayed an unlooked for speed. The heavy hand that had been clumsily reposing in the bulging side-pocket of his coat shot free. Violet seized a fist that opened and withdrew as her own fingers closed on a bit of paper.

Cassie entered to find them the width of the kitchen apart. Violet was pouring herself a drink of whiskey into a soiled glass, and, if her hand trembled, the silk swathed back that was presented to the servant hid all tokens of nervousness.

She waited until Schultz had slowly drunk his brandy. She waited to exchange a few more words and to see him go. She even waited a little longer in order not to make her retreat too patently hurried and in order to subdue by threats and cajolery whatever suspicions might still be lingering in the black breast of the apparently penitent Cassie. But at last she made her way to her own room and unrolled the bit of paper.

It was a letter dated from Katie's address four days previous to the day of its receipt, and it was couched in stiff and formal phraseology. She read:

"Miss VIOLET,

"Dear Miss Violet—

"This is to inform you that I am Miss Katie Flanagan, particular friend of Mr. Hermann Hoffmann, who used to drive the brewery-wagon that left beer at your house. He told me about you and what you want, and I told a lady friend, Miss Carrie Berkowicz, who is coming to live with me. I have just got into a small job and Carrie has just got out of one, and we don't know of none yet for you, but we'll keep looking and sure will find one, and meantime we want you to come here and stop with us just as soon as you can beat it from that place where you are. Don't you lose your nerve, and don't bother to talk about things when you get here, because we know how it is. You needn't worry about how we feel, we have too many friends who had the same bad luck as you, and least said soonest mended, we think. So come right here first chance you get and stay as long as you like, and if we're not home when you get here sit on the step till we do get home, and if anybody asks any questions just say you're a friend of ours, because you are, and that's none of their business anyhow, and nobody won't bother you any more.

"Now keep your head cool and God bless you with best wishes!

"From your friend "MISS KATIE FLANAGAN."

Without daring to lessen her courage by giving way to the feelings that this letter stirred, Violet read it twice, tore off the address, concealed it in one of the "rats" on which the structure of her russet hair was founded, and then tore the rest of the epistle into small bits, which she flung out of the narrow space between the riveted shutters of her room. She was now almost ready to strike. In her captivity, she had, after the first shock, made it her business to learn what she could of those about her. She knew that Wesley Dyker had once been what was called a straw-bail man, an agent who, for a high consideration, provided bogus bail for such women as the police, to keep up appearances, were forced from time to time to arrest. She had been told that he was wont, for a still higher consideration, to appear at court for these clients, in the rôle of a defender of the wronged poor, and in a very different rôle in their behalf with the dispensers of justice to the underworld. She had gathered that his friendship with one political faction aided in securing Rose the chance to purchase that expensive police-protection toward which Angel, unknown to Dyker, assisted Rose through an opposing faction. And she believed that his ambition was now to gain a magistracy from which he could grant bail on bonds signed by his own servants, secure for prisoners the legal service of men that would return him a commission, and pronounce judgment or dispense mercy for the furtherance of his own fortune and the strengthening of his own power. Out of these threads of knowledge Violet resolved to weave the net in which to catch freedom.

That afternoon Evelyn informed her that Rose was still abed and had sent for her favorite, Wanda, to console her. This meant that she would not descend to the ground floor or be visible to any visitors before the next evening, and that the Englishwoman, promoted to temporary command, would have to pass the night in that reception of callers which necessitated the appearance of drinking much and the fact of drinking almost nothing.

"She does that every time she goes on a bust, my dear," complained Evelyn. "Of course she jolly well knows that she can trust me and that I have some manners too, but I wish she would remember that I also have a thirst and can't do without my drop of real liquor."

Violet's nerves tingled. With her best effort to bury all signs of her mounting hope, she ventured:

"I wish I could help you."

"You, my dear?" Evelyn's eyebrows raised and her contralto voice followed them. "Catch the madam letting anyone but me take charge! You know you're none of you allowed down in the front hall unless you're sent for. Things are ticklish enough, thank you, with that new girl upstairs."

It was almost the first mention that had been made to Violet of the latest captive since the recent day of Evelyn's exposition of the entire traffic. Violet had not dared to ask any more questions than those that she deemed necessary for the perfection of her own plans, and she dared ask none now.

"I do hate the job," Evelyn was continuing, "even if it does mean a few bits extra. Rose says that fellow Dyker is due to-night. She's not fit to see him above all men, and he's the one I most particularly hate to meet, because he was a friend of my friend the doctor and used to call with him now and again at my flat. I always fancy he's making comparisons under those narsty low lids of his."

Violet, in sudden reaction, felt choking with despair.

"I could see him," she said.

But Evelyn's honors sat heavily upon their possessor.

"You're not a trusty yet, my dear, by any manner of means," she responded. "No, no; you will go to your own room after dinner and stay there till you are wanted."

She tilted her sharp chin and strolled kitchenward for a drink; but, though she left behind Her a Violet discouraged, it was not a Violet beaten.

In fact, the girl made her own opportunity. Noticing that evening that Evelyn took up a dignified position in the parlor and had Cassie conduct all the guests thither, Violet quickly disposed of the first person that claimed her attention, and, having made her best toilet—having restored her cheeks to a resemblance of their pristine glow, coiffed her russet hair, and donned her best of linen—she descended quietly to the first landing on the stairway, there to take up her watch. Before she was again in demand, she saw the servant admit Wesley Dyker. She ran quickly downward and, just as Cassie stepped forward to precede him, brushed by him in the rosy twilight of the hall.

"Ask to see me," she whispered. "Ask to see Violet. Don't let on I told you. I've heard something you want to know about O'Malley."

Before the man's shadowy figure could come to pause, she had passed him and caught up to Cassie.

"Where have you been?" she asked. "I've been calling for you for five minutes. I need some more water in my room."

She turned and reascended the stairs, but her door had not long been closed before the servant was knocking upon the panel.

"Here's you' water, Miss Vi'let," said Cassie. "An' Miste' Dyker wants fer to see you daown in de back parlor."

Violet took the useless pitcher, made sure that the remnant of Katie's note was secure in its hiding-place, and hurried, with Cassie following, to the garish room in which Dyker was awaiting her.

He was seated on the lazy, pillowed sofa on which Violet had fallen asleep so soon after her arrival in this house. He was in evening-clothes that served him, on the East Side, much as the advertised portraits of certain patent-medicine makers serve their proprietors, the flaccid whiteness of his face still bearing traces of past beauty, the weakness of his mouth hidden by his crisp, short, brown mustache, and his heavy lids concealing the secret of his steel-gray eyes.

He half rose as she entered, but she motioned him to sit still.

"Hello!" she said, with the easy manner of the house, which always seemed to presuppose a previous acquaintance. "Have you ordered anything? I'm terribly dry."

He took her hand and caught her meaning,

"So am I, Miss Violet," he answered. "Let's have something."

Violet turned to the servant.

"Cassie," she said, "bring up a couple of bottles."

She waited for the door to close, and then sat down beside Dyker.

"Speak low," she cautioned. "That girl will listen if she can. You'll have to pretend to be making love to me."

Dyker regarded her with smiling approval. Her blue eyes shone with excitement and red blood fought through the rouge on cheek and fully ripe mouth.

"What you ask will be both easy and pleasant," he answered.

"No, no; none of that. This is no time for bluffing. Put your arm around my shoulder. That way. Now then, you heard what I told you in the hall?"

Dyker, with his type's disinclination to take seriously anything that any woman has to say upon serious matters, smiled assent.

"You seem to have been doing some listening yourself," he said, as his lingers tightened unnecessarily upon her shoulder.

"Yes, I did, and it's lucky for you I did it. Will you promise not to give me away?"

"Of course I promise."

"Not even to Miss Rose?"

"Not even to Rosie."

"And if I help you, will you do me a favor?"

"To look at you I should say that I'd do you any favor you asked, and do it without expecting anything in return."

His pale lips were curled in a half-scoffing smile, but Violet's next words brushed from his flaccid face all traces of amusement.

"You remember that night you told Miss Rose about what you wanted to get at the next election? You said you were afraid of O'Malley giving you the double cross."

Dyker stiffened.

"Did you hear that?" he demanded.

"Hush! Keep your voice down, or I won't tell you nothing of what I know. Remember you're supposed to be making love to me."

"All right, all right; but I want an answer to my question."

"Well, then, of course, I heard it. I was at the keyhole there—that's why I want you to whisper now.—And I heard more."

"What was that?"

"Wait a minute. You'll do me a favor if I tell you?"

"Anything," he smiled.

"But this is business. If I tell you something that it's worth your while to know, will you promise not to blow on me to Miss Rose?"

"I promise."

"And to do something more that I'll ask you?"

Wesley was now certain that he must not stick at promises.

"Surely."

"Then sit tight. I don't know as much about O'Malley as I pretended out there in the hall, but I do know about Miss Rose. I don't know whether O'Malley is goin' to double-cross you or not, but I do know that Miss Rose has given you the double-cross already."

She had thought that passion played a large part in his relations with her mistress, and she had counted upon awakening his jealousy. What, however, had far exceeded his affection was a poor pride of possession, and when Violet's words, in addition to touching his ambition, struck at that pride, they aroused an anger that was far more dangerous than any sense of love betrayed.

"What's that?" he demanded.

Two red beacons flashed into his pale checks, and his heavy lids, shooting upward for a single instant, disclosed hard, gray eyes gone hot and malevolent.

"Be careful. Speak low, I tell you," she cautioned; "and remember your promise."

"I don't believe——"

"Here's Cassie!"

They waited while the black opened the champagne and filled the glasses.

Violet brushed Dyker's hair over his eyes and laughed at the effect. Dyker caught the offending hand and kissed it by way of punishment.

"Cassie," he banteringly asked, "why didn't you ever tell me there was such a nice little girl in this house? I had to get the news from a friend on the outside."

He tossed the now grinning negress a dollar and, as soon as she had left them, dropped the farce as promptly as did Violet.

"I say I can't believe you," he resumed, the two spots of anger still glowering in his cheeks.

Violet knew that her whole hope rested upon her ability to force conviction.

"You've got to believe me," she said. "I'll tell you all that you told Miss Rose till I had to run away, that evening."

She did it, omitting scarcely a particular.

"That's right, ain't it?" she concluded.

"May be. But what does that prove? It only shows that you heard me."

"It shows that I can hear Miss Rose when she talks to somebody else. And I did hear her."

"Whom was she talking to?"

"The man you asked her about. To Rafael Angelelli."

"Well, but I told her to talk to him."

"An' she did it. But the first time I heard her was just before you told her to."

"That same night?"

"He was in the kitchen with her when you came in. Why, he's here all the time! I don't care what she pretends to you, she's stuck on him, an' every girl in the house knows it."

Rapidly, but as fully as she had sketched the dialogue between Rose and Dyker, she now described the first conversation that she had overheard between her mistress and the Italian.

"I'd come down to graft a drink," she said, "an' I heard them from the stairs. That's how, after he'd left, I came to listen to you too."

Dyker had quailed under the revelation, thus made to him, of political danger. He now quivered in anger at the comments upon himself, somewhat colored, that Violet had placed in the mouths of Rose and Angel.

"I'll find out about this!" he said, struggling against the desperate arms flung swiftly around him to keep him on the sofa. "Let me go! By God, I'll have that drunken cat down here and squeeze the truth out of her throat!"

All the caution, all the craft, all that she had counted upon as the real Wesley Dyker seemed to have escaped him. His voice was still low, but in every other respect he was a raging beast.

She fought with him, mentally and physically.

"You can't get anything out of her that way," Violet urged, as the man twisted under her strong hands. "Of course she'll say it's all lies. And you'd only be warning her. You don't want her to know that you know; you want a chance to block her game."

Partly convinced by this argument and partly subdued by the physical restraint that accompanied it, Dyker ceased his struggles.

"But I want to be sure," he muttered sullenly.

"You can't be sure by goin' to Miss Rose."

"Well, I ought to tell her." The high tide of his anger was slowly subsiding, and the rocky Dyker that she had built on was beginning to show its crest above the still hissing waves. "Look here, Violet," he said, "I'm sorry I behaved like such a fool. I beg your pardon, but you must see that I have got to put this thing up to Rose."

"You forget your promise."

"No, I don't, but I must make sure."

Violet thought rapidly.

"Listen," she said; "I told you I wanted you to do something for me an' you gave your word you'd do it.—Will you?"

"Of course I will, only I'm thinking a little about myself."

"This will help you, too."

"What do you want?"

Violet drew a long breath.

"I want you to go over to the avenue right away," she said, "and buy me a long cloak and a hat and bring them back, and then take me out of here without a word to anybody. You needn't walk more'n three squares with me, an' then I won't bother you no more."

Dyker drew away and whistled softly. His face grew quite composed again. The heavy lids fell over his eyes.

"So that's it, is it?" he asked.

"I want to get away," said Violet.

"And so you've cooked up this little mess of lies to make me the goat, eh?"

Violet felt the sands slipping beneath her feet. She laced her fingers together till the knuckles bruised her flesh.

"Don't do that," she pleaded; "don't take it that way; it's true, what I told you, every word of it. I only want you to keep your promise to me."

She stopped with a sob, and waited.

Wesley reached calmly for a glass of wine, drank it, put down the glass, thrust his hands deep into his trousers' pockets, and, stretching out his long legs, regarded, humming, the toes of his shining pumps.

"I don't believe you," he said at last.

"But, Mr. Dyker——"

"It's too thin."

"Even if it was a lie," Violet despairingly persisted, "you ought to help me. Do you know who I am?"

"That's the point."

"Do you know how I was brought here?"

"I can guess."

"I was tricked. The man said he wanted to marry me. I didn't know. I believed him. An' they beat me an' starved me and did things I couldn't think about an' couldn't help thinkin' about. An' all I want is just for you to do me this one little favor. I won't bother you. I won't blow on you——"

"What's that?"

"Oh, you know I wouldn't blow on you! I couldn't. I want to forget the whole thing. I've got friends to go to who'll get me work. I only want you to get me out of the door and safe away."

Like most men of his sort Dyker, although ready enough to make a living out of the results of cruelty, hated the sight of cruelty's self. The girl's words touched, though lightly, his selfish heart.

"But I can't afford to help you," he protested. "You see how I'm tied up here. I can't have Rose jump on me now."

"You know she's jumping on you already. You know she's knifing you in the back. The only way you can stop her is by using what I've told you."

"Of course," said Dyker in the tone of a man thinking aloud, "if she really was playing both ends against the middle, I could pull her teeth by going straight to O'Malley and telling him so."

Violet did not wholly understand this, but she agreed immediately.

"Of course you could," she said.

"And I suppose I could have her pinched then, if you'd testify against her. Would you do that? Would you go into court?"

Violet's fingers closed spasmodically.

"Just give me the chanc't," she said fervently.

"And of course there are other girls who've been in the same scrape here?"

"There's a new one upstairs this minute."

"There is? Um. That's good." He rattled the money in his pocket. "Only, look here," he persisted, "if you have been telling the truth, it will probably make me solid with O'Malley, but if you haven't, I'll go clean to smash."

Violet saw the turn of affairs and, with hope's revival, her mind cleared immediately.

"I haven't told you all," she said, "and I guess the rest will make you sure enough."

"There's more then?"

"A lot."

"What is it?"

"Will you help me out of here?"

"If you convince me.—Let's see; the shops around here are still open.—Yes, if you convince me, you'll be out of here in half an hour."

It was her only chance. She did not hesitate. She told him the whole of what she had heard of the later assuring interview between Rose and Angelelli.

This time he listened quietly, his face inscrutable.

"That all?" he asked when she had ended.

"That's all," she said.

"It's the truth?"

"Ain't I sayin' it proof that it's true? How could I make it up? I don't know all that it means."

"You knew enough to pass it on to me."

"Lucky for you I did, too; but I don't know all it means—how could I?—and you do know, an' that ought to be proof enough that it's God's truth, Mr. Dyker."

She stopped. Her case was with the jury.

Dyker rose.

"Cassie!" he called.

Violet leaped to her feet and laid her hands on his arm.

"What are you goin' to do?" she whispered.

He silenced her with a gesture.

"What you want," he said.

Cassie put her black head in at the door.

"Cassie," he continued, flipping the maid another dollar, "I'm a little off my feed. I'm going to the drugstore on the corner and get fixed up."

"Thank you, Miste' Dyker.—Ah kin go fer you, Miste' Dyker," said the negress. "Thank you, sah."

"No, thanks, Cassie, I can go myself; I want the air. But you can do something else for me. You can just not let this girl run away from me. I know she would run if she could, but I like her too well to let her, so if anybody wants her, just you say she's in here and engaged for the evening by me. I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

He left one door as the willingly assenting Cassie closed the other, and Violet flung herself on the sofa and buried her face in the cushions, now fearful that the servant, notwithstanding their precautions, had overheard her, now afraid that Dyker would change his purpose and fail to return, and again dreading that he might betray her to Rose. Since the night she had waited for Max to telephone in the café, since the terrible morning that had followed, it was the longest quarter of an hour that she had known, but it at last dragged its quivering length away. The doorbell rang. Cassie passed through the room to find Violet sitting suddenly upright, and at once returned with Dyker, his summer raincoat tossed across his arm.

As the servant left them, he lifted the coat. Below it, not wrapped in the paper usual to a new purchase, was a dark cloak. He unrolled it, uncovered a beaver hat, and handed them both to the panting Violet.

"Here you are," he said quietly.

She seized them and began to put them on.

"No," he cautioned, "on second thought, I guess I'd better carry them. The parlor door's open, and Evelyn and Fritzie are in there with a couple of men. I'll go ahead and open the vestibule door and the front door. Then you come by as if you were going upstairs."

"Evelyn'll come out to see if I have any money."

"She'll never learn that, though here, by the way, is a ten-dollar bill that will come in handy.—The doors will be open and I'll be on the pavement. Keep only a yard behind me. Riley's at the other end of his beat, and I have a cab at the curb. Ready?"

She could not speak, but she nodded her russet head.

He passed before her up the rosy twilight of the hall.

Violet, following, her lips tight, her breathing suspended, her heart pounding against her breast, was dimly aware of her own soft footfalls sounding hideously loud, of the blast of light and laughter from the parlor.

Dyker flung wide the vestibule door.

"Good-night!" he called to Evelyn.

"Going? Good-night!" Violet heard the Englishwoman answer.

She heard Evelyn rise. She heard the front door open. She saw Wesley raise his arm.

She hurried by the parlor door, and then, instead of turning to the stairs, gathered up her red kimona and ran through the vestibule, through a patch of soft, fresh darkness, and was tossed precipitately into a cab into which Dyker followed her just as the horse, under a quick blow, dashed madly up the street.

At the open cab-window the night air beat upon her fevered face. She drank it deep into her thirsting lungs. It was the wine of freedom.

XIV RIVINGTON STREET

The eastern end of Rivington Street is a hectic thoroughfare. Often it is so hectic as to be no thoroughfare at all, but only a tossing fever-dream, a whirling phantasmagoria of noisy shadows, grotesque and reasonless. It seems a street with a bad conscience, for it never sleeps.

The dawn, even in summertime, hesitates long before it comes shivering up from the crowded East River to drop a few grudged rays of anæmic light on Rivington Street. Already, out of the humming courts, the black alleys, and the foul passages that feed this avenue as gutters feed a sewer, a long funeral procession of little handcarts has groped its way and taken a mournful stand beside the fetid curbs; and soon, pausing at these carts to buy the rank morsels of breakfast that there is never time to eat at home, the gray army of the workers begins to scurry westward.